[Matt Q]

I recently sent off some poems to an American magazine and later realised that one poem had the word "mould" in, which, in US English, would be "mold". So then I wondered if maybe I should have translated it.

It also occured to me that I've sent quite a view submissions to American magazines, or webzines with American editors, and even had some accepted, and never once thought about Americanising my English. I've never had any comments back about my use of British English.

So, I wondered: do editors generally expect poets to be fluent in other varieties of English, and translate their poems appropriately before sending them out? Am I likely to be alienating American editors by sending them poems in British English?

It also seems to me that there are actually quite a number of differences between British and US English. In addition to the spelling differences (color/colour, mould/mold, theater/theatre etc.) there are punctuation differences: US and UK dashes are different (in length and spacing), comma style-rules aren't the same (Oxford comma), capitalisation after colons is different, as are expectations about hyphen usage, the use of single vs double quotation marks, whether to put the punctuation inside or outside quotation marks and so on. Then there are word meanings/usages "career" vs "careen", "crisps" vs chips", "chips vs fries", "will vs shall" and so on. And some grammar usages: verb forms ("smelled" vs "smelt"), prepositions ("at the weekend" vs "on the weekend") and things like e.g. different rules around when to use "which" or "then", which I just recently came across.

How likely is a poet to know all this and get it right? It seems a lot to expect. I doubt I'd know most of the above if I hadn't spent so long hanging out at online poetry workshops, and I'm sure my knowledge is far from complete. I guess one could just set their word processor to the desired flavour of English and let the spell-checker and grammar-checker do their thing. Still, I wonder if it's just better to send the poem in your own version of English, and let the editor (a "native speaker") correct/translate if they decide they want to.

Anyway, I'm interested to know what others do, and what they think, and also if anyone's ever had any feedback on this from editors.

Matt