Dear Editor,

I was Published by you guys a while back.

I figured I'd give a shot.  I think paying to submit is like lottery tickets, but the odds are probably a little bit better.  But I have heard submissions for magazines like yours are well above ten thousand. So it is difficult.  You guys have been at it for a while and are well respected.   

Such a quick rejection concerns me.  The assurance that there are editors and trained screeners gives some cause for pause. Not sure what that really means.  Whatever.  

I submitted a few poems to an on-line journal that is nowhere near as respected.  Though the people who run it, I have alot of respect for.  I received an acceptance in just a few days.  This is the opposite.  Apples are not oranges.  The writer feels a need to gravitate towards what is prestigious.  Some of that is legitimacy, some of it smoke and mirrors.

Who are the screeners?

How old are they?  Who have they read?  What is the training process?

I am and English Professor and former business owner.  My experience with academic training is limited, but a sort on thousands of poems would be interesting to learn.  Poetry is not science, and craft is not a machine.  And most folks in the humanities are not data driven, the best process and system people.  Many can't count that well or managed multiple numbers and relationships in their head.  Though they are good at the text, a large amount of submissions probably challenges the part of their brain that deals with numbers.  So many poets submitting these days.   As a Poet, I can't imagine basing a sort on ten thousand poems in a scientific way.  There are too many variables, too many biases.  It is not business.  Which is why awards will soon dissolve into insignificance.  Awards and prestige are actually more important within the academic infrastructure and industry than they are for poetry.  The lowly poet has to acknowledge the competitive, but mantra that they are not merely competitive.  Lol.  Especially when they win.  They have to believe that someone's ability to judge them represents some non-biased entity, like AI evaluating what they've done.

I actually think the one time I was published here a fellow poet, probably helped my poems through the process.  There are quite a few poets on the masthead.  It is a small poetry world, and students of teachers, schools of thoughts, and connections are rather easy to establish.   The Ivy League gives rise to many of the stars, Iowa.  I read an article a few months back about how small and predictable the world of awards has become.

I actually think, if I was navigating the market and reading black poets in particular, I could hodgepodge together a few poems that may make it through your screeners.

The poem I published here years ago, made reference to white people and pivoted on racism.  I thought it was a good poem and am thankful for you publishing it.  My work rarely does that now.  I thought it was a great poem, but the ways in which I articulated the significance of the white world, I would probably now edit out.  In other words, I can see the weakness even in what was published here.  I can see how screeners who may miss some of my craft could substitute the significance of a white idea in the poem for craft.  Opposition, lauding, the reference to a "transcendental" writer in the Western tradition as significance.  Poems like black folks doing African dance with a seven drum ensemble.  Where is the nuance the Westerner can read?  How do they know it is transcendental when they can't read the reference.  

The black poet as mascot is lauded for getting all the nuance right, but often lacks expertise in the areas folks suggest they are bridging.  It is hard to be a good poet here.  You can get good at it.  But I would argue there should be an expertise in something else to keep in balance the urge to be successful and understood or awarded.  Poetry training would have aborted hip-hop before it was born.  If all the people who developed hip-hop or jazz had been educated like this generation of poets, it would have been educated out of them, like some Native Americans on a reservation forced to wear sonnets.  lol.    

I have a student whose work I have read extensively, but one of the few poems she has written dealing with whites or what we might call white supremacy was published in Best American Poetry a few years back.  I took pause.  Most of her work seemed far better for me.  It was hard to imagine that that was anywhere near her best poem.  But I could see how a screener, or even some editors would be impressed by a series of concepts that no matter how contrary or resistant they appear to be, at their root showed more honor for the thing that they were resisting than most of us can afford.

Tonal shifts, arrangement on the page, bells and whistles, abound.  And ironically, race, resistance, and the activist trended back into center stage after we watched that murder video ten thousand times, until we were convinced that our powerlessness was like some twisted advertisement for freedom's possibility.  The recent Alabama brawl, which showed a different outcome had that violence removed from the internet.  The fight is removed, but we watch the death flick ten thousand times.  

If you have discipline, perseverance and a fairly decent intellect, it is not hard to figure out what it takes to create a poem that wows or seems significant these days.  Whether or not that significance is a question of legitimate craft, or even craft at all, is subject to debate.  The humanities are hard.  They are not science.  They desperately want to be, but simple facts, like the five black Pulitzer winners in the last twelve to fifteen years, culminating with the race rage in the larger society over the last few years, suggest judging is susceptible to trends in the larger society.  If judging were fair and it was science and objective maybe it would be two not five.  And in all those years before not just Dove, Komunyakaa, and Brooks.

I love Philips though.  Poetry is like that too.  Personal, enjoyable, beyond awards or even judgement.  

On some level the system is so predictable in what it lauds and awards, it cannot conceive of those who have outwitted it, by working so hard to become the thing that cannot be denied.  I don't mean to suggest that my poetry is the best in the world or should automatically be published.  But at this stage of my life, I am getting at something specific.  I am not thinking about what will be published when I write.  This experiment clarifies some things for me.

The black poet has become a mascot of sorts for what a good poet is in a society like ours, but often lacks the freedom to imagine an acceptance if they explore the vast range of their consciousness.    

Again, reasonable intellect, discipline, a clear sense of research and the contours of academia pursued over a few intense years can produce a series of poems that fit the standards.  I get it, but poems are not just work.  They are about consciousness.  And the navigation of the systems of poetry often stiffle and straightjacket the representations of black consciousness in this society.  Those who do it well and are awarded and held as standards are as much experts at navigating and imperfect system as they are brilliant and masterful.  The bandwidth of ideas is often limited.  

I appreciate the quick rejection.  It puts in context how much the work is valued here.   Bottom of the slush pile.  Some trained screener who probably just got their M.F.A.  It is a business at certain points.  Poetry a business that doesn't pay well.

I wish you guys the best.  It may sound trite and quick.  But you guys are a great magazine that has existed for a long time.  The blacks, lol, have few publications like this.  The ones we have are so marginalized in the poetry world, I am sure folks would rather be published here as compared to there.  There are always contradictions as part of human existence. 

But there's smoke in the room.  A constrictor on our speech.  Part of my response is to write a poem I know will be published.  That may seem inconceivable, but it is possible.  I ain't cut out for that anymore.  It really ain't a job or a competition. 

There's another consciousness that is beyond Wheatley.  She's the first black poet.  Lol.  Like among the four million slaves she was the only one good enough.  It is the original riddle.  Wheatley was published for the same reason we are published now.  Because she navigates a line between her internal dynamics and what the rules of the spoken are, the rules of the game.  She knows them and becomes symbol.  Some of us don't.  Some of us know and want to forget.  To Trane or Miles to do that.  Be-Bop or hip-hop.  Writing is the last frontier.  The text is a god of sorts.    We like to imagine that it is different, but it most likely the same.  The difference is that with our education and access to circles we were often prevented from entering, our ability to navigate a space like Wheatley is more sophisticated.   

I probably won't submit (check that word) again, but I thank you for your consideration.

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