Last week I received an email from Poets & Writers with the title 950 Literary Magazines to Submit Your Work to Now. "950?" I asked Maggie, my cynical poet-friend. "Who reads all those journals?" She shrugged, "No one. And who cares?"
I've been thinking about that ever since, asking myself, "Do I care?" Isn't publishing a way of being read, of feeling heard? "Why do you want to be heard?" Maggie asked. She reminded me of a reading we participated in at a bar in Ohio with two accomplished poets and a young man who had just published his first chapbook. We readers were 50% of the audience. When the chapbook-author read, he climbed onto the table and shouted at the top of his lungs. In between poems, be belted out random lyrics from a Kenny Rogers song. He explained later that he just wanted to be heard, that Kenny was his muse. "Who doesn't love Kenny?" he asked.
But I digress . . .
Back to the question, Who reads all those journals? I assume David Lehman and his guest editors have to plow through a lot of them as they edit the annual Best American Poetry. (Thank you, David, and all your guests!) I regularly read about 10 of the 950, which sounds like a pitifully small number, but Maggie assures me it's huge. I just finished the Poet Laureate edition of Green Mountains Review, which I loved, in part because I am curious about the poets laureate, those poetry ambassadors from different states. And I am grateful to them for promoting our cause, especially Maryland's poet laureate and Buddhist Badass, Grace Cavalieri, who also hosts the Library of Congress program, The Poet and the Poem. In this issue of Green Mountain Review, featuring 10 poets laureate, I particularly enjoyed the poet of Nebraska, Matt Mason's poem, "On Kansas 156," in which he alluded to Kenny Rogers. (And really, who doesn't love Kenny?)
On Kansas 156
All the radio has to say
is eighties rock
and Kenny Rogers.
You get behind
a horse trailer
and stay there
because you can't see
around it and,
oh man,
the radio seek stops
on "Right down the Line,"
Gerry Rafferty making love sound uncrappy
whether you're ten
with a fresh copy of City To City in your hands
or forty-five with your two daughters
bored in the backseat;
you feel helpless
as the station starts to slip
into static, last lines
of the song in and out,
oil pumps and grain towers,
cassettes you forgot
how they broke
after too many plays,
unspooling
deep
inside
your bones.