Submittable calls it “Decline.” I like to refer to it as “Returned” when my manuscripts come back to me, which they still do more often than not. As an editor for Poetry South and a frequent submitter to many magazines, I have a complicated relationship with rejection. On the one hand, I have a tough skin because I return far more manuscripts than are returned to me. I get it when magazines send my work back — there are a lot of factors that are out of my control, so I shouldn’t take it personally. And yet, there is always an ounce of regret, even when I know better, when a magazine doesn’t accept my work.
Lately, I’ve been thinking of rejection more in terms of the poems I’m reading for Poetry South. Our default decline letter states that: “We know there are many excellent poems that we won’t find a place for or that won’t fit our needs for this issue.” Truer words were never spoken, and yet we also want to publish the best poems we receive. Does that mean that all the poems we send back were somehow inferior to the other poems that we accept? Not really.
You could look at the math. Right now, I’m reading for one month with over 60 submissions, which means I’m reading 240 poems. We take submissions 12 months a year. Our annual deadline is July 15, but we start receiving submissions for the following year on July 16 as of 12:01 a.m. So that means that if the month I was readng for were an average month, we would read 720 submissions and 2880 poems. It is not an average month. May, June, and July are our busiest months, when we anticipate getting 200-300 submissions a month. We’ll probably have that many from July 1 – July 15, and we get quite a few in the second half of July, too. We read year-round, though we often take a break from reading in August – November while we concentrate on putting together the next issue. What that means is that of the 240 or so poems that I’m reading right now, I can probably accept ten or fewer, since we aim for about 100 pages of poetry in our annual issue. There are tons of really good poems that I won’t be able to accept simply because if I did, I would fill up the magazine in no time.
Do we pick the best? We try. We are also human, and we are also trying to select the best poems for our next issue. That means that some really good poems won’t be selected. Some of those might be better than what we select but might not be a good fit for Poetry South or might not be a good fit for the issue that is developing. Sometimes we might overlook a “better” poem simply because we are not the best reader for that poem. Sometimes we might overlook a “better” poem because we feel the way it is formatted won’t work well in the pages of our magazine. Sometimes we’re tired. Sometimes we’re feeling the pressure of the poems we haven’t read yet or the ones that we know will be submitted in the coming months. We do our best to pick the best, but that term is subjective and relative and unfair. Please remember that when we send your poems back to you.
We also want to support new writers or writers who’ve been around for awhile and who show promise. Sometimes we accept poems by writers who’ve been sending to us for awhile because we want to encourage them. Sometimes we accept a poem by a writer who is in high school or college that may not be objectively “the best” but that shows a lot of promise. We don’t accept poems that we don’t like or that we think won’t fit in with our journal, but we do appreciate a poem that’s a little rough around the edges at times. We’re not looking for uniformity. We are looking for variety and for poems that challenge us in new and intersting way, even if they may not be “the best.” They are all the best for us at that moment when we accept them.
I want to be excited by every poem that we publish, even if that means we overlook some really good poems by well-published poets in the process. Because we know we do. We read your bios and know where you’ve published. We try not to to be too impressed by past successes, and we try to concentrate on the poems you sent us, not who you are, but we do notice. Often after we’ve made our decision about the poems.
When I send my poems out into the world, I know they will face the same inscrutable process. I know they need to land in the right person’s hands at the right time in order to have a chance of acceptance. I celebrate when they do, and I try to get them into other people’s hands as soon as I can when they come back to me. I try to remember myself as an editor when I submit my work, and to be gracious to those editors who spend their time and energy reviewing my poems. And I try to remember myself as a submitter of poetry when I’m reading everyone else’s poems, to give them the diligence they deserve and to look for the poems that will be right for us this year. And I look for the best, whatever that might mean for me at the moment, which is always affected by all the poems I’ve been reading, accepting, returning, or holding onto so I can read again before I make a final decision.
I know I am imperfect. I know I try to do my best, and I’m proud of all the poems we’ve published in Poetry South. Whether you call it “reject,” “decline,” or “return,” I hope that all the poems that go back to their poets will find their best place to be published. There are many, many other great magazines out there, and this gives me comfort every time I hit “Deline.” Somewhere else there is a better home for that poem, and I hope that it finds its home soon.