Questions for Editors and Poets

Interview by Susan Antolin

Introduction

The back and forth between poet and editor, when it goes well, can result in ushering the best work out to the world, leaving both sides with a sense of shared purpose and gratitude for their respective roles in the process. At other times, things do not go so well. One side or the other may feel slighted, their ego bruised, or their work unappreciated. My goal in putting together this presentation for HNA 2019 is to present various viewpoints on the poet-editor relationship collected from editors and poets through a survey of questions I have prepared for each. I am most interested in collecting anecdotes and insights that will shed light on different angles of the poet-editor relationship. My hope is that these shared stories will help the audience see new perspectives and will generate discussion. The ultimate goal, of course, is for us all to leave feeling that the wall between poet and editor has been made more transparent and that we feel a sense of shared community, as we are all ultimately interested in putting the best work of the haiku community out into the world.

Questions for Editors

What is the role of an editor?

The editor’s role can vary from publication to publication. In some haiku contexts, that can mean simply selecting and perhaps sequencing poems. For others, it also means typography, layout/design, and management and distribution of the printed publication. Anyone can select poems, but it’s a much more complicated task to create a book or journal with vision and direction.

Do you provide feedback on submitted work? If so, how is that generally received?

When I edited Woodnotes and Tundra, and other journals or anthologies, I would provide feedback if the feedback was requested or easy to provide. Generally, the volume of submissions prevented this, however. I once had the experience of providing the exact same feedback to two uninformed submissions of haiku that came to me in the same week. One person wrote back to say how grateful he was. The other person wrote to say how dare I offer any kind of correction and that he was offended. You can never tell how comments will be received, but the person whose ego was too big to realize how clueless he was will unfortunately never be open to learn like the other person.

How did you learn to edit? Did you learn on the job or did someone serve as a mentor? If so, who was your mentor and what did they teach you?

I have a Masters in English and have been a professional editor for technical publications for decades. Extending this to poetry (haiku and otherwise) was a natural process, but it also grew out of reading haiku widely. Again, anyone can select poems that they think are worthy, but over time, that person’s selections are bound to get better. In the early days of editing Woodnotes, I was one of two coeditors, and discussing poem selections with my coeditors was very useful [I particularly remember many animated discussions with vincent tripi]. It’s important to be able to articulate one’s opinions or responses to a poem. This goes for poems that you like as well as for poems that you think are problematic. In any case, discussing poems with a coeditor can always lead to learning points, even from someone much less experienced with haiku.

To what extent do you feel a responsibility to nurture new poets/editors?

It’s always worthwhile to nurture new poets, because without new poets, haiku could die off or wane even more than it does. And nurturing new editors is important, too. I sometimes wince at new publications, when a new haiku poet is infatuated with the genre and thinks too quickly that he or she can edit a haiku journal, leading to the sharing of mediocre work in some cases, or in creating a journal that flames out very quickly because the editor doesn’t fully understand what they’ve gotten themselves into.

What do you look for in work submitted?

Basic mastery of craft, for starters, including punctuation, spelling, grammar, logic, clarity, and so on [see “Habits of Haiku Scrutiny”]. And of course the usual targets for haiku, such as strong imagery, seasonal reference, juxtaposition (of image as well as grammar), and the effect that a good juxtaposition produces (usually an implied emotion, or something else that is deliberately left out of the poem, but that the reader can intuit). I also look for a careful crafting of words that prevents misreadings and has also moved the poem from a private experience to being a public sharing. This involves being aware of one’s audience, at least to some degree.

How do you feel about work that does not fit neatly within the boundaries of our current understanding of haiku?

Everything and anything can work as poetry, which is more important than whether it’s haiku or not. If the poet shows confidence and surefootedness in his or her “experiments,” then that’s great. But too often a beginner will think he or she is being creative when really he or she is unaware that the road they’re “discovering” was discovered long ago. Too many haiku poets, it seems to me, confuse innovation and ignorance. Beyond that, I’m also weary of innovation just for the sake of innovation. Newness isn’t the goal, at least for me. Rather, vibrancy of experience and implication are far more important. I disagree with Ezra Pound who said, “Make it new” (or rather, I disagree with how his statement is baldly and blindly applied to so-called innovation). Instead, I agree with Jane Hirshfield, who said “Make it yours.”

