Time To Read

It is still raining in the Bay Area. It has been raining all week. I mean, what is this? This isn't Seattle. Anyway, I am forgoing Japanese Hot Springs today because I need to clear off my NER desk here at home. I have 61 submissions I need to read, a combination of submissions that passed our initial readers, submissions from previous contributors, and submissions from very established poets. Although one can always dream big, it is unlikely I will find more than maybe 2 or 3 poems in this stack to publish. Every so often, I am surprised with a highish number, but I kind of know from the past what the likelihood of finding poems to publish is in various stacks. I also need to drop off a stack of 160 submissions to one of my readers, David Roderick. Each submission to NER has 3-6 poems in it. So, this is a lot of poems. If David finds 5-10 poems for me to look at, I will be pleasantly surprised. Yes, it all sounds depressing. But the true joy is finding the work that knocks your socks off; I mean the ones where your socks are across the room and stuck to the wall because of the force with which they hit the wall!

When I started editing poems for NER in the Fall of 1995, we used to receive about 9,000 poems a year. I was the only reader for poems. Within a couple of years, we hit 15,000 poems. I had to bring on a reader. Now we receive a little over 35,000 poems a year. I now have three readers. All of my readers are phenomenal. All three are published poets. 2 of the 3 have books. They are David Roderick, Major Jackson, and Elizabeth Powell. We actually pay our readers. And they are very loyal to the magazine. There is little turnover. I am completely indebted to them. They help us to find the 65-80 poems a year we publish while sifting through the tens of thousands of poems we receive. What gets us excited, the amazing poem from a poet none of us have ever heard of before.

NER has quite a history for discovering and publishing poets very early in the careers (a history of discovery that long precedes my involvement there). We are many times the poets' first or second publication. I don't ever want that to change. In every issue of NER, you will find the established and the newcomer. That is the fun of this job. Without the discoveries, it would be a boring endeavor. Editors love to have bragging rights. We love to be able to say I helped discover Natasha Trethewey, Nick Flynn, Cate Marvin, etc. Okay, time to stop procrastinating. I have roughly 275 poems to read. I should be through, if I stay focused, in about 2 and a half hours. Where are my Brahms Piano Trios?