The Poets' Den

Rubens - How many poets? Editors? Lions or lionesses?

Poems have been coming in and for some reason or other I have been less than expedient about getting them out. This is not good since the editors are waiting and the more I wait the more I tire them; the less efficient Little Emerson is. We want quick turn around don’t we? We do. Anonymity, however, carries a price.

Do people who have submitted, for example, know that their identity can easily be revealed to the editors via Word® submissions? Well it can and identities cannot be revealed. Editors cannot know who the submitting poet is. However, by clicking on “Properties” on any Word® file your identity may be revealed if it has been set as such in your computer. That is, if my name is Alberto and I have filed that name as my computer’s then that name will always appear as the author’s name in any Word® file I create. If I send that file to you, then you can click on “Properties” and voila.

So now I have to pass many Word® files sent to me to my computer—thus making them appear to be mine—before I send them to the editors. (All I have to do is go into “Properties” and erase the name of the author and that’s that.) That’s something that all submitting poets can do from now on to clear the traffic jam. (By the way no such submissions have gone to the editors yet, so don’t worry.) But it all has complicated my feeble technical skills; thus the delay we are experiencing, among others.

Also, people should know that some poems sent in the body of e-mails do not “format” correctly. One poet has identified that problem with one of her poems and identified it in time to submit it via Word® attachment. Of course, I can do nothing when you submit a poem in the body of an e-mail with special formatting. Just be aware that special spacing or cursives or whatever may not be picked up by all e-mail programs and your poem may suffer accordingly. In those instances it is best to submit via Word® attachment with the above caveat.

So now you know where the poetry is. And it ain’t here.