How important is it to include voices that have been underrepresented in the genre?

In editing haiku journals, I’ve tried to be encouraging to new voices, perhaps lowering the bar slightly for newcomers – and yet not lowering it too far. Perhaps a better way to put this is that the bar of quality remains high, but that it might be slightly higher for those who are experienced.

Has the globalization of haiku presented new challenges for you as an editor, and if so, in what way?

It’s great to see haiku spreading around the world, and for new subjects and poets to make the rounds. For example, “Harmattan wind” is a new season word I’ve learned from Ghana (I used to live there, but did not know of this term until African haiku began to blossom in the last few years). In running National Haiku Writing Month (NaHaiWriMo) on Facebook, I’m becoming increasingly aware of time zones, of seasonal differences (when it’s summer where I live, it’s winter down under), and of regional subjects. It’s all invigorating.

What do you wish poets or readers knew about the job of editing?

Sometimes good work can be rejected simply because the editor woke up on a different side of the bed that day—or read too quickly. This can also mean that a poem is sometimes accepted when it might not be all that strong. As a poet, I try not to take being rejected or accepted too personally or too seriously. The bottom line is to believe in a poem. I once got first place in the HSA’s Henderson contest with a poem that had been rejected by Modern Haiku and a couple of other journals. And yet I shouldn’t take winning that prize too seriously either. Some years ago I read that the haiku master Shugyo Takaha would sometimes review a thousand haiku every day for a publication. When I was editing Tundra, I received some 14,000 poems per year, most of which were longer poems, so a lot more work to read than haiku. That meant that I had to read, decide between, and respond to at least 38.3 poems every day of the year just to keep up. If you subtract a hundred days for weekends, that still meant I had to process 52.8 poems every day. Editors have to learn how to quickly recognize skill and clarity, and most readers are unaware of the great volume that many haiku editors have to deal with. I accepted about one out of every 200 poems for Tundra (far less than Frogpond or Modern Haiku accepts), which means I was returning good poems, yet they might not have been appropriate for various reasons, such as simply being too long.

Tell me about a time when the editing process went particularly well.

I especially enjoyed the process of editing the 2017 NaHaiWriMo anthology, Jumble Box. I selected a short list of poems written in response to each of the month of February’s 28 daily writing prompts (which I also provided). This was daily work, reviewing thousands of poems posted to the NaHaiWriMo page on Facebook, checking that each poem followed the prompt and was a strong haiku. The prompts also guided the selections in that it was interesting to present variation in how each prompt was interpreted (and I trusted that readers would take pleasure in this creativity in responding to the prompts in unexpected ways, in addition to expected ways). After assembling a long short list, I shared all the poem with Ron Moss, who selected one for each of the 28 days to make a haiga for that poem. In addition to his selections, I then winnowed down my selections to create meaningful and rewarding “chapters”—one for each of the 28 days of the month, each day with a theme of sorts created by the prompt for that day. It resulted in a book of hundreds of poems by exactly 100 poets, but grouped into readable “chunks.” One of my pet peeves with haiku anthologies is when they just present hundreds of haiku in a row with no thematic arrangement or development, or without groupings that make it easier and more satisfying for readers to apprehend the poems in batches. Many HSA membership anthologies have had this problem—just hundreds of poems all in a row. No wonder W. S. Merwin once said that “reading a lot of haiku is like being pecked to death by doves.”

Tell me about a time when the process went poorly.

I remember once having a coeditor who I would not have chosen or agreed to if it had been up to me. So maybe I was predisposed to resist that person from the start, so that was something I learned and would now try to get past and accept. But the process showed me that coediting requires respect of each other’s perspectives, but I also think it requires both editors to be able to articulate their reasons for liking or disliking a poem, or thinking it might be particularly strong or problematic. Whether one “likes” something or not is different from whether the poem is “good”—another lesson that I don’t think some poets realize about the editing process, and some editors select poems they “like” without realizing that the poem has flaws [or maybe they accept it fully knowing the flaws].

