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On 9 Jan 2006 at 0:12, Rebecca Seiferle wrote: > Ah, I'd guess of these Drunken Boats is mine, but wasn't aware that > your friend was trying to crack it. I had to scale back too, mostly > because of time pressures, not being able to edit one issue, do the > html for another, an editor who'd gone on elsewhere, and my work here, > etc, for the summer issue, and have shifted somewhat to these > features, like the Latvian feature which another editor put together > over two years. Even though it says on the submissions page that we > don't take unsolicited submissions only queries, most of the issues > are sent to me, like the interview with Aliki Barnstone by an unknown > writer. So there's not a particular taste or prejudice, the work we've > published is all over the place. And I haven't for months gotten any > submissions out of the blue of someone trying to crack the boat, > perhaps because the email address was being routinely spammed to > death. So I changed it recently, so perhaps your friend should try > again, A company that wanted its vendors and customers to maintain a solid relationship would be pretty interested in making sure that both could get in touch with it, either to place or fulfill orders. I'm not arguing that poets ought to write to order, or that poetry editors ought to place orders with poets for particular kinds of or pieces of writing, though I understand that that is what often happens, even if more or less subconsciously as "schools" of poets coalesce and disintegrate around various notions of what poetry was, is, or ought to be. What I'm saying is that if you're going to start an enterprise you should approach it with a plan and a realization of how much time it's going to take when it succeeds. Plan for success. The notion that anyone could run a poetry magazine part-time with their left hand seems to be an obvious bit of planning for failure. To complain that there were too many submissions is to complain about success, or to be woefully ignorant of the basic facts about starting a poetry magazine. Have you not seen the numbers? The New Yorker gets over 50,000 poems submitted each year. Fifty thousand. That's a thousand a week; that's 182 a day; that's 22 an hour. That means that if all the New Yorker did was open the envelope, remove the SASE, insert the poems unopened and unread into the SASE, and put the envelope back in the mail (while discarding unread any envelope without an SASE) that it's a full-time job just to open the mail and send the poems back unread. If every envelope has an average of 4 poems (3-5 is what's recommended by most magazines) and you want to do anything like justice by reading the poems, you've got to figure a couple minutes per poem. So that's 100,000 minutes in a year. There are 124,800 working minutes in a 40- hour work-week year, assuming 100% worker efficiency, which no one can do and no one assumes. Something more like 60-70% efficiency is what you have to assume of any worker. So that means if you believe that the New Yorker is giving every poem submitted a fair chance that there are two or three, maybe four or five, full-time people working on doing nothing but opening the mail and reading the poems the first time. That doesn't count the time it takes to then send the ones that survive the first reading to the people who do the second reading, or third, or fourth. The New Yorker publishes two or three poems a week, or perhaps as many as 150 poems a year, out of 50,000. The winnowing process has to be extreme, as well as extremely time-consuming. Now, if instead of 50,000 poems a year your magazine gets 10,000, that means that it may be the case that to open the mail and do the first reading is the full-time job for only one instead of for four or five people. And that says nothing at all of all the other work an editor must do. So in order to get the work of opening the mail and doing the first reading down to part-time, you have to limit your submissions to 5000 or fewer in any year -- and even then that means that editing the magazine remains nearly a full-time job, depending on how much time the further readings, layout, correspondence, financing, grant-writing, and the rest take, since opening and doing the first reading for 5000 submissions is going to take between a quarter and half a year's work. So realistically, if you want to do a magazine part-time as a whole, you have to limit submissions somehow to 2500 or even no more than 1000 a year, or the thing balloons into full-time work rapidly. Even reading 1000 poems a year seems daunting, doesn't it? especially when you realize that you're reading 1000 poems once, then 300 a second time, then 150 a third time, and many of them more often than that as the winnowing process grinds on. Who among you who have edited a poetry magazine realized the numbers going in? But I suppose the thing that most annoys me about the entire poetry biz is this casual attitude toward customers and vendors on the one hand, and the purported seriousness with which the editors claim they take excellence. Perhaps poetry editors can get away with not caring about their vendors or potential vendors because there is always another one eager to take any shit the editor happens to want to give. I've heard the same about the music business. Musicians are routinely humiliated and taken advantage of because there are so many musicians desperate for a record contract that they'll do anything to get one. Perhaps it's the same in the poetry biz: there are always poets who will do anything to get published, take any shit the editor gives out, so editors are pretty casual about the whole process and, in fact, come to think that they're not giving any shit. It's just that they're so busy, that their site is being spammed, that there are too many submissions, there's just too much work to do, and they feel stressed about it, so they feel justified in spreading the stress around. They don't answer their mail or their email or their phones; they say that the process takes months or years to review the poems submitted; they make jerky little requirements about paper size or where the name goes or doesn't go or typeface or paper weight or number of poems or number of pages or stapled or not or cover page or not or letter or not or bio or not or bio and letter but no cover page or cover page and bio but no letter or there can be no evidence that these poems have been sent elsewhere first, or at all, or only email submissions or no email submissions, and on it goes. Every poetry editor says he or she wants "the best poems" but not one of them can write the specs for "best". The best they can do is "Read my magazine and send poems like the ones in it". Let's examine that notion. If that isn't asking for writing to order, what is? It's saying "Write the way I want you to, and you have a better chance of appearing in my journal". It's saying "Write to order; here are examples that have succeeded in writing to order in the past". Who can really believe that anyone who says such a thing is really looking for "the best poems"? They're not looking for the best poems -- they're looking for the poems that most closely fit to what they like. It means that what journals do in contemporary po-biz is insist that poets reverse-engineer their poems: look in the journal you want to publish in, get familiar with the kind of poems it publishes, and write like that. What else does "Read the magazine and send poems like the ones in the magazine" mean?