It’s not easy to publish poetry of any kind, and there is little agreement between editors (and readers) about what constitutes “good” poetry. With that in mind, congratulations to anyone whose poem is chosen for publication by a magazine or anthology. If your submission is chosen out of the hundreds submitted even to obscure online publications, much less out of the thousands sent to the larger journals, it means a great deal, and you should feel proud of it.
Anyone who writes and submits regularly to magazines knows that there is a vast—even if poorly paid—industry of persons who will help you get published or teach you to write work that may have a better chance at publication. I assume that many writers avail themselves of this industry, or it wouldn’t exist. In full disclosure, I don’t have any recent experience of the classes and craft essays and workshops out there. While I have been teaching writing workshops in prisons for the last nine years, I haven’t taken a workshop for forty years, and I avoid craft essays because… I just avoid them. It is possible, or even likely, that I underestimate the level of thought that goes into those activities. So, apologies in advance, if you are a teacher or student and feel wronged by my prejudices.
Now that I’ve made this apology, I can consider what is publishable and what is not. Literary journals of all sorts consider themselves modern. As the base subject matter of poetry hasn’t changed much since the earliest epigrams, epics, psalms, and celebrations, the perceived newness of poetry often has to do with formal qualities, such as radical juxtapositions of images, distortions of syntax, or insertions of lacunae. These are matters of fashion, the way ties go from narrow to wide and back to narrow or the way high boots may be “in” one season and unworn the next.
In the last century, there used to be something called “The New Yorker poem.” It was noteworthy for its skillful presentation of a scene or landscape and the elegance of its language. These are not qualities to be disparaged, and I don’t disparage them. Sometimes, though, they were … boring. The little magazines of that period were part of a counterculture and prided themselves on not publishing “The New Yorker poem.” Not entirely dissimilar battles were fought between the critics in Edinburgh and poets in London in the early nineteenth century. Today, the fashion has shifted, and The New Yorker publishes poems that are nothing like “The New Yorker poem.” Or perhaps, there is simply a different kind of “The New Yorker poem.”
Nowadays, if you have a batch of poems to send out, your first job is to figure out what kind of poems they are. If they contain surreal elements, there are magazines that have a history of favoring those poems. If they are written in a traditional form, such as a sonnet or villanelle, there are journals that are friendly to those as well. There are also hundreds of literary magazines that respond best to free verse, however that may be defined. A logical destination exists for most poems. Forgive me if I inject here an unscientific observation. Take it for what it’s worth. Editors tend to publish poets most like themselves. While I fully acknowledge that editors make serious efforts to publish work that broadens the cultural reach of their magazines and presses, they like best what they understand best. I don’t write this to criticize anyone, only to state the obvious. And, as much as I’d like to think otherwise, when I have helped edit magazines, I’ve probably been most friendly to those poems where I recognized the thought, feeling, or approach of the poet.
Given the low cost of electronic publishing, as opposed to paper publishing, I ought to revise the title of this essay. There is likely a place to publish just about anything somewhere. “Unpublishable” in this context, though, refers to poems that are not likely to be accepted by the more widely read journals. My purpose here is to celebrate those unpublishable poems and encourage poets to write them.
Here is the problem. It is not so difficult to teach poets (or prospective poets) how to write poems that have a shot at acceptance by publishers who relate to the particular literary and/or cultural perspective of the poet. It may be near impossible to teach these poets to do the opposite, to write poems that, while still wanting to be understood, ask their readers to go beyond what’s currently fashionable, beyond the kind of poetry they already know. While poets have no hesitancy to make political, cultural, and emotional statements in their work, contemporary poetry often excludes thinking and what Yeats called “arguments with ourselves.” Perhaps these activities in our stanzas, strophes, and paragraphs are the new anti-poetry.
We still seem to be experiencing a reaction against 20th century modernism, which was once itself “the new anti-poetry.” The modernists often were extremely well read, and to be fair, much of their work was elitist. However, to the extent that their poetry engages us enough to make us think as well as feel and maybe engages us enough to make us study something new, that elitism is not such a bad thing. One of the goals of modernist poetry was to change the culture at large. We can argue that the direction in which these poets wanted to change the culture was wrongheaded, bigoted, and nostalgic, but the scope of their ambition made for some great poetry. In comparison, the ambition of contemporary American poetry often seems small and unexciting.
