 Jeff Shotts: 05.08.06-05.12.06Friday 05.12.06 It seems so often the case that the business surrounding poetry is what gets discussed—too often discussed above poetry itself. I realize, looking back at this week’s entries, I have almost entirely written about issues around the submission process and the role of poetry editors and publishers, with the thought that that was what I was asked to do. I hope it’s been useful in some way. But little of it has been about poetry. Perhaps that’s best left to the poets themselves— Read More >>Permalink | Comments (1) Thursday 05.11.06 A Case for Disappearance Discussions about poetry and editing like this one are dangerous: they always remind me that I can’t do this job well enough, I can’t read and culturally or aesthetically digest everything, I can’t disappear altogether as I think a good editor should, both from the texts I edit and from the list I shape. Read More >>Permalink | Comments (1) Wednesday 05.10.06 The word I hear most to describe contemporary poetry is “fractured.” I take this to mean that there is no one prevailing school, and that poets take full advantage of a wide sphere of influences and an array of poetic strategies, including fragmentation and disjunction. This has created a varied field of poets and also a varied field of poetry readers, and it’s meant that poetry publishers have needed to respond in order to best serve the art. Read More >>Permalink | Comments (2) Tuesday 05.09.06 I receive hate mail. Not frequently, but enough to register it and to register the disappointment—and sometimes the anger—poets feel in response to receiving a rejection letter. But receiving hate mail is not nearly as difficult, I find, as writing the rejection letter itself. Some writers seem to hold the notion that editors take pleasure in rejecting writers. The language of the process—submission—is, of course, problematic, as it conjures the image of writers bowing down, literally submitting, surrendering their works to the publishing gods. But almost every editor I’ve spoken to has said the least favorite part about the job is turning down writers. (Or perhaps the second least favorite thing, right after not having enough time to read published books outside of stacks of manuscripts.) Read More >>Permalink | Comments (4) Monday 05.08.06 Poetry is one of the ways the daily world is wonderfully made strange, and it’s perhaps all one can ask of art—to push us into wonder, outside or perhaps more deeply into ourselves. Many poets seem to write of the pleasures of familiarity, and write poems that are meant to ring in our ears as works that we feel vaguely assured by or that we’ve already heard before. I know there are readers who want this from poetry. But it’s not at all why I am moved to view paintings, or listen to music, or watch a film, or go to a play, or read a book of any genre. Or select a manuscript of poetry for publication. Read More >>Permalink | Comments (4) |
 Jeff Shotts is poetry editor at Graywolf Press, a nonprofit based in Saint Paul. Graywolf's poetry list is known for its aesthetic range and for featuring talented emerging poets alongside established poets. Some of the writers Shotts has worked with over the past nine years: Nick Flynn, Natasha Trethewey, Mark Doty, Carl Phillips, and Claudia Rankine. Shotts is also advisory poetry editor for Post Road, a bi-annual literary magazine. |
|||
|
POETRY TOOL Search for poems by poet, title, theme, and occasion. Also, articles, audio, and works for children. 
|
|
E-MAIL SIGN-UP News, updates, events, and media releases by e-mail.
|