What I’m Looking For When I Read Submissions

I was messaging someone earlier about The Aftershock Review. They’re doing a Sub Club at Manchester Poetry Library. I realised I was probably saying the thing more clearly there than I do when I try to make it sound official.

So here it is.

When we are reading submissions, we are not sitting there thinking: is this poem “good”? Obviously we want good poems. But we had around 1,500 poems to read last issue.

So a no is very often not about lack of quality. It’s about sheer quantity. It’s about the fact that an issue has to become one thing, and there are only so many poems that can fit inside it before it stops being a magazine and starts being a shed.

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There are good poems I reject. There are poems I admire and still don’t take. There are poems that might have been a yes if they arrived in a different month, or next to different work, or when the issue was asking a slightly different question.

Which is horrible. But true.

So please don’t take a no from Aftershock as some grand judgement on your talent, your future, your soul, your truth, your entire relationship with language, etc.

Sometimes it’s just: there were 1,500 poems.

And one editor, and two contributing editors, with ADHD and a cat at the vet.

What I’m really looking for is the poem that makes me open the document and go:

That’s the technical editorial term.

I don’t mean shock for the sake of shock.

I don’t mean “this terrible thing happened and therefore the poem is automatically powerful.”

I definitely don’t mean gore.

I don’t mean a poem that has learned how to sound like the sort of poem magazines say yes to. I mean: no other poet could have written this.

I want a poem which shows me in its language that no other poet could have found this exact angle. This exact detail. This exact bit of weirdness. This exact line break. This exact terrifying little joke. This exact Mars bar, which somehow symbolises so much other stuff!

I want poems that surprise me.

Sometimes the surprise is tiny. Sometimes it’s a strange object. Sometimes it’s a line that turns left when I thought we were going right. Sometimes it’s a dark poem that suddenly lets in light. Sometimes it’s a poem about the worst thing in the world that somehow remembers kindness exists.

But because life is like that. The worst days still have a stupid advert on the radio. Grief still has to answer the door. Trauma still has to find the Tesco Clubcard, or order a new Driving License when you’ve lost it (it turned up in a cupboard I never open).

Recovery is not one big noble cinematic sequence. Sometimes it’s cooking yourself a meal for the first time after weeks of takeaways.

Sometimes it’s not dying because there was a new flavour of Fanta and you wanted to try it.

Some go to thoughts:

But I don’t necessarily mean the most traumatic thing. I mean the poem you’re a bit embarrassed by because it feels too much like yours. The poem you think might be your strongest work but no magazine has wanted it before. The poem that keeps coming back with a no, but you still believe in it.

Often I accept poems that have been rejected loads of times elsewhere.

And Aftershock is, at its best, a place for poems that don’t quite know where else to stand.

Also, very practical point: the last poem in the submission is often the best one.

I don’t know why poets do this, but they do.

They send the safer ones first and then tuck the electric one at the bottom like it’s a shameful little animal. Move it to the front. Please.

Let me see the weirdest one immediately.

The Forward Prize longlisted poems from Issue One are very different poems, but what they have in common is that no one else could have written them. That’s what I love. They aren’t interchangeable. They don’t feel workshopped into a smooth little pebble. They have their own pressure, their own risk, their own strange authority.

I want the poem only you could have written.

Max

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