Y’all, there needs to be a serious discussion about the privilege inherent to being able to directly submit poems to the editor of a gigantic literary magazine that goes beyond Don Share’s statement. How many other poems made Poetry this way?

Submissions to magazines, the queue of which is often derisively referred to as the slush pile, are already a gatekeeping tool, but at least people know what they’re getting into when they submit. This backchannel makes me utterly fucking furious.

Matthew Dickman’s poem utterly dominated an issue, Poetry Magazine pays extremely well per line/page, and the only person in the whole organization, that big fucking building, who had editorial discretion was Don Share because it was emailed to him?

If I emailed a poem to Don Share, would it have gotten such consideration, or would it have wound up as quickly dismissed as all the other trans poets whose work was dismissed for being about transness?

I mean this seriously and unequivocally: every single poet who got a poem into the magazine this way needs to publicly say so and apologize for being complicit in this system.

How monumentally unfair.