To address Calonlan's point, my reference to quality material was mildly facetious, but only mildly so. My personal opinion of most modern poetry that I have read, including contemporary work, is very low. Little of it rises even to the level of being called poetry, in my opinion.*
What's interesting is that, from what I can tell, most "reputable" literary magazines and journals take exactly the opposite of Calonlan's approach.
Poetry magazine, for instance, receives over 90,000 submissions per year. It would obviously be impossible to publish all of that. In consequence, and to maintain its "elite" reputation,
Poetry magazine accepts around 300-350 poems for publication per year.
Of course, that is at the "top" of the market. Even journals with a far lesser reputation than
Poetry's accept five percent or fewer of the poems submitted to them annually. Under these circumstances, and as I mentioned in a previous post, MFA students, or even upper-year English majors, act as "gatekeepers" and do the bulk of the first readings of submissions. As I also mentioned, CAS today would be lucky even to have his work read by an actual editor before rejection, let alone to have his poems accepted. Literary journals' extreme selectivity is not only fact of contemporary life; it is likely more extreme now than it has ever been in the past. One of the many detrimental side-effects of an exploding population, I suppose....
I urge those who are interested in this subject to read David Alpaugh's excellent article
"The New Math of Poetry" in the
Chronicle of Higher Education. This article was a real eye-opener, for me. It helped to explain why those who do not follow the proper "po-biz" career track (MFA degree; networking/brown-nosing; teaching post; early publications facilitated by aforementioned brown-nosing; list of poetry prizes won in cover letter) can pretty well forget about ever having their poetry published in any selective journal, today.
Not that any of that necessarily matters, of course, but I just wondered whether there might be a decent journal somewhere that would consider publishing CAS--ideally, this would not be self-publication on the Web, or in a journal within the "weird literature/SF" ghetto. As one commentator suggested, one of the few "formalist" journals might be the best bet.
* Please, no flames for this statement of mine. I'd prefer that this thread not be derailed into an argument over the merits and demerits of modern poetry. As I have mentioned, I am sure that there are plenty of "unpublished, inglorious Miltons" in the modern era, too. I just question whether that will ever be able to publish in today's climate.
Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 24 Aug 10 | 12:49PM by Absquatch.