VQR has gotten itself chastised, it seems, by the Net, for being a bit too frank about some visceral reactions to the slush pile. Make one tiny little joke about simians, and you end up having to apologize to... well, all of you.
The offending post has been removed, but you can see snippets of it in the comments here.
I think what we have here is a cultural failure to communicate. There’s the culture of the blog, which—like email—tends to reward immediacy and the cheapest forms of entertainment (i.e. glibness, snarkyness, confessionalism, even trolling). And there’s the culture of the literary magazine, which is more predominantly (and historically) Apollonian, genteel, the organizational equivalent of a tea cozy, where decisions and tastes are mutely orchestrated from behind the scrim of an editorial silence. Readers tend to come to literary magazines deliberately, whereas on the Net, one’s browsing interest (which may or may not touch the actual content of the work consumed) wars with the instant boredom and the latent velocity of any web consumer away from the page/blog/webzine.
VQR’s dispatches from the killing ground of the slush pile are no worse than anything I’ve heard of in editorial rooms, and after reading, I dunno, upwards of 100,000 poems in the service of various lit mags, there are several filters that drop into place over the years in order to make you not totally exhausted and self-loathing.
One of these filters is an instant amnesia that takes effect seconds after you finish a poem from the slush pile. (If indeed it is worthy of slush—good poems snag you, even if you’re in auto-mode, or the rest of the submission is abysmally bad. During my editorial career, I once selected a single poem (and put it first in the next issue) from an otherwise horrendous batch by a poet who seems to have never written anything else even remotely as good—and in fact has written some of the worst lines I’ve ever come across.) This way, you don’t take terrible poems home with you in your head.
Second, there’s... well several methods of emotional release. I have heard of editors reading especially dire poems aloud in a pirate voice (especially badly executed lyrical poems), of a wall of shame of the worst metaphors received, and in one case, the aerodynamic half-life test (meaning, the duration of time between opening a submission and flinging it across the room towards the recycling bin). Is this the apex of professionalism? No. It’s stress relief, and a way of convincing yourself that not all of the careerism, mediocrity, repetition, blandness, and misplaced optimism (and the fear of the aforementioned in one’s own writing) that is a constant note in all areas of the literary life does not, in the end, carry the day. The best editors I’ve known are those who can walk away from a few hours of reading submissions in thwarted hopes of finding something singular, and still be excited about writing themselves, rather than feeling dispirited and queasily afraid that a virulent form of verbal entropy has been gnawing at their brains from the inside.
I’m sure it’s the same in other subcultures, where one constantly questions the worth and relevance (not to mention the meager monetary rewards) of one’s activity, and the recurrent sensation of struggling for a small portion of an already small audience. Combine that with the headiness of the net (say, for instance, with Diagram’s claim of 160,000 monthly hits), and it’s not always pretty. But not out of the ordinary.
There needs to be an anonymous relationship with the submitter, for two reasons. First, because if you don’t have one, you enter into correspondences like this. And clearly someone’s professional, emotional, creative, and possibly sexual needs will not be met. Second, because the reader of literary magazines are going to encounter these poems anonymously, so the best way to model the suitability of the poem for an issue is to respond dispassionately (if not astringently) as an initial acid test. Despite common, underlying assumptions to the contrary, no one is forced to read poetry. Poetry has to make the case for itself, and to total strangers. This is what I try to remember when I sometimes receive puzzling comments on my 350-odd rejections. The editor or reader (who most likely is getting little or no financial recompense) may have just rejected hundreds of poems, and the last horrible one was about Crete, which my poems also references.
Perhaps it wasn’t the most professional thing for VQR to post what should stay secret inter-office cultural communiqués, but then again, how often do you encounter “professional” and “blog” in the same sentence? As a form, it tends to be, well, informal. The only “safe” form of institutional writing is a press release, and you’re not going to get a readership for your blog if all you post is essentially advertising (especially when, with the proliferation of blogs, one’s allergy to official communications and disguised solicitations only grows). In my experience, VQR’s flavor of snark is not a tremendous departure (if at all) from a great deal of editorial culture (and I’m not speaking here for Ploughshares, merely as a private consumer).
May 7, 2008
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8 comments:
I'm glad you posted about this ... I read the posts in real time hence got to see the snark in all its original glory.
I think the negative reaction has something to do with an effect my friend Chad and I were talking about last week, whereby you're reading an essay on poetics and the author condemns some phenomenon in poetry and you always feel implicated. It's borne of insecurity and narcissism. My guess is blog readers felt implicated by the posted comments ("Maybe that was MY dead dog poem!") and betrayed ("You mock ME, your loyal reader?"). Now the editors are in an awkward position because they don't want to lose their blog readers ... but nor do they want to encourage more terrible dog poems. It's a quandary indeed.