This leaves poets with an important question to ask themselves: who is your audience? I take it for granted that poets all write for their friends. Beyond that, though, everyone has hopes of a wider audience. Possibly that audience is represented by top-tier literary magazines or the university-sponsored journals that began to publish before most of us were born. The intended audience might also be a specific social or cultural group or a conglomeration of groups. While few of us are able like Whitman to imagine a great future audience and state boldly, “I am with you, you men and women of a generation, or ever so many generations hence…,” ideally poets need to be able to imagine an audience of intelligent readers from different cultures and classes and to address that audience, but it takes chutzpa, egotism, arrogance, nerve, and then must be supported by thought, emotion, and the embarrassing candor implied by those “arguments with ourselves.”
The task I’ve described comes with complications attached. It’s a cliché to say we all suffer from imposter syndrome, but there’s some truth to it. The more we know, the more we know how small our knowledge is. We imagine erudite readers tossing our books to the floor if not into the fireplace. That complication is only overcome by the impulse to write and by the need to say something important no matter how inadequate we are to say it.
Another obstacle to surmount is the fear of not being published. Receiving a form rejection from a magazine most obviously means the poems submitted did not please the editors. That can (also obviously) be because the submission was badly crafted or obscure or even offensive. It may also have been generally indistinguishable from the four or five hundred other poems submitted for the same issue. The answer to such rejections may be to work harder and learn to think and feel with greater complexity. However, another possibility exists: the poems submitted may have been “foreign” to the readers at the journal. I wrote earlier that editors prefer the work of poets they recognize as most like themselves. Again, the best editors diligently try to stretch their appreciation of different kinds of work, but that only goes so far. The foreignness of a poem may be because of its diction, syntax, idiom, form, or subject. Very few magazines, for example, currently publish narrative poetry. They may publish lyrics with a heavy spoonful of narrative, but outright narrative is less frequent. In the same way, some magazines in their guidelines for submissions announce that they simply don’t want poems that use meter or rhyme, or they caution that formal poetry isn’t favored and that such poems will have to be beyond brilliant to find a home there.
These warnings occasionally make me wonder how the editors of those venues would define free verse, and my guess is their definition would be largely negative, something like “poetry that doesn’t use traditional meters or rhymes.” This would be analogous to defining a human as a creature that is not a cat or a bird or a fish. To my knowledge, no guidelines even make a stab at defining poetry. For the last two hundred years, lyric poetry has followed, as Harold Bloom pointed out, Wordsworth’s model. Hazlitt described Wordsworth’s method as: “He takes a subject or a story merely as pegs or loops to hang thought and feeling on.” So, for a long time now, we have been doing pretty much the same thing. What has made some poems better than others is the quality of the “thought and feeling” and the quality of the expression, its ability to wake us up by defying our expectations. What surprises us may be a voice we haven’t heard before, a music in the sound of the words, images that are especially sharp, or concepts that ask us to revise how we think. What does not surprise us are poems that are overtly rhetorical, that want to sell us on a specific political, theological, or romantic point of view. The best poems question themselves and their own assumptions. If they are trying to make a sale, they do it with complexity, no matter how simple the language or structure they use. Such poems don’t merely imitate what’s currently popular, even if that makes it harder for them to find an audience.
If poems are rejected, it may be precisely because they are doing something different, and it is this difference we should be seeking, not avoiding. Poetry is one of the ways we understand our world and ourselves, but if poetry is going to comprehend the world we have inherited and done our own bit to damage, it will need to risk rejection. In addition, there are personal benefits to this kind of poetry. Poets who are willing to take the chance of writing poems that may never be published are free to please themselves and the audience they imagine for their poems, not the editors of journals, top-tier or otherwise.
This is not an invitation to poets to write unintelligible poetry. That usually happens when the poet is afraid to be understood, possibly afraid that there is not much in the work to understand. Unintelligible poetry doesn’t seek an audience either now or in the future: it seeks to be protected from any audience. Poetry is strongest, most affecting, when it says what it means without obfuscation, what Pound called “direct treatment of the thing.” To do that, though, requires not just a certain kind of poem but a certain kind of poet, someone who isn’t afraid to write poems whose audience may never materialize, someone willing to write unpublishable poetry.