What have you learned or how have you grown as an editor?

To trust an intuitive response to poems, yet also to reread to see if a poem grows on me, or perhaps to see if an initial liking might fizzle out. Does the poem have staying power? This is especially important when judging haiku contests. Read and reread poems if you can. On the other hand, if you have huge swaths of poems to get through, and a limited number of selections you can make, you had better develop a keen sense of quality, the way an art historian can glance quickly at a sculpture and still know whether it’s a forgery or not. I also remember Elizabeth Searle Lamb saying in a Poet’s Market interview to “be your own editor”—that poets needed to take responsibility for editing their own work thoroughly before sending off selections to an editor. Don’t send ten variations of the same poem to an editor and ask the editor to choose which one they think is best. Have some backbone and decide for yourself first, and extend that idea of being your own editor to the careful crafting and revision of you own work too. Something else I specifically remember learning from a coeditor once was to give each poem a reality check—is the subject or experience correct or logical? I remember particularly liking a poem about a new moon rising in the sky until my Woodnotes coeditor, Ebba Story, pointed out that that was not physically possible, since new moons stayed lower on the horizon, and wouldn’t rise in the way the poem described. So, the poem was clearly manufactured rather than accurate. And here I would add that authenticity in haiku has nothing to do with whether something really happened to the poet, but everything to do with the effect of the poem on the reader. Does the reader believe the poem could have happened, regardless of whether it “actually” did or not. That’s the real point [and that there’s a difference between accuracy and authenticity]. I take this stance because I see haiku as poetry, not diary entry or therapy or meditation or awareness practice [see my “Haiku Stances” essay]. You make changes to facts in haiku for the sake of creating good poetry with literary value, the way Bashō changed the facts of what happened to him in the Oku no Hosomichi or in other poems. For example, there was apparently no pond at all when Bashō wrote his famous “old pond” haiku [and Buson’s wife was alive when he wrote about stepping on his “dead wife’s comb”].

Has your own creativity as a poet changed in any way due to your time spent as an editor?

I’ve found I’ve gotten increasingly better over the years at being able to articulate my comments about a poem, and I recommend that poets do this for themselves, if not in a group. Don’t just read poems in a haiku journals and perhaps mark off which ones you like or ones that you think are flawed. Go the extra step and articulate why you think that’s the case, even if just to yourself. [I don’t directly answer the question here, but I would say that editing has given me tools for assessing poems by others that have proven helpful to apply to my own work. Another practice I have is to fill up a notebook with haiku and senryu before considering the bulk of them for possible publication, which can take a year or more. This is an act of patience, but it also produces greater objectivity in assessing my own haiku, to see whether a given haiku still transfers energy a year or more later.]

Has social media and/or the proliferation of online publications changed the role of editors? If so, in what way?

Ultimately, I don’t think so, except that an editor might have to think about whether a poem is truly “unpublished” or not. Personally, I don’t consider poems posted to social media sites to be “published.” However, a few journals (haiku and otherwise) do consider anything posted online to be “published” because it was made public, regardless of whether the poem went through a selection or vetting process by someone other than the poet. One factor that has changed with the advent of the Internet and social media is that responsibilities have shifted. Decades ago, it used be that a reader could trust most editors to be arbiters of quality and taste in selecting what was published. Readers didn’t have to think too much about this. But now, with it possible for anyone to post anything online, the reader now has an increased responsibility to assess what he or she reads. So, in a way, everyone reading anything online has to take more responsibility for assessing the work at hand. The burden of judging online work is now deeply in the reader’s hands, especially when there is no editing and selecting process for that work [the work hasn’t yet been prescreened by a seasoned editor].

Questions for Poets

What is the role of an editor?

The role of the editor is to guide the poem from private vision to public vision.

Do you welcome feedback on submitted work? If so, how do you feel about the feedback you have received?

I welcome feedback from anyone but would always weigh it based on the nature of the feedback, perhaps also influenced by how much experience or respect the person has. I’ve received truly misinformed feedback from some editors yet have also received excellent feedback from some people who are very new to haiku. [In other words, we should always be on our toes!]

