No Simultaneous Submissions Means You're A Dick (Or More Powerful Than The Death Star)

"To have great poets there must be great audiences too." ~Walt Whitman

After sending out poems rapid-fire last week, I came to learn something about what literary magazines think of themselves. The most arrogance consideration a publication seems to have is "no simultaneous submissions."

"Simultaneous submission" means that you're sending the same poem out to other magazines at the same time. You're sending out several poems to several magazines, you're saying. Most magazines say, "We consider simultaneous submissions, as long as we are aware they are simultaneous and are notified immediately if accepted elsewhere."

And most big magazines that include poetry (The New Yorker, The Atlantic, etc) won't take simultaneous submissions. That's fine. It makes total sense that big-time poetry magazines don't accept simultaneous submissions. They have the power to be choosers without ever even having to thinking about any remote form of begging.

I mean, they don't need anybody. The New Yorker is the most asexual magazine I've ever read. Mostly because it's the only magazine I can imagine reproducing by itself. How stoked would The New Yorker be if it could have sex with itself?

Shit, how many times have you read their cartoons and just thought, "Who loves these cartoons more than the staff?" Ugh. Fuck you, New Yorker.

*sigh*

God, I want to be in The New Yorker so badly. Just to make in there with all these professors and stuffy tweed monsters that would think I was an idiot otherwise.

Maybe that's what this whole blog really is. It's just one big diary about how I plan to sneak my way into The New Yorker.

But some of these smaller publications have similar rules to The New Yorker. Less than 1,000 in subscribers and they still say, "Run a poem by us, see if we like it and then if we say no, send it other places." That's ridiculous, considering most of these magazines don't respond for at least three months and don't pay. These smaller prints that believe in smaller poetry want smaller poets to only contact four magazines for the entire year.

Wow, the underground keeps you underground. Awesome. Jerks.

I suppose I mention this because I remember one online magazine having an entire paragraph, saying (paraphrased), "Of course we accept simultaneous submissions. It's ridiculous to think that writers should give small publications a first read. It limits the writer. We think that any editor forbidding simultaneous submissions was never a writer to begin with."

Good point, small magazine whose name I have forgotten. You were right on the money without having any.

So if Whitman's right, and we need a great audience to have great writers, why did the audience start bad policies to suffocate the writer? Goddamn, they're making up rules on the runway when the plane's trying to take off.

Dickbags.