What Stands Against Obscurity

Owning a villa in Provence, Tuscany, or Greece is an oft-shared fantasy among many writers. To the poet remaindered in obscurity, however, this lottery-inspired dream pales in comparison to febrile visions of notable publications. I am such a poet, and was completely unprepared for the extraordinary news that twelve of my poems were accepted by a single literary magazine for an author feature to be published in June of 2025. There is an oddity involved in this publication announcement that is important to discuss, as it has raised some fundamental questions for me about the relationship of publishing to Art, and Art to culture.

There are two interrelated contexts in this conversation: the first is the overarching one of the uncertainty I feel as someone over 60 about the extent and quality of the future left to me (and that left to most Americans given the predominant failure of our social and political institutions to interrupt the spread of corruption and fascism).

The second context is the historical place the literary magazine has occupied as a cultural force with the capacity to continually alter the landscape of what is acknowledged in a particular culture as inventive and lasting poetry (and my fundamental assumption is that an inventive and lasting poetic tradition matters).

The act of publication, especially by a respected third party with a specialty in creative writing, continues to be—at least in American culture—the litmus test of talent and social impact, even in our current technology-obsessed historical moment. The massive shift in the 21st century from print to online publication (a substantial part of the latter self-publication)—no matter how thin the aesthetic qualities—has not changed the fact that to be published is to be legitimized as a writer. And the question of who is so legitimized and by whom or what continues to be the unavoidable political reality of the lives of writers not already enshrined in or sanctioned by the dominant factions in either patriarchal or Western literary cultures—and this is most writers.

I learned in mid-October of this year that Andrew Cox and Raphael Maurice, Co-Editors of the praiseworthy online literary magazine, ucity review, selected all twelve of the poems I submitted to the magazine for a forthcoming author feature. I am especially honored that so many of my poems were accepted for publication given ucity review’s mission statement: “Each issue highlights a noteworthy writer, whom the editors believe deserves more exposure” (ucityreview.com; emphasis in original).

It thus appears Mr. Cox and Mr. Maurice consider me a “noteworthy” writer, and there was something genuinely “noteworthy” in my twelve poems sufficient to warrant publication. I am profoundly honored by this assessment.

The oddity mentioned above, however, is that 9 of the 12 accepted poems were originally written between 24-30 years ago.

All but one of these 9 poems were substantively revised through a minimum of 15-30 drafts over years. Each of the 9 poems was submitted in its finished form several times per year for two decades or more. All were consistently rejected until the acceptance by ucity review.

The one poem out of the 9 that went through only two drafts before being finished was written in a workshop with the irreplaceable poet Jack Gilbert (the year his singular volume, The Great Fires, was published), who praised it as a “truly organic poem.”

Mr. Gilbert thought my poem had literary merit, yet it was later trashed by every one of my MFA instructors, and rejected by dozens of literary magazines over 30 years.

So I wondered—in processing the fact that eight months from now, the largest representative sample of my work since the publication of my chapbook in 1997 will be available to the public—whether Jack Gilbert, one of the acknowledged genuine greats of 20th century poetry in English, was simply wrong about the quality of my work, given the decades-long rejection of the particular poem he praised. More seriously, was I wrong to trust his assessment?

And was I wrong to have trusted positive assessments of other poems in the ucity review submission from other writers, editors, and magazines which I deeply respected?

Does the ucity review acceptance mean these 12 poems had literary merit all this time, but that merit was just unrecognized by everyone but Jack Gilbert, Mr. Cox, and Mr. Maurice?

What was it that the ucity review editors saw in these poems that no other teacher, editor, volunteer poetry reader, paid poetry reader, competition judge, grant application assessor, grad school director, or publisher to whom I submitted them previously could see?

Or, is it really the case that none of the poems has evidentiary literary merit, and it’s just the momentary aesthetic whim of Mr. Cox and Mr. Maurice that will allow my work to appear before the public?

