Editor Interview: The Road Not Taken

metrical and/or rhyme

Raintown Review, Mezzo Cammin, Measure Lucid Rhythms, Better than Starbucks, Loch Raven Review.

Yeats is enduring favorite; the one who lives in my head most often. But I think Milton is the master of blank verse; he studied the caesura like no one else I know. Chaucer of course (because I am also a medievalist). John Donne for sure. Herbert and Drayton. I won't name Shakespeare only because it goes without saying. And among poets born in the twentieth century, Alfred Dorn.

The Road Not Taken publishes idiomatic and natural sounding poetry in meter and/or rhyme. The goal is not to revive the poetry of a bygone age, however masterful. Rather, The Road Not Taken believes that poets who enjoy writing in form today should be comfortable with modern idiom and sentence structure. Lines should not regularly end in punctuation, because life is rarely that neat and tidy. The Road Not Taken particularly admires poems which combine tight structure with a "fluid" sound. Humor can be a coping mechanism in the world, and is to be encouraged; this can be true even when the issues are serious.

Aim for an easy, fluid poem that is written in form without necessarily sounding like it; be unobtrusive. Remember that variation in form should never be done for your convenience, but for a point. Show me that you know when to break the rules, and why.

(see the last two answers above). Poems should be thoughtful, nuanced, rhythmic, intense, and masterful.

N/A (I just took over the Road Not Taken on June 15th, 2013)

Cover letters are always a plus. Re publication credits: give me a sample if you can, but avoid long lists. The Road Not Taken publishes both new and experienced poets. It is interesting to see where a contributor has been published, but not essential.

I read every piece to the end. That said, it is certainly true that beginnings are important; I would rather see a beautiful poem whose author didn't quite know how to end it, than a mess than fights its way to a resolution, but I'm not sure how it got there. Revise, revise. It doesn't necessarily have to sit on your computer for months. But if you haven't come back to it in a cold and ruthless state of mind, it probably needs work.

Once a poem is accepted, it rarely goes through additional evaluations.

This is a question I will be better equipped to answer in a year. But so far I begin by putting all new submissions in a separate file and sending the author a letter of acknowledgement. I wait until I have perhaps a dozen, and then I read, sorting them into piles (maybe, definitely not, and (occasionally) Wow. Then I put the poems aside and come back to them again, testing my first response and critiquing.