This Ain’t No Genteel Evening: On the World, the Work, and What We Owe
One way to save yourself some pain when rambling down that hall of seeking publication in lit journals is to research the journals you are submitting to. If you can’t read any copies for free, ideally you should then buy a copy, or, at the very least, take the time to look at the names that have been published in recent editions, google them and find other poems of theirs that might be online. Then you research the editors, read interviews they’ve given, maybe even tune into a talk on YouTube if there’s one. If the editor writes, read their work too.
And, if you fail to do the above, and you send work that does not align with the journal’s voice or mission, and you are rejected, perhaps even an explanation given as to why, don’t behave badly online in response. Your insecurity is not their responsibility, and a critique of your poetry is not a character assassination.
Of course, largely, this is born out of my seeing someone do exactly that: send their objectively unpolitical work — a poet who writes largely vignettes of moments in their life, images held in time, or which focus solely on their own anxieties without transcending them further — to a deeply political journal with deeply political poets as the editors, and then put on blast that editor, that journal.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, instead of this writer being told they are behaving badly or even anyone having enough curiosity to ask what research that poet did before sending to the journal and what poems did they send, the entire thing turned into a pile-on of individuals insulting not only the journal but the editor. Folks called into question the editor’s authority, their grasp on the English language, their ability to discern meaning or “read closely”. It was ugly, and it was immature.
(Then again, I am one of those who believes that meaning that needs explained after the fact is a sign of failure rather than a show of complexity. Even poets like Wallace Stevens, who is often seen as difficult to read, are ultimately obvious in meaning.)
Context makes it all even uglier, as the editor in question has built a career in engagement with the political, existential, and aesthetically challenging. The editor has been carving, for decades, spaces for complex, politically attuned, and unflinching poetry — publishing writers who sit at the edge of the world and push.
All this to express that the journal in question is a journal aiming to interrogate the world and our places in it, not simply to describe it. At the very core, it is a journal of resistance. And there, in response to a single sentence, you have a bunch of white poets, primarily privileged ones with MFAs and even PhDs, harping on about how the editor wouldn’t know a good poem if it hit them in the face.
To have such a tantrum at all tells one how true the journal’s critique of the work might be, as even in that moment, the rejected poet cannot move past their entitlement, their wounded pride, their solipsism to reflect on where they might have gone wrong. It is not that there are not places for their poetry. There are plenty. They are published often. It is that this place, that journal, was not one.
There is a childish refusal in that sort of behavior and response. An unwillingness to accept that not all poetry is about them, that not all journals are spaces for their voice, that not all editors are obligated to treat their work with kid gloves and a soft bedside manner. And declaring that your poems are serious doesn’t automatically mean they will function within every critical, political, or philosophical landscape. The poems didn’t land because of some injustice done to them; they didn’t land because they lacked resonance in a space that demands it.
It is, ultimately, a display of personal insecurities to lash out at and punish a figure for not offering you affirmations, for being bold enough to have any commentary on your poems that isn't wholly positive, which, like above, only further alludes to the possible reasons for why that individual’s work was not a fit.
They are not seeming to be writing in service of humanity; they seem to be writing in service of themselves. The motive isn’t to say something vital for the world or those of us within it; the motive is about what they can receive from the world for speaking. Even that however, the desire to be admired by others, can exist meaningfully within the poetry of self-awareness.
When Ben Fama writes in Fantasy, “Some thoughts are not that great / The Internet is my home / Where it's easy to be beautiful / And seen and new / In the glow / In the spell / I thought I was better / I guess I won't ever be”, he turns telling on himself into something that reaches beyond his interior and reveals the dull pain of alienation, it becomes both the consequence and wound of being, of existing within this increasingly ever-connected yet ever-individualistic modern (and Western) society.
So, no, there is nothing wrong with personal work, but to demand it be universally embraced without asking what it gives back? There might be something wrong with that.
It is, I think, important that when we write, when we submit, we understand the conversation before demanding the stage lights be aimed at our words. We should be intentional. We should feel reverence for editorial integrity over editors who make decisions based solely on trends or a poet’s name recognition, education, or past accolades.
Editorial discernment is not an act of cruelty. A journal that exists in literary resistance to pleasant, MFA-drenched lyricism that doesn’t risk anything is not an act of violence.
As I age, I grow to appreciate more and more the critiques of a certain sect of the literary world voiced by outlaw poets like David Lerner. In Mein Kampf he writes, “I’d rather / sell arms to the Martians / than wait sullenly for a / letter from some diseased clown with a / three-piece mind / telling me that I’ve won a / bullet-proof pair of rose-colored glasses / for my poem 'Autumn in the Spring' / I want to be / hated / by everyone who teaches for a living”.
He writes: “this ain’t foolin’ a / grab-bag of clever wordplay and sensitive thoughts and / gracious theories about / how many ambiguities can dance on the head of a / machine gun / this ain’t no / genteel evening over / cappuccino and bullshit / this ain’t no life-affirming / our days have meaning / as we watch the flowers breath [sic] through our souls and / fall desperately in love / this ain’t no letter-press, hand-me-down, / wimpy beatnik festival of bitching about / the broken rainbow / it is a carnival of dread / it is a savage sideshow / about to move to the main arena / it is terror and wild beauty / walking hand in hand down a bombed-out road / as missiles scream, while a / sky the color of arterial blood / blinks on and off”.
Or how he writes to Rimbaud in Thief of Fire, “You’d have looked bad / trying to make it as a poet / befriending people who bored you / reading your stuff in rooms the color of death / wondering which slumped comatose figure was the editor”. (Note: I have lost my copy of this piece and so the line breaks are estimations rather than gospel. I will edit when able).
And that voice is still, unfortunately for all of us, acutely relevant and vital, particularly when we see “Autumn in the Spring” writers unable to stand the existence of a space not catered to them, cannot stand it so much that they must try to tear it down. They call, with their own vindication gleaming in their eyes, for the journal to fail, for the editor's embarrassment, for ruin, for a space filled with marginalized and daring voices to be ripped out of earshot because it made the other poets, themselves, feel bad (or so that is how they see it).
Primarily, the point of everything before this very now is that we should try to not be dicks; and yes, even if, or rather maybe especially when, our feelings are hurt.
