Tangled Rope

I recently sent a friend a birthday copy of Spreading the Word: Editors on Poetry, a collection of 16 essays by editors of literary magazines published in the late 80s and reprinted through 2001. Neither of us are literary editors; we are both fairly excited (and excitable) about poetry, and I at least fancy myself a writer of poems from time to time. This collection provides some fairly interesting insights into the business, but more importantly some clear ideas about what makes a poem “publishable”.

The essays each center on one or two poems by a single author published by the editor, with the editor’s explanation of why that poet was chosen, and what that choice reveals about their own particular process of selection and editing. I intend to summarize key points from each of these essays over the next little while, to both share the insights and maintain a record for my own benefit.

David St. John, poet and editor of The Antioch Review penned the essay “On Editing”, which features two poems by Jane Hirshfield “In that World, The Angels Wear Fins” and “In a Net of Blue and Gold”.

David includes the following reflections on the task of editing:

• read widely in literary magazines “to … have as complete a sense as possible of who is publishing what”
• publish a poet only once during editor’s tenure
• avoid falling into patterns
• “there are millions of ‘competent’ and well-written poems…the poems I wished to published were … more eccentric, demanding, difficulty…’risky’”
• good screeners are invaluable, must know what is and is not desired, what to exclude and what to let through

On the Hirshfield poems David reveals, “each time I returned…I learned something new about them, and about myself as well. … Like all the best poems, they yielded slowly, like blossoms unfolding.”