Editorial
WELCOME TO ANON, a poetry magazine that uses anonymous submission procedures.
On a cold day in January 2003 I collected a thousand flyers for Anon from a printer’s shop in Edinburgh’s Cowgate. I was a couple of weeks away from getting stuck into publicising this new project, but as I lugged the package home, I couldn’t resist dropping off some flyers in a few venues. The next day, the first Anon submission arrived. When Anon’s administrator opened the envelope, he pulled out not just three poems but a cheque for the first three issues. Since then, subscriptions and advance sales of single issues have come in steadily, challenging the view that everyone wants to be in poetry magazines but that no one wants to buy them. The concept behind Anon seems to appeal to many people.
Submissions have poured in, and I’m pleased that Anon has captured the imagination of overseas poets, particularly in the US. I would like Anon to become an international publication for poetry in English. Anon’s stance is to treat the poem as a freestanding artefact to be considered without reference to the poet’s reputation or previous work. Only when the magazine’s final selection has been made do the editor and the external readers find out who wrote the accepted poems. Furthermore, rejected poets remain anonymous; the editorial team does not find out their identities (distinguished or otherwise). This means that well-known poets can submit to Anon without fear of embarrassment. And as the editor, I can conduct the business of running the magazine without the burden of making friends and enemies.
NAMES
This is not to claim that a poet’s standing and other work are irrelevant in the enjoyment of poetry; of course they can be of great value and interest. But in my opinion, a poem, whether by an unknown or by a ‘great’, ought to earn its publication in a magazine on its own terms. It is my contention that some outlets for poetry are based, whether consciously or unconsciously, on the pull of the ‘name’; and that this sometimes leads to poems by well-known poets being published at the expense of better poems by unknown poets.
‘Names’ enhance credibility, making magazines more attractive to buyers and to potential contributors. Anon is not claiming that such a method is ineffective or disreputable. The many excellent poets who have achieved recognition through the existing system testify to this. However, alongside these magazines there is a place for a magazine that refuses to compete on those terms. There should be no place for deference in the critical process. An attitude of ‘This poem must be of interest, because the poet is distinguished’, does a disservice to the poem and to the poet. I feel some poetry magazines fall into that trap. A better viewpoint is, ‘This is a distinguished poet, but is this poem of interest?’ Many magazines operate from such a perspective, honourably and well. But perhaps a viewpoint of ‘Is this poem of interest?’, with no reference to the poet’s reputation at all, represents a worthwhile innovation.
PUBLICATION HISTORY
In the world of poetry magazines, it is standard practice for poets to send in their publication history with their submissions, and other factors are becoming influential too: MAS in creative writing, residencies, prizes, testimonials from the great and the good. Well-known poets apply an influential authority merely by submitting. In general, all these factors can be indicative of a poet’s talent; but they are not necessarily indicative of it. And they are not as indicative of a poem’s quality as the poem itself! Several editors have claimed to me that they’re not influenced by such information; but if that is so, then why do they continue to receive it? Isn’t it mistaken to assume that one can handle that information objectively? Of course, when assessing a batch of poems it’s often easy to identify the very best poems, and it’s usually very easy indeed to identify the large number of bad poems; therefore information about a poet’s identity, history and standing will probably have little or no effect at the upper and lower ranges of poem quality. But when making borderline decisions – choosing one good poem over another good poem, which is 90 per cent of the assessment process – extraneous information can be very influential; and this is leaving to one side the hardly outrageous notion that at least a few magazines are interested in their sales and their place in the pecking order, and so sometimes take pragmatic decisions.
