Sometimes when I’m reading poetry submissions for @WaxwingMag, I get to the end of a batch and find a weird one that makes me want to go back and read all of them again. By weird, I mean being very different from the rest of the poems (1/6)

But sometimes they are weird, formally, stylistically, etc. Sometimes for the good and sometimes not so good. Good or bad, I like those weird poems for the way they stop me at the end of a submission and ask me to think about what I’ve just read. (2/6)

Sometimes it seems obvious that last poem was thrown in at the end to make it five poems, the max we take at one time in a sub. I don’t think this is a bad thing to do, especially if it makes me want to read what I’ve already read again. (3/6)

So often I see writers who are surprised that the poems they throw in at the end turn out to be the poems that editors want. But from my side, those poems end up being the ones that stand out from the rest, the ones that say, okay here comes something different. (4/6)

And sometimes that last poem offers me insight about how to read those earlier poems and I end up liking them more than I did on first read. Not always, but sometimes. (5/6)

I don’t know that this should be part of the ordering process for poems in a batch for submissions but when writers wonder why editors like the poems writers didn’t expect them to, I think this is part of it. It is at least when I’m reading them. (6/6)