Rose, I agree with you, I think, but I wonder if there's not another point of view. If a poet has a distinctive or unusual voice, isn't it possible that we can miss that voice if we've only seen a single poem by that poet, but if we see more of the poet's work, we begin to "get" what the poet sounds like? I have certainly had my appreciation of individual poems expanded to a certain extent by later becoming familiar with more of a poet's work. If you only read one quirky poem by Emily Dickinson, for example, you might not immediately figure out what's going on, but that same poem may speak to you very clearly and beautifully once her voice has become familiar to you. I know it took me years of reading her before I was able to "discover" certain of her poems.

Maybe, too, this relates to my question about submitting thematically related poems, or poems that are not part of an actual sequence but are related to an extent. Two poems may "belong" together in the sense that they complete a bigger picture. E.g., a poem about Mother may go well with a poem by the same poet about Father. In a sense, every poem exists in a vaccum, but that doesn't mean that the reader approaches every reading experience without any sort of context or preparation.

From my tiny experience at choosing subs for the Shit Creek Review and WORM, my feeling about the group of poems issue is this:

For SCR I focussed just on the individual poem and its merits, irrespective of who the author was and what other poems they had sent. I stripped them all of their author names, mixed them up in a new order, gave them an identifying number, sent a text version of this stripped list to Nigel Holt, and put them aside for a while. At more or less the same time I was processing a similar list for WORM - again stripped of author ID.

Then I went back to my sripped SCR list and gave each poem a score 0 - 5 - 10 (= decline - maybe - definitely). Of course I could occasionally remember who sent what, but there were a lot of subs, over 200 poems, and I could rarely be sure; as well, I tried hard to not let that factor influence me. I tried to rank them totally on the merits of the poem. Nigel did the same, only with no idea at all of what belonged to whom, and he sent me his scores. From this it became clear which poems should be in, and the small group of maybes was discussed further between us - as poems, not as works of authors. I'm not saying this was foolproof, but it did make us focus on the poem alone rather than on other issues. It is a watered-down version of the WORM method (which has three editors), which I think has a lot going for it.

Maryann,

Thank you for starting this thread. You expressed an interest in hearing from present or former editors. When I was poetry editor of Edge City Review, I tried to consider every poem individually. I suppose the impact of a given poem can't help being affected by that of its siblings. But much more, it's affected by the cumulative mass of poems (both published poems and submissions) that an editor has read previously. If the poems immediately preceding were tedious, it just MAY be easier to find the next one refreshing, surprising---and vice versa---but in my time as poetry editor, first impressions never held sway because "possible" poems were always reread later; and I was amazed sometimes at how different they seemed the second time.

As for those few (yes, few) authors who revised poems after they were accepted, I didn't mind that, provided they acknowledged that having the revisions accepted was a privilege and not a right. The even fewer who presumed it was a right, impressed me as being insensitive to the labors of editing--especially when it's a labor of love. However, if I had taken a long time getting back to them, I took that into account.

FYI: I haven't been poetry editor of ECR for the past five years or so.

Claudia


[This message has been edited by Claudia Gary Annis (edited November 25, 2006).]