Back in June

Poetry Journal Editors Panel

I realize now that before it actually happened, I should have blogged about The Riverwood Poetry Festival in Hartford (June 21^st-24^th, yes, sorry, you’ve missed it this year).  It looked really great: among the events, four Poets Laureate read one night (Dick Allen (CT); Walter Butts (NH); Lisa Starr (RI) and Sydney Lea (VT)), and Nick Flynn all by himself on another. 

And I was on a panel of poetry journal editors, trying to characterize our journals and what we looked for.  We each read two poems we had accepted and explained some of what we liked about those poems, and the audience asked questions—two in particular seemed to strike a nerve.

The first was, why does it seem you have to have an MFA to get published?

The second was, doesn’t anyone accept poems that rhyme anymore?   

We all had our answers.  Of course you don’t have to have an MFA to get published, and we (all the editors on that panel, but also we editors at Common Ground) don’t actually look at your credentials: we look at your writing.

However, people who’ve worked to get an MFA may have these advantages: they’ve had a period of intense concentration focused on making their writing shine; they’ve had experienced teachers giving them advice; they’ve run their poems through the gauntlet of their peers’ criticism, and then they’ve revised their poems some more.  (All praise to those who have gone through and survived!)

The MFA writers may have these disadvantages, though: their poems may sound “workshopped” and/or more like their mentors than like themselves; the work may have lost energy and innovation as it gained polish; the writer may have chosen to shy away from risky moves, for example, deciding to err on the side of intellectualism rather than passion, fearing that passion might be overly sentimental or naïve.

Or it might rhyme.  (That’s a joke!)

Personally, I don’t think rhyme should hijack the poem.  The poem is not about rhyming.  If rhyme has a point, if it adds rhythm and meaning to the poem’s content, then I’m fine with it.  But even then, I want the rhyme to be created from the best-chosen words; I want the rhyme to please and surprise just the way I want the rest of the poem to do.

If you want to look up the other journals whose editors were on the panel, here they are:

Caduceus: http://tfuscomedia.com (Tony Fusco)

Connecticut River Review: http://ct-poetry-society.org/publications.htm (Pat Mottola)

CT Review: www.easternct.edu/connecticutreview (Lisa Siedlarz)

Dogwood: www.dogwoodliterary.com (Sonya Huber)

Drunken Boat: http://www.drunkenboat.com (Ravi Shankar)