I was recently asked to guest edit an issue of a literary magazine. For me, this was a first, and I suspect that the editor, who is a good friend, may have wanted to teach me a few lessons about what it’s like to be on the other side of the submissions process. OK, I get it. Reading manuscripts is seriously hard work. We capped at 200 submissions, and most submissions had three poems each. So, approximately 600 poems later, I understand a little of what regular editors go through every three months. My job was to be the first reader of these poems on Submittable and to give a thumbs up to the ones I thought should be accepted. As far as I know, my friend—the real editor—mostly went along with my judgments.

Did I make mistakes? Probably. Maybe even more than probably. All I can do is apologize and tell you that there are lots of stories about great poems being rejected. If you believe in your work and I rejected it, send it to other magazines. Someone else may recognize qualities that I missed.

Beyond realizing how difficult it is to edit a magazine and how fallible my judgment might ultimately be, I did learn or was reminded of things that will influence my own approach to submitting poems and may even be of some help to other writers. However, these are not rules. They are simply thoughts that crossed my mind while I was reading submissions or thinking about them later, and they are simply my thoughts, not policies of any magazine or editor. Not only should you feel free to disagree with them, but on another occasion, I might disagree with them myself.

1. Most people who submit poems have amazing credentials, and it doesn’t matter. There are so many prizes and important magazines out there, it’s not easy to impress anybody. Also, no one has the time (or inclination) to check whether the credentials listed are real. The time is better spent reading the submitted poems, so keep those bios short.
   
   
2. A large percentage of poems are proficient. Submittable has three possible responses for an editor or reader: thumbs up, thumbs down, or a flat hand tilting from one side to the other. Many submissions fall into flat hand because (a) at least one poem is interesting, (b) the poems are relatively well made, or (c) the editor or reader suspects a first reading may have been too severe and plans to return to the poem or ask someone else’s opinion. Acceptances require more than proficiency. (Confession: I had way too many flat-hand undecideds. If I do this again, I’ll be much more binary.)
   
   
3. The usual remarks about it being a good idea to have read the magazine are absolutely true. The magazine where I was a guest editor is very appreciative of voice. Any reader of the magazine will see that the poets it publishes all have distinctive voices. While the elements that go into these voices are different, there are common features. For example, they all have control of their diction. They can use conversational language to address important themes. This is the kind of thing that’s useful for a poet submitting work to realize, but you can’t realize this without reading the magazine. (Another confession: I am uncomfortable with journals that instruct writers to read the magazine before submitting but don’t provide free online samples of the writing they like. My friend’s magazine is free to read online.)
   
   
4. Don’t underestimate the importance of narrative. Nothing engages a reader’s attention like a story. Even if the poem is very much a lyric, you need something to wake up the weary editor, and a modicum of story will do that. Otherwise, the reader is left in the realm of untethered emotion or language, what used to be called “pure poetry.” Today, that’s not a very exciting place to be.
   
   
5. Many of the best poems are conflicted. The problem with political/message poetry is that it is predictable, and unless it is very personal, it will often be a fast thumbs down. It’s no help that you and the editor may be in total agreement about the state of society and what to do about it. Yeats pretty much nailed this when he wrote: “Out of the quarrel with others we make rhetoric; out of the quarrel with ourselves we make poetry.”^[1]
   
   
6. Concrete nouns, please! While great poetry can be written full of abstractions, it is rare these days. A poem should convince a reader of its reality. Concrete nouns are the fastest and easiest way to do that.
   
   
7. More poets than I’d expect seem to be going along well in a poem and then ruin it by yoking a concrete image to an abstraction with a preposition. Pound used the example—I think from Swinburne—of “dim lands of peace” and declared, “the natural object is always the adequate symbol.”^[2] In other words, if “dim lands” isn’t peaceful enough on its own, adding “of peace” to it isn’t going to help. Don’t they teach this stuff in workshops anymore?
   
   
8. Speaking of workshops, there are a lot of poems that have had whatever situated them surgically removed so that readers have no idea what caused the poet to sit down to write it. Is this a workshop thing? It’s not clear, but someone somewhere may be teaching writers to cut away at poems to make them mysterious. This may register with certain readers, but to others, it’s just a gimmick.
   
   
9. Ambiguity for ambiguity’s sake is not a great aesthetic principle. We’ve all read Stevens’s lines about how “The poem must resist the intelligence / Almost successfully.”^[3] First, that’s a big “almost.” Second, he was Wallace Stevens; the rest of us aren’t. Third, if you don’t want to be understood, why publish?
   
   
10. The best moment for an editor is when a poem surprises. The poem is by nobody you ever have heard of, and you have no expectations. Then, bang! That poetry bomb goes off in your face. It’s what poets want to happen and what editors want to happen. But, that little explosion requires poets to write not just for themselves but to be read by other people, which means you need to have a sense of what you want your reader to experience and a sense of how your work will actually be perceived by others. This is not to say you can please everybody, but if you’re not capable of some objectivity about your work, acceptances will be less frequent.
    
    

If you’re ever offered the chance to guest edit a magazine, I suggest you jump at it. It will change how you view the submission process—at least, it did for me. There’s nothing we can do to guarantee that editors will want to publish our poems, but we can write poems that want to be read and that make it reasonably easy for others to read them.

—First published in George Franklin’s blog (27 August 2024); appears here with author’s permission.

Publisher’s Notes:

Links were retrieved on 28 August 2024.

1. William Butler Yeats, paraphrased from Part V of “Anima Hominis” in his book Per Amica Silentia Lunae (The MacMillan Company, 1918), page 29.

2. Ezra Pound, in “A Few Don’ts by an Imagiste” in Poetry: A Magazine of Verse (March 1913); republished by Poetry Foundation (30 October 2005).

3. Wallace Stevens, in “Man Carrying Thing” in The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens (Alfred A. Knopf, 1954); poem is available online at Poets.org (Academy of American Poets).

George Franklin

is the author of the poetry chapbook What the Angel Saw, What the Saint Refused published in 2024 by Sheila-Na-Gig Editions. That press also released three of his full-length poetry collections: Remote Cities (2023), Noise of the World (2020), and Traveling for No Good Reason (2018). In 2020, Blue Cedar Press released his chapbook Travels of the Angel of Sorrow.

In addition, Franklin is the author of a dual-language collection, Among the Ruins (Entre las ruinasz), translated by Colombian poet Ximena Gómez and published by Katakana Editores in 2020. That press also released, in 2019, Gómez’s book Último día (Last Day), which Franklin co-translated; and in 2023, a book they co-authored, Conversaciones sobre agua (Conversations About Water).

Franklin’s poems appear in Another Chicago Magazine, Cultural Daily, The Decadent Review, The Lake, MacQueen’s Quinterly, New York Quarterly, Rattle, and Solstice. In 2023, he was the first-prize winner of the W. B. Yeats Poetry Prize. He practices law in Miami and teaches writing workshops in Florida prisons.

Author’s website: https://gsfranklin.com/