Cathy--
I see your point (and don't actually mean to second-guess Alex's choices), but I don't think my sense or Anna's sense of what we should nominate for the Pushcart or whatever is sacrosanct. (I do think it's quite good, of course.) And I can even see why Alex may have interpreted Phil's remark the way he did.
But I believe, strongly, that rejections hurt a bit more than we let on, and that using them to publicly humiliate or discredit our fellows is not on. There are plenty of ways to win an argument without that move, in this case, Alex could argue that (say) Stephen Edgar gets a lot of recognition because he is a very good poet, for instance.
Quincy
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