There’s no simple answer coming from me to these questions. But certainly, this publication news is exponentially validating of my confidence that the 9 poems I mention here maintained at least something of the living breath of poetry, and that readers would be able to experience that. I feel similarly about the remaining 3 poems in the group that will be published in ucity review—composed between 2019-2023—despite the fact they were also rejected everywhere I submitted them for between 1-6 years.

It’s important to note that I am by no means unique among American poets for having spent my youth studying, reading, and writing poems, and my adulthood studying, reading, writing, editing, and teaching poetry. I was exceptionally fortunate—but again, likely not unique—to have had as a father a published writer, editor, critic, and English prof (though he died tragically when I was 8), and a librarian mother, and to have experienced an early facility with reading and language. I share with many other writers experiences in high school, college, and graduate school dominated by founding/working on literary magazines and pursuing creative writing. I went on, like so many other poets, to make engagement in the poetry and larger literary communities a priority, including: editing award-winning volumes by American and British poets; founding and participating in numerous poetry collectives; creating numerous reading series with the goal to provide a platform for unpublished and marginalized poets; and mentoring decades of emerging writers while they were my students and long afterward. In addition to Jack Gilbert, I was fortunate—like many other poets—to study with accomplished poet-critics like Henry Taylor, Emily Grosholz, Donald Revell, Mario Petrucci, Jane Duran, and Matthew Sweeney, among many others (in my case, this study was long before going back to grad school for the MFA). Immediately post-MFA, I was nurtured by several individual poetry sessions with the incomparable Stanley Kunitz, who I know was similarly generous with other serious poets. And I am of course unremarkable for having used the time outside of paid employment and eldercare duties almost exclusively for studying and practicing the specific craft strategies of poems, challenging myself to see more comprehensively, to connect, associate, experiment, dare, risk, observe, examine, interrogate, and feel deeply—and to find particular shapes of language for all of this.

But to be blunt, absolutely none of the above apparently earned me publication. If it had, I suspect the 9 poems under discussion would have been accepted sooner than 24-30 years after their composition by at least one of the hundreds of literary magazines, grant-giving organizations, fellowships, and academic programs to which I submitted them, and my full-length poetry manuscript would not have needed the past ten years of substantive revision, re-envisionment, and resubmission only to remain without a publisher.

This is not to say I think my poems are unequivocally better than those of the poets whose work has been published instead of mine over the past few decades. It is, however, to pose the question on behalf the hundreds of thousands of serious yet mostly unknown poets in our country—who have, as I do, decades of experience writing, revising, and re-envisioning poems, formal study, daily practice, scholarly research, continued professional growth activities, editing poetry, teaching poetry, and infrequently, publishing poetry—whether all this training, effort, and dedication are sufficient to earn or warrant publication, or more acutely, to overcome obscurity. And if all of this is not, then what is?

To bring home one contextual level of this question, it’s worth observing that the print-on-demand, ebook, audiobook, microbook, 3-steps-to-self-publishing, Kindle-ized literary culture of the present moment has done little to nothing to lift these thousands of serious yet marginalized poets out of obscurity and onto the bookshelves, computer screens, and award lists of the poetry-reading public. The vast preponderance of dedicated poets (with or without MFAs) in our country do not have full-length books for sale on Amazon or at your local Barnes & Noble, and are not reading soon at a bookstore, coffeehouse, basement cultural center, or charity event near you. While we do constant online and in-person networking, expend great effort to create and sustain literary communities, and embrace social media, our reach has apparently been limited to a relatively small self-selecting group of fellow writers similarly obscure and financially stressed, on whom the obscure poets are dependent for: buying what magazines and books in which we manage to get published; providing recommendations for grants and teaching positions we seek; attending our in-person or virtual readings; and providing legal resources when our work is plagiarized or used without our consent or payment, among other tasks. In other words, our reach to have our voices publicly recognized—unlike the reach of writers of fiction, political commentary, or entertainment articles—falls quite short of both the general reading public and larger social institutions. Despite our years of concentrated autodidacticism, undergraduate and graduate formal education, workshops, classes, seminars, conferences, residencies, and increasing hours per day spent in practice and experimentation in the craft skills of poetry, we are—in the main—still unknown, unread, and unseen unless, that is, we are published in a print or online literary magazine.