ANONYMITY AND OBJECTIVITY
Anonymous procedures are becoming prevalent in many fields, providing a useful check to unnecessary subjectivity. In many universities, finals papers are now submitted to markers anonymously. This has come about because research highlights all kinds of ways in which non-anonymous procedures are inaccurate. One telling example is that a paper attributed to a known ‘strong’ student is often awarded higher marks than exactly the same paper when attributed to a known ‘weak’ student. Such errors occur even when the markers are educated in the processes of institutional bias and are consciously opposed to it. In short, we cannot counter the subjectivity of our own perceptions merely by being aware of it. If one is to claim objectivity, then a starting point is that the infrastructure itself has to be objective.
If Anon is claiming to employ a higher level of objectivity than occurs in many existing magazines, then an obvious criticism is that the editor’s own aesthetic preferences and leanings remain subjective. This is true. But it is a criticism that can be levelled at all literary magazines. There is finally no objective way of deciding what makes a good poem. And yet it is an editor’s job is to make such decisions. This editor feels that to remove any unnecessarily subjective variables from the process is a sensible action. In addition, in an attempt to counter any unreasonable editorial bias that I as the editor of Anon might harbour, the magazine has external readers. Each of these readers looks at every poem submitted and gives a recommendation to me of reject, shortlist, or accept. In this way I hope to temper my own preferences and leanings a little (but not too much!) by receiving opinions different to my own on poems that I might have underestimated or overestimated on first acquaintance. I can report that the external readers have acted as an invaluable editorial safety net in Anon One.
CONCLUSION
Anon has its downsides. The criticism of Anon that has been made most strongly to me is that an editor ought to be able to recognise the styles of many poets regardless of anonymous submission procedures. I have two responses to this. My first response is to suggest that there are not as many poets out there who are as distinctive as they think they are, even among the most successful, when ALL context is stripped away, and the poem is just one among many hundreds. However, I concede that there are some. My second response is that, if this criticism poses a serious credibility problem for Anon, then it is a criticism that applies to poetry competitions too. So anyone making this criticism of Anon has little choice but to conclude that anonymous poetry competitions, of which there are hundreds, some of them prestigious and influential, are fatally compromised by the same problem.
It would be easy to caricature the credo of an ‘anonymous’ magazine as some kind of aggrieved knee-jerk reaction against gross nepotism, as a stand against magazines knowingly publishing indifferent poems by famous poets out of self-interest. I hope this editorial has scotched that caricature before it can be aired. The issue is much more complicated and subtle than that, varying from magazine to magazine and even from submission to submission. There is no general gross corruption that I can see, though I have seen instances, and the great majority of editors work hard and scrupulously to choose the best poems submitted to them; my claim is merely that the extraneous information submitted along with poems is inevitably part of the criteria of assessment. The anonymous system itself is by no means perfect. But I would suggest that its very visible effect – no favours for the known, no concessions to the unknown, no conscious or unconscious weighting for the quirks of geography and socio-economics that Peter Finch mentions in his foreword – makes it less imperfect than most other systems. But it seems to me that both systems should exist together side by side. I would not, finally, criticise other magazines for being influenced by issues other than the quality of the poetry submitted to them; I merely want to provide an alternative. It is a credible argument (albeit one that I don’t agree with) that a poet’s standing IS a relevant factor in assessing a poet’s work, helping the editor in forming the best decisions, saving the editor from making important choices solely on the merits of his or her own judgement; why, in other words, is Anon re-inventing the wheel for every poem submitted, wantonly ignoring the poet’s hard-won publications history? And I can report that the responsibility of choosing one poem over another with no criteria but the words on the page is simultaneously exhilarating and terrifying. No, I would limit my criticism only to the claim that editors can receive and process information about identity and standing and yet remain uninfluenced by it. That is having your cake and eating it. One can argue about the degree of influence, and one can argue that such influence is a good thing or (as I feel) a bad thing. But to claim that there is no influence at all, which seems to be the starting point of most editors I’ve talked to so far, is surely wishful thinking.
Hopefully Anon is not so very radical in seeking ways to provide a level playing field for all poets, and in encouraging our interest in poetry to be focused on poems rather than on poets.
MIKE STOCKS, 2003