Editorial

What is Anon and the ‘level playing field’ that it claims to provide? Well, ‘a nasty individualistic Thatcherite competition’, in the words of Kathleen Jamie in this issue; a project ‘essential in every way ’ according to Mario Petrucci. They are responding to the question of whether Anon has anything to offer the established writer, and are joined by Gerry Cambridge, whose forensic criticisms have led me to tinker with one or two aspects of Anon (for example, in this issue we print biographies of the Anon team), and Gregory Woods, who welcomes Anon and its opportunities and raises interesting parallels with the Practical Criticism and New Criticism movements. I would like to thank all of them for their insights, which make for compelling reading.

Kathleen Jamie’s piece is vigorous, entertaining, and implacably critical of anonymous submissions to the point of near contempt, with words such as ‘adolescent’ and ‘nonsense’ cropping up. One wonders if the Association for Scottish Literary Studies is adolescent in using anonymous submission procedures for New Writing Scotland, the annual showcase of the best new writing in this country; or if the many prestigious poetry competitions that have catapulted some of her peers from unestablished to established virtually overnight are nonsense. Given that I was scrupulous, in the editorial of Anon One, to make exact and limited claims about the effects of anonymous submission procedures, it is interesting to see her construct a polemical vision of Anon, mainly out of what other people have said about the magazine, and then imperiously demolish it.

Readers can agree or disagree with her views as they choose, but there are two points that ask to be scrutinised here. First, her use of the term ‘Thatcherite’ is perplexing. In what specific ways is this magazine, which is open to all and which demonstrably affords the same treatment to everyone, Thatcherite? On the contrary, Anon is manifestly egalitarian. The inaccuracy of the accusation would seem to derive more from the outrage of the landed gentry than from a serious critical objection. Secondly, she suggests that talk of level playing fields not only leads the unestablished to remain mediocre, by wasting their creative energies in resenting the successful, but effectively labels established writers as little more than charlatans. I feel Anon can have no bearing one way or the other on how resentful aspiring writers might be. Some will be driven by elements of envy and resentment, and some won’t—much like professional poets. Such traits belong to individuals, not to groups. As for the point about charlatans, well charlatans are conscious frauds; I would never accuse any poet of being a charlatan, for surely almost all poets sincerely believe in the value of their work. But do I think that some established poets aren’t very good? Of course I do; who doesn’t? It’s hardly a guilty secret that I keep to myself. And of course, I also think that some established poets are very good. Surely it’s too simplistic to suppose that all established poets are good, and all unestablished poets are mediocre—if only because the former necessarily develop out of the latter. But of more relevance to this debate and to this magazine is my firm contention that even the best poets write good poems and not so good poems—sometimes many more of the second type than of the first; and that unestablished poets – if we mean by that serious, talented writers who are committed to poetry but who are not widely known – sometimes write good ones. If I may borrow and misuse a stanza from Robert Schechter’s delightful children’s poetry in this issue:

When chickens squawking in the coop

squat down on their chicken legs

they’re sometimes making chicken poop

and sometimes making chicken eggs.

An excellent justification for a magazine such as Anon! The other main justification was laid out very carefully in Anon One: although anonymous submission procedures ought to make little or no difference at the lower and higher ranges of submission quality, my belief is that they will have an effect on the stuff in the middle, and this is where Gerry Cambridge and I respectfully differ. Many of his more pragmatic objecions are well-made, and only time will tell if Anon can overcome them. But he disagrees with the view that strong editors can be influenced by factors extraneous to the quality of work submitted, and in support of his case, he tells us that ‘the serious point is that background information calculated to impress can do the opposite’. And yet if you think about those words with great care, they support rather than disprove the notion that editors are influenced by factors other than the quality of the writing—how much influence occurs, and in what direction, is not the issue, although it will be different for every submission and for every editor. And it is with middle-ranking poems – the ones that comfortably make the shortlist but don’t instantly make the acceptance list – where difficult, fractional editorial decisions have to be made for one poem over another poem; where small and inaccurate presumptions can tip the balance one way or the other without our even knowing it; and where anonymous procedures help us to evade our own conscious and unconscious prejudices. In other words, conspiracies, cronyism and deliberate bias are not the primary problems that Anon is trying to address, despite Kathleen Jamies assumption to the contrary; certainly Anon strives to be incorruptible, but so do many other poetry magazines run by honest editors. A far more potent, subtle and interesting force than conscious bias – one I have yet to see scrutinised by critics and commentators – is that of the editors’ unconscious prejudices. This force is not resisted merely by having integrity and good intentions, but by implementing a system that puts every poem through the same process—in Anon’s case, blind assessment by two external readers and an editor, all of whom come to an opinion on each poem independently of one another. I don’t regard this as a radical innovation, nor even a particularly challenging one, but rather an expression of common sense. Within the parameters of the editors’ aesthetic preferences – whose subjectivity no one can do much about, or would want to – the anonymous system allows us to identify more accurately the best poetry submitted to us. It is a limited aim.

It doesn’t matter to me whether the poets in Anon are established or not—I just want to ensure that no one feels alienated from submitting. Hopefully I’m succeeding. In Anon Two, several established poets have chanced their arm and have been selected. I know of others who submitted and didn’t get selected, because they chose to tell me so afterwards (ordinarily the editorial team doesn’t learn the identities of rejected poets). I feel they are to be commended for putting their egos on the line. I am hopeful that, in time, the bulk of established poets who value little magazines, and who submit work to them (some don’t, but in recent ‘little’ magazines I have seen poems by Edwin Morgan, Andrew Motion, Seamus Heaney, Douglas Dunn, Matthew Sweeney, Carole Satyamurti et al) will regard Anon as a good place to be.

It is interesting that The North – surely one of the most highly regarded poetry magazines in England – has also been experimenting with matters anonymous. Issue 33 has ‘Poems by 33 anonymous poets’, and a note explains: ‘As editors we often claim that it’s the poem not the poet that matters. In this issue we’re putting that claim to the test. The poems appear anonymously, with numbers attached instead of names. But all is not lost. For the confused, the faint-hearted and those who want to test their poet-spotting skills, a full list is given on p64’. What The North didn’t do is use anonymous selection procedures—only the presentation of poems is anonymous. Anon experimented with something similar in Anon One. The poems appeared on the pages without names, and readers who wanted to discover the identity of a poet had to cross-reference to the contents page. I hope this was an interesting attempt to highlight the issue of how a poem is received by a reader. North 33 has received all kinds of feedback on its foray into the same territory, and readers can look at a review of the issue on the Writers Inc [[No longer exists. We have linked to the archived version of the site New Ed]] website. Anon has also received interesting feedback on this specific aspect of presentation, and for myself I’ve decided not to repeat the practice. The poets didn’t like it much, readers were split fifty-fifty, and worse, some people got hold of the wrong end of the stick and assumed that publication in Anon meant that poets weren’t credited for their work. It seems to me that the core aspect of Anon is the ‘blind’ assessment of work; perhaps maintaining that separation of poet from poem into the publication was a step too far.

MIKE STOCKS, 2004