My individual experience shows it has, in fact, been only the slim width of an individual editor or competition judge (or co-editors), at an individual literary magazine or competition, at a particular coincidental moment in which my poems coalesced with his/her/their taste, that has provided the opportunity for my voice to be heard. Everything about getting published (which is to say, to have a public voice rather than just a private one) rode on that single moment, and my lifetime context of work in poems was both invisible and irrelevant in that moment.

This was most definitively demonstrated in late 2022, when the extraordinary, esteemed poet, Richie Hofmann, selected my poem, “Demarcation,” as Runner-Up in the Fifth Annual Sewanee Poetry Contest, ensuring that a poem consistently rejected for a decade would be published in The Sewanee Review.

And it is absolutely confirmed by the acceptance by Mr. Cox and Mr. Maurice of twelve poems that have formed the foundation of my aesthetic contribution to poetry, a contribution that could very well have remained private without the forthcoming ucity review publication.

As a poet just finding significant publication opportunities in her sixth decade of life, I have additional questions I’d like to pose to fellow poets, editors, critics, scholars, and teachers (and of the people who’ve followed my journey in poetry), on which I hope you’ll reflect:

Should publication in a literary magazine be granted simply on the basis of a person calling her/himself a poet? Should it be given by fiat from those living poets already in the poetry pantheon to those trying to enter it? And why does occupying a place in the roster of culturally-acknowledged poets still matter so much?

Should publication be earned, and by what? By generalized effort in the world of poetry? By certain characteristics of the poet her/himself? By membership in a group traditionally excluded from publication? By the evidence of what one writes, meaning, by the literary merit of the poems one composes? By some combination of these features?

And who gets to define and assesses such literary merit? How did she/he/they acquire that position?

Let us recall that even through the relatively bloodless revolutions of Postmodernism over Modernism (and later, Metamodernism over Postmodernism), writers, editors, and teachers of poetry felt a reassuring persistence in the features of poetry that convinced us what we were writing, reading, and teaching continued to be poems, and not something else. We were convinced that with serious and dedicated study, we could understand the laws of motion of poems and read them as writers intended they should be read, felt, and experienced. With even more serious and dedicated practice, some of us would even be able to write genuine poems and develop our craft to the point when we could consider ourselves actual poets.

I don’t share the Metamodernist assumption that poetry is anything written down in any way. Rather, I think poetry is a distinct genre of literature and writing that is identifiable as such by particular literary characteristics. I continue to assume that, generally speaking, the publication of poetry is based primarily on the effective use and functioning of certain expressly literary or formal qualities that inhere in the poem itself and that allow it to possess living energy as a true example of its genre, in combination with some degree of enacted emotional or wider-world-referent significance represented by the content and its dialectical relationship with the poem’s form, whether that is a received, fixed form or a nonce form. I also assume that writers of such poetry are cognizant of these literary or formal qualities, and work to deploy them in ways that create genuine sensory and somatic experiences for readers. These qualities should be recognizable to all those in positions to assess poetry for publication, awards, grants, and entrance into academic programs. This, I think, is an expansive enough perspective to allow for both maximum inventiveness, evolution, and change in poetry, and, appreciation of and fidelity to a craft tradition.

I further believe it is possible in our current anti-standards era to re-acknowledge the historical precedent of the consensus as to precisely what parameters of the arrangement of language are recognized as poems qua poems, and especially, as effective and lasting poems. It might be helpful to reaffirm the foundational assumption of our Art that poetry is not the same thing as prose, and vice versa, although the best examples of both genres share an inventive imaginativeness. Our attention should be redirected to the perspective that poetry is distinguished by particular technical strategies of compositional craft, and that his craft is rooted in the arts of lineation and imagery.

