The Editor Issue
Pros, Cons & Questions of “Gatekeeping”
The poetry world gives editors power as gatekeepers — the ones who determine what work gets “in” and what work stays “out.”
The ‘editors-as-gatekeepers, artists-submit’ paradigm is the standard means of poetry curation today — keeping quality high, but at a steep cost. It’s a complicated topic, worth exploring and questioning.
Firstly, being an editor is an important, and almost always underpaid, job. Editors at today’s some-odd 3,500 poetry “markets” steer a journal’s artistic direction. They’re charged with keeping the quality of poems admitted into their issues both high and consistent with their chosen aesthetic.
Not only do editors have ultimate say on which pieces get in, they craft the narrative of featured work, assembling and juxtaposing pieces thematically (or not) to create a larger, meaningful structure that evolves as it unfolds for the reader. Editors have the opportunity to create something wholly new from the parts.
Editors do a lot of work, and much of it is grueling and thankless. But readers of poetry everywhere benefit from their long hours of labor and lost sleep, coffee-guzzling, hair-pulling. This, on top of other (often teaching) full-time jobs, appointments, families. (Thank you, editors!)
They’ve also earned their right to gate-keeping power over years of study and first-hand poetry immersion; very rarely is an editor NOT a writer him/herself. Their expertise in reading, writing, and evaluating poems is hard-won and should be recognized and rewarded accordingly. Perhaps editors’ refined judgement uniquely qualifies them to be the ones to bring great poems to our attention.
The other side of the editors-as-gatekeepers paradigm:
In today’s submission system, what gets chosen for publication is limited to what editors want. This severely narrows the pool of incredible poems we can see today.
The way that we publish poems privileges the publication over the artist and reader. The system is exclusive, political, homogenous — almost, by definition, unable to accommodate variety accurately or fairly. Like everything else, our poems must find footing in a hierarchy.
Evidence of this systemic problem manifests over and over — an abundance of work by white, straight, cis- male writers, and under-representation of minority voices — those by females, the LGBTQ community, persons of color…
(Though outcomes are slowly improving, with entire journals devoted specifically to featuring minority voices, the problem persists acutely, and across genres. See one writer’s response, below.)
Further, we’re at a point in poetry publishing — concerning contests and journals alike — where a big name in the slush pile will automatically skew the scales against emerging writers. Their work will simply not get the consideration (or air) that it deserves.
At the core, handing gate-keeping power to editors means that everyone agrees: the general reader should not (or cannot) be entrusted to make judgement decisions. There must be middlemen, to tell us something about a poem’s quality, worthiness, or value.
Limited publishing space and resources are what makes acceptances so meaningful, right? Everyone wants to be published, but everyone can’t.
But is the editors-as-gatekeepers paradigm the correct approach?
Should such limitations on space and resources constrain the total or variety of poetry talent that gets featured? Should this system of poetry publishing be what determines almost everything about the way we access quality contemporary poems today?
What if we could encourage great work and diverse talent without requiring passage through the gate-keeper bottleneck? After all, we’ve experienced the many pitfalls of the system’s bottleneck: time and money spent on submission, (often) crazy-long wait times, overwhelmed staff, extended deadlines…
What would democracy look like in the world of poetry? What would it look like to ‘open the bottleneck,’ so that readers, not editors, determine quality and aesthetic “fit” for one’s tastes? Would that immediately devalue poetry or the work that editors and journals do? Will terrible poems reign unchecked?
What if the bulk of editors’ work, instead of quality-control, revolved around crafting larger-scale forms out of individual poems?
These questions are just some meaty examples of food-for-thought on the editors-as-gatekeepers issue. I’d love to hear your opinion. Thank you!
