The Best Worst

I spent the afternoon slushing the first half of the October Strange Horizons poetry submissions and was pleasantly surprised by the quality floor. I have been in a lot of coffeehouses and heard a lot of deeply bad poetry. Similarly, I have spent time slushing fiction and read some deeply dubious paragraphs. Unlimited free internet submissions of poetry to a market that pays decently and is down with stuff about vampires and gods? It seems like it should be a beacon for countless terrible, terrible, bleach your eyeballs afterward poems.

To my surprise, the bad stuff wasn't all that bad. It wasn't all that good, but it was more "eh" than "I want to revoke your keyboard access." It was immeasurably more coherent than the bottom-of-the-barrel slush we'd get at Reflection's Edge, which is astonishing - it takes much less time to write a poem than a short story, and SH pays better than RE.

Perhaps the bad poets confine themselves to coffeehouses, whereas bad story writers don't have an outlet other than slush piles. Perhaps most bad poets don't realize that poetry gets published in places other than chapbooks. Perhaps poetry naturally attracts people who have low opinions of themselves and fiction attracts megalomaniacs. Perhaps poetry is a flexible enough form that odd constructions and shifting tense seem deliberate instead of jarring. Perhaps poems are short enough that writers look them over a few times before pressing "send."

I could also have just gotten lucky. Bad poets might be busy in early October.