A Job in Poetry

This new venture, which I'd like to advertise except for my ambivalent commitment to anonymity/security, is technically a job, but looks more like a volunteer position at the moment. It all started when I ran into my ex-girlfriend at a conference in Michigan. Within 30 minutes of us catching up the last 6 or 7 years, she had decided to ask me to be her poetry editor for her start-up literary journal. The impetus for the journal was her and her husband's dissatisfaction with the quality of Christian literature they had encountered, coupled with their own interests in writing essays and stories that made a serious engagement with the world and didn't sanitize their content.

The journal is largely possible because (a) the editor's husband (and the journal's financier) is a computer tech guy and (b) there's so much free or inexpensive stuff available in our digital age. Our first issue is due out in November and I pretty much expect most of my friends to buy it.

It turns out it is difficult to be a poetry editor. To begin with, there's the aura that surrounds poetry as a form. It's supposed to be all high and lofty and esoteric, which often means difficult to understand. As 'the poetry guy' on the team, I'm sort of expected to get everything that comes our way, but, frankly, I don't always. Sometimes I can find other reasons for rejecting it anyhow, but some stuff appears formally strong yet is difficult to decide on respecting meaning.

On the other hand, there are plenty of people who think they can write paragraphs with funny line breaks and it counts as poetry. As it turns out, this is not true. I don't know that I could give a definition, but poetry is certainly more than line breaks.

It is also more than copying out psalms. A lot of stuff we get is just regurgitated church sermons which may or may not have tasted fine the first time, but certainly turn ugly the second time around.

Then there are our editor meetings. These include myself, the editor-in-chief, and the assistant editor, all of whom have widely divergent tastes in poetry (plus the editor has her more pragmatic commercial concerns). We end up getting into these fights about whether something is wonderful or complete tripe, which may sound like a lot of fun but can really be frustrating--especially at the first such meeting, when I wasn't even sure what position our assistant editor was in, and only knew she kept arguing with my opinions as though she had some business there. The thing I try to keep in mind is that all of us will have our names on this thing, so we all have a stake and are taking it very seriously. The end result is an issue that represents a great diversity of talents, a handful or so of compromises, and perhaps one or two that require me to swallow my pride.

We just had an editors' weekend of workshopping and socializing. This at least provided me some extended periods of rubbing against my fellow editors (in the non-scandalous sense) that hopefully will lead to increasingly constructive meetings over the months and years. This is actually a rather exciting experience, though at times I'm not sure I believe it will go anywhere. But we are all very interested in not only succeeding but in creating a quality product. Whether it lasts one issue or seventy, I do believe in our mission and am deeply intrigued to see if and how God will use it.