There's a lively debate with (Mr. Genoways participating) over at Literary Rejections on Display, in case you are interested in the developing story. (www.literaryrejectionsondisplay.blogspot.com)
Very hard to be a writer, editor, or even an intellectual without generating and receiving such disapprovals. The whole question of aesthetics is whether or not you like something or don’t (and it take eternal vigilance not to make the easy transition from an aversion to the display of a writer’s psychic materials to the writer herself or himself). So it’s ludicrously easy to make even your closest friends and writer allies feel like your tastes (in reading, writing, editing, or criticizing) are not in some way a reflection on their tastes, writing, and critical ability. In fact, one could say that an intellectual career is largely a work of artful disagreement. And tensions are even higher when it comes to submitting, because of the sheer volume of impersonal rejections one receives and the customary long response time (which is heightened even more for magazines like VQR which do not accept simultaneous submissions). So there’s a lot of free-floating rage even in the most impersonal transaction. No doubt, editorial silence is much preferred to the alternative.
Thanks for the link, WR. I found this (anonymous) comment interesting:
Steve, agreed -- some of that stuff is just insane. I've seen it. I've worked the slush. It's nuts. I think the point is that first, they have time to make all these jokes about the bad stuff but not to even send a single damn sentence to any of the work they reject -- if this is all the insane whackjob type submissions, and they have time to make jokes like this about the whackjob stuff, WTF are they doing with the good stuff, the mediocre stuff, the broken but legitimate stories, the very good but not quite A-list stuff, the stuff that's great but they just ran something similar, the stuff that's obviously great but not aesthetically or politically or philosophically right for them?
Form letters, all.
Plus they even admit that in the rare cases when they do send comments, it's not their honest thoughts -- they rewrite them to "soften the blow" instead of the honesty, even if harsh, even if witty which would help the writers. But they won't do that. They probably never read Boswell's Johnson, either. (They should. Then they could learn how real literary men carry on.)
That's f'ed up, Steve, is it not? Also, they give a list of comments on the whackjob submissions and a list of comments on the "truly mindblowing" submissions; wait, what about the whole giant in between, the massive rejections of all the regular submissions? Not the stuff that's obviously from another planet, but what about the thousands of rejected pieces? We get no comments about that. Not a word.
This whole thing shows that they do actually have the time to sum up each submission at least in a sentence, that they can in fact do that (in fact if they are honestly evaluating a submission, the mere action of evaluation means they must form an idea in their mind and be able to articulate it).
So why don't they send these comments to the actual submitters, as was formerly the common practice of journal editors? They totally faced themselves with that blog entry and I don't see how they can get out of it without admitting the patently obvious: that they're mired in elitism and laziness and a lot of other ugly things. These journals have been coasting for way too long. They're culturally irrelevant, too. They're obscure, elitist, and definitely part of the problem.
And the irony is this: if these editors would be more honest about submissions, and about what they like, and abandon all this insane cultural relativism and "we're all valid in our diverse ways but we just can't use your particular piece right now," if they would do that, and say what is right and wrong to them, what they like and don't like, make their opinions known, they'd get a lot less of the useless submissions, they wouldn't have to deal with shoveling all that massive slush, their journals would be held in more esteem, they would be helping writers, and quality would go up.
I kind of like the point that if the readers have time to assess every submission, why can't they include some of those notes on the rejection? (At Ploughshares we don't file any written comments on submissions that aren't being passed on to the main editors -- so only positive remarks are recorded and those often are passed on the writer.)
However, the thing about VQR being elitist ... I mean, surely some heartache would be saved if submitters took time to read/research the journal before submitting. Obviously it's elitist! Duh. Look at the names of the people who get published there. Aside from the very rare unknown we are talking bigshots. You could easily do a little research and determine that the mag's acceptance rate is absurdly low. (Also true of Ploughshares.) There are plenty of other journals and venues out there that are not as selective or "elitist" -- submitters should spend a little time getting to know these markets. If they knew how low their chances of getting into VQR were in the first place they wouldn't be so shocked to get the slip later. The odds are against you even if your work is exceptionally good.
I’ve read the comments over at the Rejected Blog, and it seems to me that there are two points that have been lost. First, Ted’s comment about correspondence. There. Simply. Isn’t. Time. People write back early and often. And a throwaway line in casual conversation would not be beneficial to submitters. To respond professionally and diplomatically to every submitter who wasn’t outright terrible would be a tremendous drain, and give them false hope. When the major journals have a 5% or less rejection rate, it’s not fair to commit both the editor and the submitter to some kind of epistolary relationship, especially when they are essentially two strangers, and it gets emotional very quickly in ways that you could not possibly expect or, in the end, ameliorate. In short, it gets personal. If you don’t understand this, then you need to work for a literary magazine with a submission rate like VQR’s, though in my experience it has been the same at magazines with drastically lower submissions and circulation.
(At a past literary magazine, we once received a handwritten letter detailing various conclusions about our objectivity, agenda, and background, which the writer was evidently able to glean from three standard rejections of his or her work. It was signed “With titanic disrespect...” If the writer had bothered to read the magazine, he or she should have been able to reasonably see that the magazine never published stories that remotely resembled his or hers in content or plan of attack. The writer also failed to notice that the editors shuffled out year to year. There was no monolithic, “aesthetic” decision-making process, nor even the type of institutional memory he or she envisioned. All the pieces that made it to an editorial meeting were discussed and voted democratically on. I feel like I shouldn’t have to mention that the sheer volume of submissions makes it impossible for every staff editor to discuss every piece and vote on it, but I will anyway. I feel like I shouldn’t have to point out that magazines have wildly differing organizational arrangements, but I will. Sometimes you have interns doing the first cut. Sometimes the editors read every single piece. Sometimes the editor has one vote, the genre editor has one vote, and all the other staff have a single vote combined. Sometimes the editor has veto power. You have no way of knowing.
