Any poetry magazine editor, whatever her or his native dialect of English, is likely to be British/American bilingual, so there’s little danger that your spellings (or mine when I submit to British journals) will be mistaken for lapses in literacy. Editors might revise our spelling to comply with some in-house style, but they won’t think there’s something wrong with us. (Well, not unless they get to know us personally.)
I try to make the appropriate changes in my overseas submissions – “courgette” for “zucchini”, “colour” for “color”, etc. But the editor at The Spectator has caught me out on occasion. For example, she has had to change my “cozy” to “cosy” and my “esophagus” to “oesophagus”. But those entries were both winners, so she clearly didn’t hold my foreign accent against me.
|