Rant

On one of the forums where I lurk, someone is complaining that the editors of a magazine suggested changes to their submission which would have radically altered the poem, nay changed the whole tenor. The poster adds that they never had much faith in those editors' judgement anyway.

So why are they sending their poems there?

It is easy to get enraged over exchanges like this, so I won't. It can be very dodgy offering unsolicited crit. Some people are adult enough to welcome it, but others are prickly as hell. Why do they send stuff in the first place if they don't value the editor's judgement?

As for solicited crit, you know it's going to be a disaster from the off. Anyone who needs to ask isn't going to like what you're going to say. Anyone with an ounce of sense knows that editors won't have time to write a word more than they have to unless they want to. It takes too long to work out a tactful way to tell someone their work is crap. Or just boring.

Some would-be contributors have an attitude problem: they seem to think that there's a kind of bar of general competence they have to clear.
Er, NO.
They have to write a poem that the editor thinks other people are prepared to pay money to read.

Plus, that poem has to fit in with the other poems on the shortlist. So the ten millionth brilliant poem about Alzheimer's probably ain't going to cut it.

The editor's judgement may be a bit idiosyncratic, but the editor's best placed to know the sort of people lined up prepared to pay for poems in that particular magazine, and how far to push their tolerance - so like it or not, the would-be contributor has got to accept that judgement. Anyway, why are they sending their precious poems there in the first place if they don't?

I'm well into my second year editing at Seam. It feels like a hundred. When I started out, I was more liberal with my comments than I am now. One classic response was from a man who wrote that he'd taken on board my suggestions, and had sent his revised poem to a competition where it had won a prize... (Thanks, mate, you're welcome.)

I don't know about other editors, but the biog is the last thing I read. And I'm trying to draft a catch-all rejection slip that is somewhat more gracious than the one I got from Brando's Hat, years ago, after about six months. We are sorry you have not been successful - a thin line of type crudely scissored from thirtynine identical others on a page of A4.