I devoted a little more time to dgp manuscripts today and sent out some more responses and was thinking about the subjectivity of the editor's task. I always laugh at the editors (usually men, weirdly or not so weirdly) who talk about accepting "high quality" work and "the best" of the submission pile (what's sad is when they use this to justify their lack of diversity, their tendency to only publish well-known names or their friends because of course they're the"best" ) This is the same "best" historically leveled at me (again by men) when they criticize the press for only publishing women. Don't I want "the best" no matter their gender? I have to explain to them that mostly the press was started as a way to balance out the scales of publishing as much as I can--that, of course, I'll publish what I deem "best", but even that qualifier is totally subjective. And that's okay, but it's foolish to pretend it's anything else.
I sometimes think I have strange tastes in writing (probably because I have strange tastes in many things.) I've often heard from authors that their chap was this strange little creature that other presses weren't into. I also love it when poets purposely send their strange little beasties my way because they know I like that sort of thing.
I tend to error toward not sending away anything I wished I could publish, so of course, we publish a lot of titles in a given year between what I cull from submissions, what I solicit, and new books by returnng authors. Of course, I admit to shameless publishing people I know, who also are people's whose work interests me (obviously, usually why we are friends). I also want to make sure the year's haul it's a good selection of various backgrounds, cultural identiies, thematic concerns, ages, etc. (it was more difficult at first, but now we naturally get a lot of diversity in the inbox.) I have various other things I am looking for--new writers who have never published a chapbook--writers from Chicago or the midwest. Writers whose work I am familiar with from journals and such. I also like some style variation (traditional lyric, epistolaries, prose poems, vispo). I am most excited by the poets who just appear, having never seen hide nor hair of them, and somehow have written a book that is just perfect for dgp. I found a couple of these today just waiting there in the to-read pile.
In ways, it's exhilarating. Moreso than the slushiness of other mss. contests I've helped judge, moreso than the work we have always gotten for wicked alice (which is a lot of people who have obviously never read the journal, and sometimes apparently even our guidelines), dgp submissions, even the ones I end up rejecting, are not that far off the grid. Usually most are pretty sound, though somehow they do not appeal to me as much as another batch, and since I have to make a cut, I wind up throwing back some things that will no doubt eventually find homes elsewhere.
Things I'm looking for? Things I like? I like a tight focus or at least cohesiveness to a manuscript rather than a mish-mash. I like a certain authority of voice, a certain intentional-ness, even if you're going to go really far out there, a certain tenor to the mss. and I will willingly go along. I like a good story, as well,especially if it's delightfully fractured. I like darkness, strangeness, both thematically and stylistic. I like humor, and quirkiness, and a certain off-balanceness for me as a reader. I really do like fairy tales and myths and mermaids, so we probably publish too many of these (but bear with me) . I also like pop-culture things, ghost stories, texts in conversation with other texts. I love visual text mash-ups (obviously). I love poems in the forms of other things,--- lists, letters, abcedariums, indexes, instructions, dialogues.
I could go on an on, I suppose, but these are the things I am looking for everytime I open up the "under consideration" folder in my e-mail, and the sort of things that get an enthusiastic yes. Other things of course, have to be released back into the wilds, but I usually ask that writers try again, maybe with other projects that might be exactly what I'm looking for.
