I find myself without humor today, so you must forgive me if I take what was probably just a snarky lark too seriously. It’s a bad habit of mine.

Contrary to the stereotype, poets are probably the least fragile of people, since the vast majority of them have been rejected thousands of times. But then who hasn’t felt fragile now and then? I bet you’ve even had fragile moments, despite the certitude evinced
in your entry above. Hopefully, someone was nice to you at that moment of fragility.

Second, would-be-poets send their entries into slush piles in the hopes of getting better. Most of the really bad entrants aren’t all that bad, they’re just beginners. If they didn’t keep submitting, they wouldn’t get better. I don’t know of any poet, whether it was Creeley or Sorrentino or Spicer, who started sending out poems and was immediately declared a genius. (Surely, there have been a few exceptions, but that’s just it: they were exceptions. As you probably realize, most poets take decades before their work finds a readership.) But let’s not get too excited by that mischievous word “better.” What “better” means in this context is: the would-be poets get a finer and finer sense of what the people in charge of the piles of slush like and want. It doesn’t mean they get better at creating intrinsically valuable works of poetry, for such things don’t exist; that kind of poetry is an institutional myth maintained by people who either don’t know any better or simply want to keep the good times rolling. Instead, what “better” means here is that the would-be poets slowly master a distribution network. Fence is a forum within such a network, one whose taste I usually like. But I don’t think that it is intrinsically “better” than any other poetry journal, even those that publish the most abominable verse by, say, John Updike.

So it seems a little disspiriting to find that someone at Fence is so naive, presumably after s/he has gone through the process of sorting slush–which I’ll admit is often a tedious, eye-glazing task. If you haven’t noticed the arbitrary side of slush-sorting, I don’t know what to say. In any event, the best journals are those that employ slush-sorters who manage to stay awake while maintaining their own peculiar (but not intrinsically superior) judgment consistently throughout, thus giving the would-be poets a fighting
chance of matching their own work to the tastes of the gatekeepers. This is almost exactly the same kind of responsibility that composition teachers have while correcting papers, most of which aren’t to the teacher’s liking, but some of which are. It’s the bad teacher who writes a nasty note next to the “C-.”

This is why there is wisdom in the gentle, even the impersonal, rejection. I know I sure wouldn’t want to get a note telling me that hanging in there just makes me look like a bigger loser! Save that kind of meanness for people like Sorrentino, a late friend of mine who never gave up on the idea of intrinsic value, even in his almost impossibly acerbic letters. (The reason I think of him here is that your proposed rejection notes seem like something from Mulligan Stew or Imaginative Qualities.) I’m sure Creeley, another man I was proud to call a friend, didn’t credit such a stupid idea as intrinsic value–here was a guy who slaved at first, trying to get into any journal he could–and I doubt he’d want his image used this way. When he was sober, he was the nicest guy, regardless of what his recent biographer had to say.

Again, sorry to be so churlish. I’ve probably only reinforced the unfortunate stereotype about poets being overly sensitive birds. I’m sure you are a great person who simply caught me at the wrong moment. But the fact that some of these images actually made me laugh made me feel sick, so I felt some kind of epistolary emetic was in order. Here’s a thank-you to Fence for providing a forum to respond to their own bloggers-gone-astray. But hey, maybe you didn’t go astray, since the other respondents seem to think what you’ve done here is pretty cool.

I am not one of them.

Cheers,
Dave Andrews

thanks…