To what extent do you feel an editor has a responsibility to nurture new poets?

An editor can do what he or she wants to do, and can make up whatever rules they want, even to the point of arbitrarily accepting every fifth poem and rejecting the rest, regardless of quality. But a better editor balances his or her own experience with having a vision for his or her publication. A good editor will have a vision—a goal for a particular kind of haiku, for example. [I would also add that editors of a membership journal might want to be more nurturing to members who are new to haiku, but it’s also perfectly fine, say if the editor of Frogpond, the journal of the Haiku Society of America, chooses not to do this.]

How do you feel about work that does not fit neatly within the boundaries of our current understanding of haiku? Do you hope to see that sort of work included in journals?

Some measure of innovation is interesting, but I find a lot of it to be tedious and self-involved. [And I would hasten to ask, although I didn’t when I originally wrote these responses, what the “current understanding” even is. My perspective or the perspective of any of a dozen different editors isn’t the only rodeo in town.]

Do you think an editor should try to include voices that have been underrepresented in the genre?

Yes, but without lowering standards, if possible. [This raises the question of what “underrepresented” means. It’s not just people who are new to haiku, but also marginalized subjects or communities. I shouldn’t resist a poem just because its subject lies beyond my daily existence, but then I shouldn’t accept it just for novelty, either.]

What do you wish editors understood about the submission process from the poet’s point of view?

Editors should respect the effort that conscientious poets exert in making their submissions, but then poets should indeed exert effort to make suitable and respectful submissions that follow guidelines. I recall that William Higginson wrote in the first paragraph of The Haiku Handbook that the purpose of haiku is to share them. Publication is an act of sharing, and I think both poets and editors should be mindful of this step in the process, that the poet is being vulnerable not only in asking to have good work selected out of lesser work, but also vulnerable in writing about particular subjects instead of other ones. [In the realms of longer poetry, many journals are notorious for taking months or even years to respond to poems. Fortunately, this doesn’t happen with most haiku journals, with responses pinging one’s in-box usually in a month or two, if not a few weeks. This is one of the things I love about the haiku community—usually prompt responses to submissions!]

Tell me about a time when your interaction with an editor went particularly well.

Robert Spiess would sometimes offer the slightest correction to a poem that improved it dramatically, or at least gave me something to think about for other poems. On the other hand, he once suggested revising a senryu to give it a two-part juxtapositional structure (he was big on that), seemingly without realizing that senryu do not require that structure. After the original publication, which presented the poem with the edit that I agreed to too readily, I have since reverted to my original version, which I think reads more smoothly. [The following is the poem, as originally intended, though that it was first published with “his favourite deli—” as the first line.]

at his favourite deli

the bald man finds a hair

in his soup

Tell me about a time when your interaction with an editor went poorly.

I once had an editor say that my poems were good but that they would not represent me well, that they expected better quality (as if I had to outdo myself), and thus rejected my poems—even while lesser-quality poems by less experienced poets were accepted. I found this statement to be a bit insulting and unhelpful [or perhaps disingenuous—because I did think several of the poems were still excellent, although if I hadn’t thought so, I would have taken a harder look at the poems to find ways to improve them, or abandon them, which I have also done on numerous occasions].

Do you write with a particular editor in mind?

Multiple editors (journals, anthologies, special projects, etc.). [My answer seems superficial here, and not even accurate. I write with no editors in mind at all, but I do submit with particular editors and journals in mind. For example, I knew Robert Spiess loved canoe and kayak poems, so if I had one, I knew to send it to him, or I would send poems with uncommon words in them to another editor, because I senses that they had a soft spot for such poems.]

Do you submit primarily to online or print publications?

Both. Because it can be so easy to submit via email (whether the publication itself is in print or online), I think it has become easy to be cavalier in one’s submissions, but I think poets need to be exquisitely careful with their submissions regardless of how the poems are submitted [and where they are published, whether online or in print].

Thank you for taking the time to share your thoughts! If you plan to attend HNA, I hope to see you there!

—Susan