Poetry as Process and Product
— Steve Luttrell

Quick Note about this issue: This Editor’s Issue of The Café Review is different from our normal published reviews. We have asked 14 editors of poetry journals from across the United States two complex question: Why do some poems stand out from others? And what is he state of poetry in America today? Their answers will surprise you. We hope this issue will give poets a better sense of what editors look for in poems. You will get the inside scoop about why different journals accept different types of poems. For teachers, this issue will answer questions students have about the dos and don’ts in submitting poems as well as the perennial question of why poetry matter.

We live in a time fertile with new poetic voices and abundant with new outlets for poetry. Poet Robert Duncan once said, “I find it healthy that there are just lots of different kinds of poetry. Most of the time, having heard something once I won’t want to hear it twice.” As publishers of small–press poetry, we know exactly what he means. Given the vast variety, we must have criteria by which we make our selections and recognize that every editor brings to the process some sort of subjective bias. To deny this fact is to be untruthful.

I have always thought of the poets and artists included in The Café Review as an extended family of creative people, correspondents to the publication itself. With that in mind, when sending out work, a poet should select publications that print poems similar in tone and style to those he or she writes. My own bias favors a poetry of delight, of exuberance and play; a poetry that celebrates the sheer joy of language and its possibilities. The true pleasure of making a poem (even a dark one) should be conveyed in the energy of the poem. The experience of the poem is delight.

In addition to solid criteria, a publisher should have an agenda, a way to promote poetry that gives the publication a distinct personality and a unique approach. Poet Charles Olson characterized the poem as a “high–energy construct.” With that in mind, I tend to regard each issue of our publication as a gathering of such constructs and believe the combination of these energies defines the impact of the issue. I feel this principle gives The Café Review an organic base to its process and product.

Small–press poetry has its roots in offering an alternative to establishment publishing. Historically, editorial authority has been with the academy, which has presided over a limited body of work, slow to admit anything new or fresh, anything risky in subject or speech. Moving beyond small presses, inexpensive self–publishing and the Internet have markedly altered the landscape of contemporary poetry. They have created a new freedom to produce and distribute, bypassing the steps of submission and acceptance or rejection. Hence, editorial judgment has been democratized, passing from the elite establishment to the individual. In this atmosphere of freedom and dissemination of the new, it is important that a small–press publication know itself and be able to adhere to its determined criteria, carry out its particular mission and yet avoid pedantic, academy–like discrimination.

Poet Robert Creeley once counseled that the only reason to write poetry is because you have to. Perhaps we could say the same about publishing poetry. We select the poems and assemble each issue out of a love of poetry, grounded perhaps in a certain idea of what poetry is and why we need it. In order to develop our criteria and define our agenda on the practical level, we need to mine the deeper, organic level of poetry itself, though a slippery task it may be.

The trick, it seems, is to get a handle on the poetic process and its apparent place in our collective consciousness, its value as such, and its ability to mirror our time. I am most drawn to poems that contain the universal in the particular, such as Li–Young Lee’s poem Fire Enthroned, published in our Spring 2003 issue:

     The dove’s voice
    is a sodden bed of leaves.

     My mother’s voice
     an unheated room in autumn.

     Or is that my voice, after all,
     at the window? Or has my dead brother’s

     shirt collar begun to yellow?

     A dove’s peeled breast
     could barely feed a soul. The hunger it tolls

     is my own inheritance.
     Or have I dreamed too long

     under my mother’s pear trees?
     Have I traded my mother’s tablecloth

     for a shadow
     of the falling petals,

     my voice for the voice
     of the conquering dew,

     my portion of time
     for a seat somewhere between

     finished earth
     and the speaking fire
     alive inside each thing
     woven of dust and yearning?

     The dove’s tremors
     are lapsed echoes

     of that native voice, the fire enthroned.

     The dove’s flying away casts a shadow.
     Now a bridge, now a gate, now my hands

     parting the curtain to find the rest of the day.

In this poem, the poet seems to draw from his personal experience and create a much larger set of images for the narrative. The poem issues from his consciousness and is, literally, expressed. It takes its power from the very center of his being while referencing the universal.

In his book Day Book of a Virtual Poet, Creeley describes this dynamic by saying, “Poetry depends on the moving relations within itself. It is an art that lives in time, expressing and evoking the moving relation between the individual consciousness and the world.” In other words, a poem reflects back the poet’s mind, just as the tremors of Lee’s dove echo his voice and cast a shadow of their own.

