There Are Days When Calling It a Slush Pile is Too Kind
Published December 27th, 2008 | 
It’s Saturday morning and normally you wouldn’t be caught dead reading submissions on a weekend. But, you’ve got a lot of balls in the air and you can’t afford to drop any, so in addition to maybe pounding out a blog post or two and persisting with working on a new issue of one of your ezines, you decide (against you’re better judgement) to spend an hour early this A.M. trudging through the slop. Okay, there is one decent poem that you think you might want to squeeze into the very ezine issue you’re working on, but the rest are pretty goddamn awful, and worse still — almost none of these wannabes has followed you’re submission guidelines. One guy has sent his poems, written in mouse print, in red ink on paper so thin it’s almost like that tissue paper they use to wrap gifts before stuffing them into a box. His cover letter (at least you think it’s a guy. His names is not written on his submission and you cannot read the chicken-scratch on the envelope. You think the name reads, "Chase" or "Carr" or something like that) is a one liner that says, "Here’s a few for you." Yeah, okay, Hoss. As if he’s doing you some major league favor by sending these crappy poems in this crappy, unreadable condition. As if you’re supposed to whip out a rubber stamp and just accept them just because he decided to send them. Christ! There’s not enough rubber stamps in the world to make his submission remotely acceptable. Dream 0n, Bucko!
But, you’ve mellowed somewhat in recent years. Sure, you’ll bitch about this submission on this blog — a guy’s got to vent, after all, but in the past, you’d really tee off on an individual like this. Back in the day, you would’ve really lost it! You’ve said things that have brought writers to the brink of suicide. But you’re a kinder, gentler version of yourself. You’ll send this dude as polite a rejection as you can possibly manage and leave it at that unless he decides to be a complete tool about it.
Still, you’d think these people would learn. They keep sending these poems out. They aren’t any good, but even if they were, if they’re sending out in an unreadable format on material that isn’t much more substantial than toilet tissue, how can they expect an editor to associate their writing with anything other than shit? You’ve been doing this for a long time and it never ceases to amaze you how brain-dead some of these fuckers are.