While there are vast differences in the styles of writing poems, poets of varying approaches can certainly assent to the dominance of key qualities that make poems distinct from prose: the primacy of the line over the sentence; the interplay of syntax and lineation and the differing qualities of the line in terms of annotation, parsing, and enjambment; the fundamental musicality of language; the centrality of the sound of language (metrical or rhythmic organization) as a level of meaning (facilitated both by lineation and the use of punctuation as a method to guide the reader’s breath); use of images, and the deployment of metaphor, simile, and other mechanisms of making imaginative associations; economy of language; and the shaping of language to enact and create a sensory experience in readers without needing to be loyal to the strict English syntax of declarative sentences.

The dominant site in our culture where this craft is consistently demonstrated is the literary magazine. By recent estimates, there are more than 1,500 extant print literary magazines in the U.S. (New Pages.com); more than 2, 825 online literary magazines (Duotrope Digest); and close to 500 poetry book publishers in USA (Publishers Archive). Despite the welcomed resurgence of poetry readings (in person and virtual) and the explosion in BFA and MFA programs, it is the literary magazine that remains the lifeblood of the sustained reproduction of the poetic tradition in the U.S.

The opportunity to publish poems in a literary magazine, and the conditions that allow literary magazines to continue to find and highlight unknown writers long-term is nothing less than the ability to increase the power of the imagination and how it shapes, influences, and makes more relevant to everyday living the human program of creating meaning.

Simultaneously, however, the majority of literary magazines are funded by the personal incomes of their editors or publishers. The positions of editor and reader are, with rare exception, voluntary positions, and thus, most magazines and journals cannot pay staff or contributors. Magazines and journals connected to academic institutions are at increased risk of abrupt defunding and closure. This is evidence of the increasing deterioration in the status and role of poets in American culture, ironically, at the very historical moment poetry is claimed to have an increasing appeal to the average person.

Without the literary magazine as the institution shaping the future of poetry by embracing and publicizing past and present unknown writers, especially those voices historically relegated to the margins of public consciousness (BIPOC, women, older, working-class, and disabled poets, as examples), not only is the American poetic tradition is at risk of irrelevance, but the people whose ways of being as poets contribute necessary wisdom, intelligence, creativity, and insight into daily life face increased marginalization and hardship.

This places the question of what it means that one older, obscure poet will finally have 30 years’ worth of dedication to the craft of poetry in front of the public in a more pressing—and I hope—relevant, historical context.

It’s obvious I think that meaning is vast, and applies to individuals and social groups far beyond my personal life, because it is symbolic of what is possible in the Art and craft of poetry, which I have always believed is ultimately a way of having a conversation with living. Each poet’s experimentations with the sound, rhythm, and shape of language—if they are truly based in the particular craft strategies of poems, no matter how far afield they may travel from traditional forms—represent an expansion of the human imagination, and thus, an expansion of just how variegated human perception and the creation of emotional relevance can be.

When poems offer participation in a sensory and somatic experience for readers, poems enact empathy. Empathy is a path to understanding our place—as individuals in relation to our own thinking and creating, and as a human collective navigating how to relate to the planet and all its creatures (without harm, I might add). Poetry is an enactment of the unity among the human mind, human emotion, and the historical, contextual world in which human experiences are shaped.

To ask of poetry that it continue to guide human beings in this unification is to require poetry to retain and strengthen its specific literary characteristics and qualities, and for us to demand that the most expansive panoply of voices in service to poetry be heard by the public. I would like readers as much as writers and editors of poetry to remember that this underlies the significance of being published in a literary magazine—especially to poets who realize there is very little in our present society that values permanence, and it is only the words we leave behind that can resist impermanence.   

If, in eight months, we in the United States have found our democracy sustained and the recent degradation of the rule of law begun to be reversed, I hope the imaginative visions of our poets will continue to sustain you. If, however, we have reached the end of the American experiment in democracy and find our daily lives wracked with the collapse of what remained of our liberty, equality, and justice, I fully expect poets will reclaim the social power of the imagination to offer us a vision of what individual and collective emotional meaning can still rescue of dashed hopes and struggles for freedom. And my most fervent wish is that literary magazines like ucity review, The Sewanee Review, and so many more who take creative risks by lifting poets out of obscurity and publishing them, will gain increased support from readers and writers alike.

It will be my honor and thrill to share so much of my work with you next summer.