The function of poetry, at least in part, should be to explore the possibilities of language, to be engaged with language in a special way, a way that pushes the limits. Language as a flow seems to surge at times and become relatively flat at others. Language is a system–less system. “We’re surrounded by language,” Duncan says. “We take what of it we can use.” A poet finds his or her voice continually. Voice is a very fluid thing. It is a dynamic function. As any art form requires experimentation, it is necessary to “try on” many voices in order to reach the one that most reflects one’s ground of consciousness.

For a person aspiring to write true poetry, it is crucial to read as much of the poetry of others as possible. One should search out the poetry of other times, other cultures. One should explore the seeming boundaries of speech and find the subtleties of feeling in forgotten forms. In this way, as an architect of language, a poet develops personal criteria and sets about following an authentic agenda.

What Makes a “Good” Poem?
— Andrei Guruianu

Quick Note about this issue: This Editor’s Issue of The Café Review is different from our normal published reviews. We have asked 14 editors of poetry journals from across the United States two complex question: Why do some poems stand out from others? And what is he state of poetry in America today? Their answers will surprise you. We hope this issue will give poets a better sense of what editors look for in poems. You will get the inside scoop about why different journals accept different types of poems. For teachers, this issue will answer questions students have about the dos and don’ts in submitting poems as well as the perennial question of why poetry matter.

When authors query The Broome Review before submitting their work, one of the most common questions I am asked is, “What kind of poems are you looking for?” It would be all too easy and trite to answer that I’m looking for the “good ones.” But, of course, that’s what all editors look for — the best possible work they can get their hands on.

Authors despair, of course, at such a generic answer because the qualities that make a poem “good” are extremely subjective. If I think a poem is good, another editor might think it needs quite a bit of work, and vice versa. To make matters even more complicated, tastes change. We grow, evolve, and adapt as readers/writers/editors.

The following guidelines are my attempt at applying some kind of general code of quality control over the poems that have a chance of making it into an issue of Broome. These, of course, come with the caveat that they are not 100 percent infallible, that there are always some exceptions, and that they can change over time.

First, a poem has to have a strong beginning. It has to grab you. It has to, as in a good introduction to an essay or a piece of fiction, pull you into the “story.” It has to make you want to continue reading. Take for example the first stanza of Stephen Dunn’s poem, The Gasoline Sportcoat, published in our No. 1 issue:

     At parties, women with skirts
          slit up to their thighs
     have been known to touch it,

These first three lines make a good beginning because they work on multiple levels — which is the mark, in my opinion, of any great piece of writing. First of all, they make a flawless and smooth connection with the title. The “it” in the third line clearly refers to the “sportcoat” in the title. On another level, they contain a concrete image that grounds the vague and abstract reference to “it.” The women with skirts/slit up to their thighs provides a solid visual element that automatically draws the reader into the picture or story. This same image carries with it the dual quality of being a double entendre.

The second quality I look for in a strong poem is consistency.

If it starts out “good,” then it must continue to do the job from beginning to end. Even one or two weak or misplaced/misused images in the middle of a poem can ruin the entire piece. This is often due to a careless mistake, or a “rush job” that can be fixed with a few strokes of the keyboard. However, in the literary–magazine business, editors seldom truly edit. On only a couple of occasions have I taken the time to ask a writer to revise, and both times the changes were minimal. If a poem needs major revisions such as a completely different beginning or ending, I will pass on that poem regardless of how good the rest of it is.

A third critical aspect of a poem for me is the ending, which has to be just as strong if not better than the beginning. I often encounter poems that read smoothly until the very end and then the last one or two lines will simply ruin the poem. “Bad” endings come in several forms, including proclamations; generalizations; outrageous statements where the author is trying to make a point; and flat–out dropped endings where the poem doesn’t really end and begs for a resolution of some sort. My best advice when it comes to endings — and this approach can likely be applied to other parts of the poem — is that understatement is often the more effective approach. It helps you avoid clichés. Let’s look at the ending to Dunn’s poem:

     it’s influencing the sweaters on the topmost
          shelf, it’s becoming
     its story, the story I’m now telling.

