I usually let the rejections pile up before sorting through them for my records. I resent it, but it seems my life is defined by the things that pile up--email, for the love of God, somebody pick up the damned phone--and though I am oppressed enough by my piles to transport them across the country with me, I am rarely convinced I ought to use my energy to dismantle them.
So I arrived in Arizona with a pile of rejection slips to look over and found some closely-written thoughtful commentary from Ron Offen of Free Lunch on yellow post-its attached to each rejected poem. I don't think an editor has ever commented on my work before, aside from the usual "close, but not for us," or "we liked ______ but chose not to publish it." Frankly, I don't expect editors to comment on my work. They have their own piles to manage--obviously--and if they do their editing lovingly, as I know most do, I don't expect more then a generic sentence or two on a slip of pink paper and a set of initials in blue ink indicating we--the editors and I--have had our correspondence.
(Cream City, on the other hand, returned my work with my own cover letter on top, just as I'd sent it. Not the first time it's happened with them. I don't do them an injustice when I say I assume they haven't given my work even a cursory reading. Sloppy and dismissive, that.)
Question is, if editors are to comment on submissions at all--and I'm not suggesting they should--what ought they say? (Well, what do you say, those editors among you, and why?) What I appreciate most about Offen's response is that he accounts for taste, which in the abstract, I hadn't thought would be useful to me beyond my knowing how my poems fall short of it. He says of the last poem in the batch I sent:
"Again--too fragmented for me. Don't care for this style of writing. Overall too prosey--lacks figurative language, which I like."
Yeah, exactly. Exactly! All those qualifiers--"for me," "don't care for," "which I like," and even "style of writing"--ring true here, though in a workshop setting such language usually comes from the faux apologist in the room. The editorial bias, as an objective, as a standard of taste, allows Offen to say something surprisingly true about the poems. They are fragmentary, prosey, and sadly lacking in figurative language, the polar opposite of what I often most admire in other poets.
In the mail just before leaving Galesburg, I received a copy of Suzanne Frischkorn's Spring Tide. Spent yesterday recovering from the long drive and steeped in her poems. I have more to say about what Suzanne can do that I simply can't--figurative language!--but for now must be off to the grocery store. There is turkey to consider.
