Frogpond 32.2 • Summer 2009 (pdf) - Haiku Society of America

Revelations: UneditedPoets and Editors: Some Thoughts about Bothby Marian Olson, New Mexico“It takes two to speak the truth—one to speak, and another to hear”—ThoreauEarly on when I first began submitting work to editors, I consideredthem formidable and alien. They either honored mywork with acceptances or they dishonored it with rejections.Poems I thought were good, they rejected. Poems I wasn’tsure of, they took. Their responses were unpredictable. I receivedtheir opinions personally and sometimes with puzzlement,but always with the idea that they were the unassailablearbiters of good, great, and bad poetry. My poetry failed orpassed according to some mysterious absolute that they wereprivy to, and I wasn’t.Time and experience changed my perspective. For a while Ico-edited The Writer’s Block, the poetry journal of AntelopeValley College. I learned on the job about the work involved,as well as the arbitrary and subjective choices an editor makes.It was not an easy task to wade through piles of poems andchoose which ones would make the cut for the upcoming issueand which ones wouldn’t. It wasn’t easy to assuage damagedegos or temper the occasional self-importance of some whosepoems were accepted. Working with poets and their poemswas only a part of our responsibilities. We also had the taskof layout and design while we labored to meet deadlines—all this in addition to our professional and personal lives.Thus, I learned that the job of editor has the heart of a tyrant,ignoring personal needs for relaxation—space to play, ruminate,or write. It has no tolerance for sloth or error, demanding accuracywith detail. It offers no monetary reward for all the timeand effort involved. Its motto would seem to be serve me, slave.. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .38 Haiku Society of America