I received my editor’s copies of Silk Road Review Volume 6.1 today, with its striking new color cover by Orna Ben-Shoshan. Since taking up the post of Senior Poetry Editor last year, I have read scores of poems each week, deliberating with my Associate Editors about what to include, and how. Being on the rejecting side of so many poems at once, I wrote a kind of rejection slip that I wish I could transmit to every aspiring writer who has, inevitably, not made the cut.
The poems that did end up in this issue are a delight to see in print–set in the woods and on the beaches; places as varied as the Peruvian Andes and a chic restaurant in glittering L.A. They each transcend their locality in some way. The prose in this volume was equally a labor of love for my fellow genre editors. And I look forward to reading the interview with the poet Dorianne Laux, whose latest collection, The Book of Men has been rocketing up the top-ten charts for poetry on Amazon.
In the end, it is for love that we write, and love that we compile–not only tenderly, but to provoke, incite, encourage, and unsettle. My hope is that issue 6.1 does all of that and more. To order this issue, or subscribe for a full year so you won’t miss 6.2, send contact details and payment, specifying which issue(s) you would like, to Pacific University.
“Aesthetics is for the artist as Ornithology is for the birds.”
-Barnett Newman
A recent short piece I posted on rejection seems to have struck a nerve with friends and readers. Following this hopeful lament of the inevitability of being turned down, I wrote some more practical advice for the Silk Road Blog, touching on what I, as Senior Poetry Editor, look for in a poem that I actually decide to accept. Although I remain uneasy with the aspect of editing that feels like being appointed an arbiter of taste, I none the less share candidly what my own tastes are, and what makes a poem jump out of the slush pile screaming, “Publish me!”
Enjoy.
“Publication–is the Auction / Of the Mind of Man–”
-Emily Dickinson
In my first month as Senior Poetry Editor of Silk Road Review, I have already read over a hundred poems (selected from hundreds more by assistant editors). In the end, we will reject most of it. As a poet, I am no stranger to rejection myself. But this is my first experience being on the rejecting side of so many poems at once. Responding to this, I wrote the following short piece.
Rejection Slip
I’m sorry for what you lost. A friend. Or your belief in the world as a safe, sane place to live. My stamping a red “rejection” on the blood-specked page you sent to me is hardly the response you deserve. Find someone who sees the poem you will write twenty years from now, on the selfsame topic, that brings us to our knees. Never let that person go. Cling like a barnacle. Cleave also to the belief (which is true) that because you can be hollowed out, as with an ice-cream scooper, by the poems in dogeared volumes on your shelves, that someday, someday, you will have that effect on another. Today it is not this poem. Today it is not me. Though I refer to your piece by its assigned number when delegating to a subeditor the task of contacting you, consider this now my most personal attempt at reaching back. I’m sorry. I live here, too. This place overwhelms my instruments also, pegging the needles of sorrow and beauty on the gauge at the center of my chest. I decided, like you, long ago, to learn the device’s more subtle measures, no matter how often it surged and blew. Keep learning. Note by note. In the future, I will not have to look for you to know you have revised your fate. You will send this message back to me. It will not bring me comfort, even as now I am sure you are not consoled. But maybe this will encourage you to shovel coal into anger’s furnace, and ride upon that heat to a better poem. I do not like this any more than a natural disaster. Yet I must believe that Nature loves us in her way. Go write. Go write some more. Be gorgeous, despite it all.
Subscribe now for great poetry of place
I am excited to announce that I have accepted the position of Senior Poetry Editor for Silk Road Review, a publication of Pacific University. I will be editing content for two volumes of this excellent literary journal in the 2010-2011 academic year, taking over from Abby Murray. Hers are big shoes to fill; platform shoes with glitter and plastic sunflowers on them, if I know Abby. I only hope I can bring half as much style to the job.
In all seriousness, it is an honor to accept responsibility for continuing this publication’s tradition of both celebrating established poets and introducing new, up-and-coming voices into the ongoing conversation of poetry. The magazine focuses on place as a touchstone for the work it solicits and features. My poem “How Can a Boy Hate Fishing?,” for example, featured in Vol. 4 last year, is set in the desert farming community on the U.S.-Mexico border where I grew up. The current issue takes you to an inherited condo in Florida, a jeepney in the Philippines, a house trailer in rural Michigan, a fire escape in New York, and the Chinese Himalayas. By subscribing now, you will receive both this issue, and the next issue, which will be assembled under my editorship.
I look forward to writing about my experience on the other side of the publication process, as I sift through poems with a talented team of cohorts, panning for those nuggets of earned transcendence. Submissions are currently being accepted through the journal’s online submission manager. Here’s to a year of saying “yes” to great poetry.