Even if there was such a presiding spirit at a magazine, so what? Sometimes the job of the editor is to advocate for certain styles or types of stories, and sometimes it’s to highlight pieces that underrepresented at large, no matter what their aesthetic. Sometimes, it’s both. Most often, however, the great majority of editors I know are simply happy to receive good pieces, rather than pieces that fit a perceived or imaginary agenda.
It is not the job of editors to give writers validation and a sense of connection to the literary community, nor to, in essence, give them mini-workshops. (It’s great when they can, but it’s not a reasonable expectation to expect them to devote themselves full-time to doing so.) That’s what your own workshops and your writer friends do. When you receive 10,000 submissions a year, that’s 10,000 sensibilities, 10,000 agendas, 10,000 publishing histories and encounters with other magazines that you as an editor have no way of knowing about or anticipating. Because the time of the editor is so limited and often not their primary (or paid) job at all, you really only have time to be an advocate for what you clearly and overwhelmingly like, for what moves you. And this shifts over time. It depends on what you’re reading, what you’re excited about, what you’re doing in your own writing, and a billon other factors (including but not limited to what’s happening in your personal life). Hell, when I first read Larry Levis ten years ago, I couldn’t believe that he was trying to get away with certain moves in his work. Five years after that, I found myself envying the skill of just those moves.
Which brings me to my second point. It’s subjective, folks. Endlessly, profoundly, capriciously so. Even work that has sufficient technical merit can seem repetitious or simply not new, depending on a million factors that affect the consciousness of an editor on any given day. You can read a piece that fulfills its own propositions, but simply not be drawn to its particular ambition or subject matter. It may not have anything to do with craft.
There are a million ways that literary activity is depressing and draining. Looking at pieces that got into magazines where you were rejected. Prizes that were given for terrible books that were written after the book that should have won. Nepotism, schmoozing, reciprocal publication, professional obligations, and a host of unknowable pressures or circumstances that fall under the aegis of simple bad luck are more than enough to make you feel like you are engaging in an absurd and ultimately meaningless activity. I once heard a staff member of a major literary magazine talk about a story that he or she wanted to include in an issue, but which the editors delicately hinted might upset one of their major donors. It is foolish to think that you (or anyone) can either be able to say with certainty whether a story is bad (as if it were as simple as arriving at a mathematical outcome), or to make judgments about why a piece was rejected. One simply cannot know what goes on in an institution (even if it’s small and literary), nor for that matter, inside the head of an editor who may just happen to be exhausted or in a bad mood that day, or who is (frequently) overworked and underpaid.
And this doesn’t even take into account the publication cycle. Maybe the magazine has already accepted pieces like yours for this issue. Maybe the magazine is already nearly full for the next issue, and thus only the very best pieces that garner a clear consensus get in. Maybe the magazine has accepted too many pieces similar in style to the one you sent. Maybe there’s a new editor who wants to showcase new work. Maybe there’s a backlog, so the editors are even more stringent. One has no way of knowing what sort of horse-trading goes on below the surface during the editorial meetings, and it’s silly to think that the combined history of the staff has no chance of shading the evaluation of a piece. When you think about it, it’s surprising that editing by committee (much like the hive mind of the workshop) even works at all, given the deeply personal material out of which writers build their unique sensibilities and projects.
All of these factors are continually in play, and often are in no way a reflection on the success or merit of your piece. So be passionate about the work and dispassionate about the business. Anything else takes away from energy that should be going into your writing.
Yes, Sim, I agree with your (and Ted's) point time, there simply not being enough. I'm actually impressed that VQR readers take the time to write down specific reasons they are rejecting this stuff that is evidently so horrifically bad. I guess I just wish it were true that writers really wanted to hear those reasons, cutting though they may be, and would take what they could from them and move on.
And I agree that submitters should be aware of the statistics involved in submitting to these big-name journals and not take rejection (or even acceptance!) so personally.
And as I remarked in a comment on the VQR blog, I disagree with the sentiment that submitters are serving a support function for journals and therefore deserve more attention/respect. Submitting work to a journal is not a very useful way to "support" it.
point ABOUT time, that is
Thanks, y'all, for the much more considered and accurate commentary here than is the standard in some comment fields.
If I send a true form rejection to someone (no "Dear [Name]," no "____ was the closest poem," no "I felt like the ending was a letdown"), I am pretty much saying "If this is representative of your work, it's not a valuable use of your time or mine for you to send it to me." But I don't say it because of the subjectivity issue you mention, and also because some rejected writers are far too willing to try for dialogue even when it's not encouraged.
On the other hand, if I personalize a rejection at all (and I do that plenty), that definitely means I'd be happy for the writer to try again in the future--I don't want to BS people or give them false hope. I try not to waste anyone's time, including mine.
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