Recently, a local litizine which operates online released its latest e-issue.
I submitted poems to it. My work wasn't chosen.
Normally, I don't waste space on this blog complaining about rejection re submitting poetry to publications/other poets (with the recent exception of revisiting my years-ago treatment by Name Omitted). Rejection is a fact of the writing life.
But I'll run through another red light and make an exception here.
Years back, when the editor was building her litizine, I was able to submit work and be accepted. And I was able to offer a chapbook of mine for review--and the review appeared.
On top of the above, the editor once asked me to guest-edit one of the issues. I took the assignment quite seriously, read the poems and selected my choices. And I did get a nice thank-you letter.
Now, I'm finding that the litizine won't accept my poetry or make room for reviewing a recent chapbook I offered to submit
Maybe there's too many submissions now (not exactly the case during the litizine's early phase). Maybe the poems I submitted were judged as lacking in quality and standards.
And, maybe, just maybe, I'm not Prestigious enough and the editor (plus her assistant) want to chase Literary Prestige like greyhounds after a mechanical rabbit at the dog track. The chasing of Literary Prestige happens a lot in Los Angeles and, as I've noticed in the past, can lead to poets contorting themselves into pretzels or reinventing themselves to create distance from too-populist coffeehouse pasts.
Click this link and judge for yourself as to the quality of the litizine's standards: http://www.poeticdiversity.org/
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