Notice the continuity in this last stanza with the first stanza. The ubiquitous “it” refers clearly to the “sportcoat” but by remaining understated and a bit vague, the “it” takes on a more universal quality that helps the reader step into the poem and associate with the subject matter. We all have an object, place, or person that gives us that extra boost of confidence to get through the day, to do things we normally would not be able to because we are shy, uncomfortable, afraid, etc. Yes, the poem is about Dunn’s sportcoat, but it is also about our sportcoat, our get–me–through–the–day talisman.

The Broome Review’s strict editorial vision is necessitated by the sheer volume of work received. Out of more than 3,000 poems considered for the last issue, the staff accepted less than 30 poems (the rest was prose). Having to make decisions on what poems are publishable and which aren’t is not an easy task. It involves much discussion and haggling between editors.

It is also important for writers to understand what is probably the hardest part of an editor’s job — having to reject “good” poems. Even after all of the best poems were selected and vetted down, some of them still did not make it into the final volume. The principle applied here is the same one that dictates what poems make it into a chapbook or full–length poetry collection. All of the components must work together effectively. An author sometimes has to make difficult decisions to cut a poem out of a collection, and similarly a magazine editor must at times reject “good” poems if they simply do not work in the overall scheme of the publication.

     The Gasoline Sportcoat
     — Stephen Dunn

                 Slow? He so fast he run through hell
                 in a gasoline sportcoat, and live to tell about it.
                                         — Cassius Clay on Sonny Liston

     At parties, women with skirts
          slit up to their thighs
     have been known to touch it,

     and men of all kinds turn suddenly alert
          in its presence,
     seemingly envious or wary.     

     I call it my gasoline sportcoat,
          my live–to–tell–about–it
     antidote to what’s shy in me.

     With it on, I’m able to challenge
          those who Jesus us
     beyond all sympathy, laugh at others

     who, in the glare of daily atrocities,
          say it’s hell
     having this ache, this head cold.      

     Without it, when I walk into a room
          it’s as if Anonymous
     has preceded me and stolen the spotlight,

     his amazing fame on everyone’s mind.
          A man like me needs help
     to get through a day and the long slide

     into evening. Which is why at home
          I push its hanger
     deep into the closet as if it might gather

     strength there, in darkness, be ready
          for a next time.
     It’s mingling now with my ties and shirts,

     it’s influencing the sweaters on the topmost
          shelf, it’s becoming
     its story, the story I’m now telling.

Quickening the Senses
— Lee Sharkey

Quick Note about this issue: This Editor’s Issue of The Café Review is different from our normal published reviews. We have asked 14 editors of poetry journals from across the United States two complex question: Why do some poems stand out from others? And what is he state of poetry in America today? Their answers will surprise you. We hope this issue will give poets a better sense of what editors look for in poems. You will get the inside scoop about why different journals accept different types of poems. For teachers, this issue will answer questions students have about the dos and don’ts in submitting poems as well as the perennial question of why poetry matter.

A poem that excites me will quicken my senses, insinuate itself inside my head and rearrange the furniture there. Within the first two or three lines, I know if this is likely to happen. Predictability of language, hackneyed approaches to overworked subjects, navel–gazing, sentimentality, sloppy line breaks, and anything else that indicates the author isn’t in control of her or his craft short–circuits the process of giving myself over to the poem.

That said, I’ve learned in my 22 years with the Beloit Poetry Journal that poems in a wide range of styles and genres can and do move me. Over its nearly 60–year history, Beloit has been known for the catholicity of its taste. In the early years, the journal published a chapbook paying tribute to William Carlos Williams and another with Langston Hughes’s translations of Gabriel García Lorca’s Gypsy Ballads. In 1958, it published a chapbook of the West Coast “Movement” poets (including Charles Bukowski, Gil Orlovitz, and Judson Crews) alongside the English “Underground” poets poets (including Donald Davie, Elizabeth Jennings, and Philip Larkin). Both groups were in open revolt against the strictures of Modernism, but the contrast in styles could not have been more pronounced. Today, too, we resist getting trapped in the comfy pocket of our preferences.

The diversity of aesthetics among the editorial board members certainly helps in this effort; we talk through poems — sometimes at length — to clarify their intention and argue our points of view in order to bring the group to consensus.

Of course, our responses to poems we’re considering can’t be reduced to a formula, but here are some of the questions we ask about poems we’re considering: Is the language fresh? Will the poem stand up under a second reading, and a third? Does it make music in the mouth (not any particular music, but a music that announces itself clearly)? Does it resonate beyond its immediate context? Does it pass the “so what” test?

