April may well be the cruelest month, but some of its nasty edge is blunted by April also being National Poetry Month in Canada and in the United States (so take that, TSE!). I’m doing my bit by reading the poems—almost 600 of them—submitted to carte blanche for issue 13. I’ve been directing many of them to a “must reread” file. Once I’ve read them all again, I’ll start to make sub files: “I really like these, but I’m not sure,” or “I don’t think these are for us after all,” or “We must publish these!” In the end, I’ll give in to administrative demands and rank the poems that migrate into this last group, because we only publish six per issue—or maybe eight—giving us an acceptance rate of just over 1% for cb 13. A lot of entirely publishable poems get rejected.

carte blanche has been around for a few years now and every issue we receive more submissions. The challenge of selecting poems has become more difficult as the competition for publication gets tougher—in terms of both sheer numbers and quality.

So how does your poem become one of the lucky six? The first step, of course, is to read our journal, especially the most recent issues, and see if what we have been publishing looks at all like what you’ve been writing. When you receive as many submissions as we do, editorial policy blends with editorial taste. There is no way around it. If I like your poem, I’ll try to publish it. There are a lot of poems that I like, but don’t publish… but none that I don’t like, and do publish.

So what do I like? I don’t really know the answer to that question. My inclinations, in poetry as in many other things, have always been pretty eclectic. I know what I like when I encounter it. But even then, I might not know I like it right away. Often (but not always) if I don’t grasp what a poem is up to, I’m intrigued by my failure to understand. Sometimes poems bewilder or confound me, demanding further reading and eventually—sometimes—making me think, “This poem is really doing something interesting.” Or perhaps I do get it, but in a way I’ve not ‘got’ something before, and this too makes me want to reread. A poem can capture me because of its metaphors or imagery or form or intellectual challenge, or sometimes even its subject.

Always, though, I want to experience language doing something I hadn’t anticipated, and cannot paraphrase easily. I don’t want to be able to say, “Oh, this is a poem about X,” and feel that I’ve done it justice. I want to feel that the interplay of language, imagery, and thought is specific to this writer, to this work, and that it cannot be reduced. And when that happens, I want to share the poem with others, to say: “Look at what is happening here!”

And that is how the poem gets published, or at least how it gets onto the shortlist. I hope that when others read carte blanche, that they too are challenged, intrigued, and seduced by the poems they discover.

On another note… As you are no doubt aware if you have been reading this space, the new Montreal International Poetry Prize is offering $50,000 for the best poem submitted to its jury of ten renowned poets from across the globe. Len Epp, carte blanche contributing editor (& treasurer) is part of a group that created the prize (see his previous “Shop Talk” post). Read more about it, hone your best work, and send it off. You don’t need to be Anne Carson, Derek Walcott or Seamus Heaney to win this one—you just need to write a really great poem in English. After the jury creates a shortlist, they will send the finalists to Andrew Motion, former UK poet laureate, who will select the winning entry. Poets, invoke your muses!