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Those Vital Clichés
This was supposed to be a blog entry about how authors submit poetry to us covering clichéd topics that there’s just no way we’re going to print. But then I did the math, calculating the percentage of our submissions and published work that contain any of a dozen mainstays of poetic terminology, and found that precisely the opposite is true.
| submitted | published | |
|---|---|---|
| water | 19.9% | 24.8% |
| death | 14.1% | 15.2% |
| blood | 11.7% | 13.8% |
| stone | 11.1% | 16.0% |
| bone | 9.1% | 7.8% |
| poetry | 7.6% | 10.3% |
| heart | 7.5% | 6.7% |
| fish | 7.0% | 5.3% |
| birth | 5.5% | 7.4% |
| darkness | 3.9% | 17.0% |
| rust | 3.3% | 2.5% |
| cat | 2.3% | 2.8% |
As it turns out, our editor is all about those dreaded paeans to cats. The moral of the story is that talent transcends topic, I suppose; in the hands of a skilled poet, even stone/bone can be made a vital couplet again.
03/17 Update: Those who exist in the pointy little overlap in the Venn diagram of Lit Geek and Stats Geek may also enjoy the ten most common titles of submissions that we’ve received in the past year, the percentage of submissions that are totally inappropriate for us, our rate of international submissions, and the hazards of being way too efficient in dealing with submissions.
03/17 Update 2: To clarify the original post and to correct some of the blogs linking here: we’re not declaring that we publish “clichéd” poetry, only that words that would appear to be clichéd don’t preclude a poem that uses them from being good, or worthy of publication. As noted in the original post: “talent transcends topic.”