Dear Reader/Writer,

I have found that if I publish "guidelines" in the sense of what I am looking for, some poets try to write to those specifications, and others, upon receiving a rejection note, quarrel about my editorial judgment with regard to whether the rejected poems match my description of publishable poetry. So my guidelines are simply to send 1-3 poems for the magazine or a sample of 6-10 from a manuscript of a book or chapbook, with an s.a.s.e. No expressions of racism, sexism, and such. Poet's Market asks editors to include in their entries some advice, and my sentence is: "Emphasize imagination, passion, engagement, artistry." I do think that those elements are crucial to the creative process, and they probably are characteristics that attract me to poems.

I'll add this thought: One thing that has worried me, over the years, is the number of submitted poems that show little awareness of what has been done in the art since about 1850. As everyone knows, the most important single way to improve one's artistry is to read, read, read (while writing writing writing). Surely such reading must include what has been written in the current period, which, let's say for generalization, begins in the 1850s with Baudelaire and Whitman (not forgetting Poe's contribution), is given a great boost by Modernism, and continues, including the influence of Dickinson, through the second half of the 20th century, and into the recent experiments, innovations, and emphases. For me, as a reader, effective new poems, like new creations in all of the arts, are informed by what has recently been shown about what can be done in the art. Then we depend on the new poet, through the new poem, to show us something of what else can be done, now.*

I read every poem that is submitted (about 4000/year). Sometimes I seek the opinions of friends, to help make up my mind.

I rarely offer comments about poems that I return,** because I simply can't find enough time to both read every poem and offer comments. I wish I could. One of the pleasures of being the final arbiter for this magazine is that I get to publish whatever I enjoy presenting to readers. Always that means something that I think is worth reading, artistically; and sometimes that also means a poem that seems to be particularly timely or to represent an interesting dimension of the function of the art of poetry. At any rate, I want to publish it.

I know that not every reader will like every poem that I publish, but I hope that a high percentage of readers will be happy to have read a high percentage of the poems.

Sincerely yours,
Tom Koontz

*"Now" is always a necessary consideration, because the arts, to be effective, must be like fish swimming in the waters in which they were born, but to which they are not-quite-perfectly adapted, while the acquatic conditions keep changing. Turning to face up stream, each poem commits an act of resistance against the present currents of consciouslessness. (Really? Well, I became interested in the metaphor. There might be some truth in it.)

**On the basis of my own experience, as poet and as editor, I suspect that a "rejection" does not guarantee that a poem is not worthy of publication, nor does an acceptance guarantee that a majority of readers would have published that poem if they were editors. Some functional reasons for an editor's decision to return a poem are: individual taste, fatigue, some other cause of simply missing what that poem is doing. The use of an editorial committee sometimes guards against these problems; but I do think that there is a valuable place for the single-editor mag, such as Barnwood