One short lyric we published recently, William Wright’s Peach Trees, Suffused with Pesticides, illustrates the qualities I’ve been describing:

     Hummingbirds stop
     to bathe in the creases of leaves
     where each grass spider
     has left the husk of its body.
     The sky ravels in the throat

     when ends of limbs tremble,
     unlatch their petals
     to a distant sea of hands:

     the body
     cannot scrub it out, this lack
     of stain, emptiness gathering.

Contrast the quiet music of Wright’s poem (if painted, it would surely be a watercolor), the slow, additive procession from image to image that pauses at the end of each line, with Matthew Gavin Frank’s Little Mouse, which appears in our Winter 2008/2009 issue:

     Cobbled–together roustabout makes dilophosaurus
     dioramas with pegboard and stiletto shoeboxes.
     Hoping for an A–plus, pastes pennies for their eyes,
     Abraham Lincoln inward, green paint, this imagined
     stand–off with the walnut brains, your mother’s extra–
     long toes that once, before you, choked your father.
     Do this to avoid the holy horror of weightlifting,
     your father’s fourth eagle tattoo, the muscular
     world shoving peacocks beneath our armskin. Even
     the Romans would have slandered them in Latin,
     called their biceps little wriggling mice. But still
     you hear it, how boys belong on soccer fields.
     So many big decisions: to use the rubber cement,
     to go extinct. 

Frank’s poem pops and crackles in the mouth as it bulldozes from line to line, clustering consonants and compressing syntax. The delicious sounds made us willing to put in the effort it took to parse the poem, an antic family scene, sketched in the expressionist mode, in which gender constructions threaten the survival of the poem’s unnamed principal, and the species as well — the same issue, ultimately, that’s laid before us in Peach Trees. Little Mouse had us laughing ‘til we wept; Peach Trees stilled us so we could see and feel the desolation of a not so distantly, barren planet Earth. These are political poems — though clearly not in the didactic mode — and we’re hungry for poems that help define, through whatever strategy, the current political moment.

C. D. Wright asks in Cooling Time, “Can poetry survive? Is it mutable, profound, sentient, resplendent, intense, stalwart, brave, alluring, exploratory, piercing, skillful, percipient, risky, exacting, purposeful, nubile, mirth–provoking, affective, restive, trenchant, sybaritic, nuts enough? Can it still enkindle, prod, or enlarge us?” Much of contemporary poetry sets lower standards for itself. Largely as a result of the proliferation of creative writing programs, the population of poets (if not readers) is mushrooming, and inevitably, the majority of what is written will be unremarkable.

Most of what comes in over our transom is reasonably skilled — not much of the Hallmark verse that used to constitute half of our submissions — but has little to distinguish itself from dozens of other poems that we read in the course of our screening process. Too much of it dwells on the untransformed emotional life or consciousness of the writer, as if that were an end in and of itself. There’s a lot of verbal cleverness without consequence and narratives with language flat as the Plains. That said, a great deal of original, consequential poetry is being written at this historical moment by poets old and young who bring an exhilarating range of cultural backgrounds and concerns (political and aesthetic) to their work. My job as an editor is to ferret out those poems for our readers, poems that stand, to quote Muriel Rukeyser, “against the idea of the fallen world.”

The Final Frontier: Honoring The Condensery
— Keith Flynn

Quick Note about this issue: This Editor’s Issue of The Café Review is different from our normal published reviews. We have asked 14 editors of poetry journals from across the United States two complex question: Why do some poems stand out from others? And what is he state of poetry in America today? Their answers will surprise you. We hope this issue will give poets a better sense of what editors look for in poems. You will get the inside scoop about why different journals accept different types of poems. For teachers, this issue will answer questions students have about the dos and don’ts in submitting poems as well as the perennial question of why poetry matter.

Trying to teach someone how to write poetry is like assembling an instruction manual for a sunset. What the reader of poetry craves are surprise and astonishment, doors opening to true vistas for the first time, radioactive poetry; the right words in the right order, lending light, beautiful accidents. These accidents enter our writing because of our ability to listen and to be open to the possibilities of any influence, to be one of those people on whom nothing is lost and all will be possible. “I want to be with those who know secret things or else alone,” said Rainer Maria Rilke. The best poems stop us in our tracks, shut us up, make us read the poem again and again because it has opened another room in our brain that was hidden to us before. But how?

