I was dealt with firmly, but fairly, at the Carolina Quarterly. The editors at the time simply felt that the "pointers along the way" they gave me were not being taken, or even sinking beneath my rather thick skull. Everyone was more than polite about it, and I remained on "speaking and smiling-in-passing" terms with both editors throughout the remainder of my campus days. Though it hurt like s$%* to get canned, I did not blame them. They were just doing their jobs.
As always, there's more to the story: I related the positive portion yesterday in my post, but not the negative. I also reviewed a "test entry" mailed to CQ by a world-famous author. This person was likely sending a manuscript to us she'd typed herself, just to get feedback outside the New York publishing "loop" as it existed then. I did not have the maturity (or experience) to see that, and I slammed the piece -- which, by the way, was not professionally typed or edited. (Note: This was many years years before personal computers appeared on the large-scale consumer market. Tying manuscripts to fit submission guidelines in the 1970s was a real and very time-consuming chore for anyone but professional typists. Trust me.)
I felt piqued that I had to read this lengthy story at a time when schoolwork was really starting to pile up, and I vented -- probably too harshly. I was an undergrad.
No one said anything to me about it then, and other CQ staffers' comments on the manila, while perhaps less direct, were much the same. Still, my poison pen can't have helped my case very much.
I had at the time considered graduate school and an academic career, but not seriously, and I perhaps unwisely let my editors know that. There was only other undergrad on the staff, whom I did not meet until the Christmas party. He was truly on an academic track, and he regarded me disdainfully at that particular fest. It did not occur to me then (or until many years later) that maybe I had been getting to read famous peoples' stuff, and not him.
Why am I going on like this? For one thing, my dismissal from CQ was a little chip that had been sitting on my shoulder for half a lifetime, and I'm glad I just now knocked it off.
But, more importantly, I have a larger point: How many of the names on The Top Ten (or the still-evolving Back Nine) were literary scholars in their day?
Scholarship has its place, there's no doubt about it. And the academy is the keeper of that particular flame, again, without a doubt. Since the time of Auden, it's also been a haven for many poets.
But the best literature, and especially poetry, seems to emerge without an MFA or a PhD necessarily attached. That flame burns on its own, within or without the ivy walls. Even in college, I believed that.
I still do.
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This is all I plan to say about this topic, at least for the time being. However, I need to mention one more thing to loop back on the theme that got me started: as a college student, I was not living to serve anyone but me back then, and I got what I deserved. I came to know a better way later, and, while I'd rather avoid belaboring an all-too-familiar quote, I must say it has made all the difference.
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