Given typical editorial response times, how many years would it take for a poem to rack up over 40 rejections, if the author were actually complying with "no simultaneous submissions" policies?
Sam, we might need to define what "meritocracy" means. I assume it's in scare quotes because some people question the standards by which merit is being measured.
I keep thinking of this paragraph from Dave's essay:
Quote:
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But the climax of [comedian Hannah] Gadsby’s remarkable monologue exposes another problem of identity. Identity is not merely the possession of an individual saying, “I identify as….” Identity is also the way others see us. These others might be our family and friends, with whom we sometimes differ, or the institutions where we work and interact with others, but also truly malevolent people, like the man who beat the shit out of Gadsby simply because of the way he identified her. He hated gays. He thought beating the shit out of people he considered different was the way a man should behave. The violence and abuse so many have suffered for so long because of their identity—whether defined by race, gender, sexuality or something else—is what makes any discussion of identity in society, as well as in the arts, particularly fraught.
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My Chinese-American husband and I have two daughters. Their self-identifications are important, even though those self-identifications don't seem to do a damn thing to change how others perceive them. When they were each born, my daughters' race was identified in medical documents by two different nurses (two and a half years apart), who noted their parents' races the same way, but called the darker-skinned kid Chinese and the lighter-skinned kid White. The darker-skinned daughter now self-identifies as White, and the lighter-skinned one now self-identifies as Asian.
I have always self-identified as their birth mother, because, you know, I gave birth to them and all. And yet when they were little I was constantly asked by Whites if I was "the nanny," or what country I had adopted them from. I didn't perceive these questions as in any way aggressive--I assumed they were good-natured curiosity, and how else are people supposed to remedy their ignorance if they're not allowed to ask questions? Then again, I'm not very good at picking up on subtle signs of hostility, and am perhaps naive about my assumption that most people have good intentions. And I don't doubt that if my skin were darker I would feel more insulted by constant assumptions that I was the nanny for children that didn't look like me.
I use my married name for everything in real life, but have only published a poem under that name on two special occasions, because in general I don't want to misrepresent my ethnicity to people who can't see me. That feels wrong for several reasons. But when I stopped using my actual maiden name and picked something similar but different as a pseudonym, I didn't realize that so many people would mistakenly assume I was Jewish. Oops. Oh, well. It is actually my Pennsylvania Dutch great-great-grandfather's surname, before it got Americanized.