[David Mason]

Like many others, I feel rather strange using the word "career" in relation to poetry. Frost's uniting of avocation with vocation says it better. In any case, Tim suggested I be available to discuss career issues and I thought I'd begin with one tiny suggestion here.

Editors will often say that they are swamped with poetry, but what they really need are book reviews. I think there are several good reasons why poets might write reviews:

1. To test their own ideas in progress about the art.
2. To contribute to the larger discussion of the art.
3. To advance the careers (or increase the visibility) of poets they admire and raise questions about poet they do not admire, who have perhaps been overpraised in the past.
4. To establish some sort of personal connection with editors who might later be willing to look at poems and associate them with a name rather than the anonymity of the slush pile.

The most virtuous editors are always combing the slush pile, of course, hoping to make a discovery. But even the best of them can't see or read everything that comes along, depending on the magazine, and must rely on readers who are also fallible. So some hint of name recognition achieved by reviewing books might just help.

How to get into the reviewing biz. For my own part, I just started small and kept challenging myself to try better magazines. I reviewed many books for a xeroxed newsletter for poets who lived in Upstate New York. This was edited by Judith Kitchen, a writer who has been a steady reviewer for the Georgia Review over the years. When friends told me about tiny magazines looking for reviews, I tried them. In the early days of Nebo, edited by Paul Lake, I contributed several reviews, as well as fiction and poetry. Probably nothing I'd cherish now, but Paul was kind enough to give me a start. I also reviewed for a little magazine called Abraxas in Minnesota. I wrote a couple of restaurant reviews and even wrote the "headnotes," as it were, for my father-in-law's restaurant menu (this in a now-defunct marriage, so I can't make many promises). Eventually I inquired with George Core at the Sewanee Review whether he would consider a review on spec of two poetry books (I might by then have had clippings from the Seattle Times and other papers to show him). I reviewed Lake and McDowell. That review was seen by Fred Morgan at Hudson, who wrote me a nice note. I wrote him back immediately saying I wanted to review for him. He later called, offering me the Fagles translation of the Iliad. I said I had good Modern Greek but no Ancient, and Fred said I could just compare the new translation to others of that book. So I did. I worked my butt off on that review, revising it nine times as a mini-essay, and it was accepted. For years I reviewed anything Hudson would send my way: fiction, poetry, criticism, etc., and never missed a deadline.

Anyway, all of that is a long-winded synopsis of how one set of relationships with editors was established, and I'd suggest to anyone else out there that you might try reviewing on spec for newsletters and very small magazines, reaching higher when you feel you've got the confidence to do so.

[This message has been edited by David Mason (edited August 30, 2004).]