“All art,” said Pablo Picasso, “is the elimination of the unnecessary.” Condensation is the final frontier for the poet, after the pulses of the syllables, the break of the lines, the word choices, punctuation, and stanza order. Learning what to take away is one of the hardest things for a poet to practice. One poet whose lifelong commitment to concision yielded some of the most beautiful poems in American letters was Lorine Niedecker:

          How white the gulls

                                                   in grey weather
                                                          Soon April
                                                                      the little
                                                       yellows

Niedecker’s commitment to pare away all but the essence allows each poem its own identity and power, letting the color nudge up at the end like flowers in the underbrush. Niedecker’s boundaries are firm, but there is a bounty in her discipline.

     Remember my little granite pail?
     The handle of it was blue.     

     Think what’s got away in my life —
     Was enough to carry me thru.

Ezra Pound believed that each line of the poem was a component to be tested for its authority. He advocated a line–by–line examination: Move to the top of the poem and remove the first line. If the music or meaning of the poem is not altered, then that line has no place and must be deleted. Then the weight of the second line is judged, and line by line, the poem is trimmed, its essence distilled.

While a foggy or repetitive tone can become a caul over the head of the poem, the beats and arpeggios of breath inside the poem can rescue it from monotony. If we think of each word as a note, then the language becomes an enormous piano with the poet at the keyboard. A poem should be a long, angular, hungry momentum, a flow with no impediments. Over the course of several stanzas this momentum picks up more and more lines. Rhythm is the entire movement of the poem, the recurrence of stress and unstressed syllables as they relate to the pitch and texture of the sentences, one against the next. It is important to acknowledge inspiration’s worth here: We have to give our emotions free rein at the outset. Most writing impediments are either technical problems obstructing the poem’s flow or psychological problems blocking the writer from recognizing the true impulse — not the first impulse, mind you; first thought, best thought is a worthless conceit, and a lazy writer is like a desperate salesman; neither one can close the deal.

If a poem is dynamic, its rhythm headlong, then the turbines of this momentum are the verbs. As space yields to nouns, time and pace are controlled by the verbs with their various tenses and energy, and it is valuable to try and replace those verbs that lack heft or dynamism. Action verbs muscle up a sentence and help its propulsion. They create astonishment. We should examine every verb for a more powerful alternative. Another method to make the sentence livelier is to turn a noun into a verb.  Look at the surprise at the end of Stephen Roberts’ poem, Sex, when the noun “maple” becomes a verb:

     Each love creates
     its own final cause.
     Crimson, orange,

     pink and violet
     wisps arch behind
     the oak and pine

     draped mountain’s
     distant, unseen slope.
     The gray, creaky,

     board–warped dock
     projects from the reed
     rimmed shore into

     the spectral lake.
     Leaves sink surface
     to sediment while

     unending, wind
     driven waves maple
     out into darkness.

We see the waves curling down along the shoreline like branches and receding out against the darker surf. “Maple,” turned to a verb, brings a moment of quiet surprise that also provides the sentence’s motion. The poem turns in on itself and follows the motion of the waves. It takes a single verb, cleverly chosen, to set a poem on the tip of a pin. See how Niedecker makes the cold come alive in this untitled poem, animating it by her choice of a verb usually thought of as a noun:    

     Popcorn–can cover
     screwed to the wall
     over a hole
             so the cold
     can’t mouse in

The choice of “mouse” in the last line almost makes us see the cold as it sticks its nose into every crevice of the house. A mouse is insistent, and the cold is a pervasive foe. It’s a liberating choice, allowing the poem a final motion as the lines nestle and resonate inside the reader.

When we place our work in the hands of editors, no amount of background, biography, or back–slapping will help them decide to publish or reject a poem. There is only the poem in front of them and any decision an editor makes in those moments is arbitrary and dependent upon his or her mood, the weather, the themes of the issue, conscious and unconscious stylistic bias, their digestion, the time it took to read the mountain of poems, their child’s piano lesson, the lack of a title, the length of the title, the worth of the first line, the color of the paper stock, the unmitigated gall

to send a multi–page biography, it’s another damned sonnet, it’s the perfect damn sonnet, the lack of a shower, bravado, pitch, vocabulary, humility, sweep, vision, humor, shape, rhetoric, form, diction. We can only hope that the action of a good editor, however quixotic, is riveted with love and bears the quality of tenderness.