I saw an article today, the author is a person who is as "boring" as me, named Ah Du. He was so idle that he had nothing to do, thinking of submitting articles to the Selected Poetry Journal. However, he searched for half a day and did not find the submission mailbox, and finally got two submission mailboxes in the public account.
Ah Du quickly submitted to the first mailbox, and did not expect to return in seconds. But the reply made Ah Du dumbfounded, and it turned out to be a system prompt, "The mailbox space is insufficient, I can't receive your email." "What do you mean?" It's that the mailbox is full and I can't receive mail anymore.
I said that this Ah Du is "boring" enough, even if he is not dead hearted, is there still a submission mailbox? Without stopping, he continued to submit articles to the second mailbox. However, the result is the same, the mailbox is also "not enough space" to receive mail.
The two email addresses given by this "Selected Poems" could not even receive e-mails, so there were two puzzling problems. First, how does the "Selected Poems" receive manuscripts? Where did they get their manuscripts? The second is the two submission mailboxes of the "Selected Poems", and the manuscripts submitted by previous authors, have anyone read them?
If someone in the Selected Poems had opened these two mailboxes, they would have received a reminder of "insufficient space." That means that these two mailboxes, in fact, for a long time, no one has logged in and opened, let alone looked at the email inside.
So where did the manuscripts published in each issue of the Selected Poems come from? Is there anything else that is not publicly available for submission? I was also "bored", searching the "Selected Poems" on the Internet and discovering the mystery. Selected Poems is "the only poetry anthology in China" whose purpose is to "select the best poets and the best poems." ”
So, the keyword here is "choose", so where to choose it? That's fine. Where are the "best poets"? Where is the "best poem"? To be honest, these two questions, I am afraid that the average person can not answer. In fact, now, even what kind of person can be called a poet, what kind of poetry can be called poetry is a question, let alone a good poet and a good poem.
The two "insufficient space" mailboxes of the Selected Poems show that "good poets" and "good poems" have never been in the mailbox. In other words, the Selected Poems doesn't care about those mailbox submissions at all. They have a knack for selecting good poets and good poems, which is to select works from other journals that have already been published poems.
For example, the headline poet of the Selected Poems in February 2022 is Mo Yan, whose poems have actually been published in the January 2022 Shanghai Literature. In this way, "selecting" poets and poems is the most secure, and I have to admire the "Selected Poems" for moving fast enough, and the poems published in January are selected in February. There is a series of work such as editing and typesetting, and the efficiency of the Selected Poems is quite high. But does it make sense to "select" someone else's published work and post it again?
Since the Selected Poems does not select manuscripts from the mailbox, why should it publish two submission mailboxes? And these two submission mailboxes can't submit articles at all? This is probably to show an attitude: the "Selected Poems" actually wants to select manuscripts from the mailbox, but the poems in the mailbox are not the "best poems", and over time they will not bother to take care of it.
I wonder if the mailboxes of other poetry publications are also "insufficient"? Maybe not, after all, the manuscript is the life of a journal. The more manuscripts a journal receives, the more popular the journal is, and there should be no journal that deliberately rejects authors' contributions.
The "lack of space" in the submission mailbox actually reflects the "lack of living space" of the poet now. Many poems that are not the "best" poets not only have no chance of publication, but even the opportunity to "see the light". But every poet is not born "best," but gets better step by step. Obviously, there is not even a chance to "get better" now.
Perhaps, Shang Zhongmin's poem "Publication" published in "Chinese Dictionary" last year can explain the problem, that is, the submission should be "buddy" to match. By handing the manuscript to the editor, it is estimated that the editor can see the "good" of the poem, and then it is possible to publish it, and it is possible to be selected by the "Selected Poems" and become the "best poem". However, there are several people like this "buddy", how can they be mixed?