Friday from the Archives: “what poetry can do and how it can do it”: An Interview with NCLR‘s Poetry Editor Jeffrey Franklin by James Smith from NCLR 16 (2007)
Have you submitted to either of our April poetry contests yet? If your written poem is chosen by our group of first-pass readers, it will then go to our long-standing Poetry Editor Jeff Franklin for review. Jeff has been working with us here at NCLR to preserve and promote NC’s rich POETRY culture since 1999, even as he’s moved from the Appalachians to the Rockies, retired from teaching full-time, and published his own poetry collections.
In 2007, James Smith corresponded with Jeff to conduct this interview. They discuss Jeff’s spiritual and geographical inspirations for writing poetry as well as his viewpoints on both reading and editing poetry for NCLR.
“James Smith: How do you settle finally on a poem for inclusion in NCLR?
Jeff Franklin: First, I’ll mention that I receive the poems from Margaret Bauer without the author bios or the cover letters. I most often do not recognize the author’s name when it is on the manuscript, and I would
just as soon review anonymous submissions. As a result, I have treated some first-time publishers with deference, and I no doubt have pissed off a few poets with arm-length publication lists by my assumption
of critical authority. Here are my two final tests: 1) Can I read the poem without once pulling out of it in order to be critical; does the poem hold me? and 2) Is there a surprise, even a single word, line, or figure that excites, a moment of discovery, a new angle or-insight? I ask many other questions along the way,
including: Does the poem care about language? Is the language itself interesting, if not in fact either
arrestingly original or so dang right as to feel like those words have to be the words they are? Does the
poem care about line? Is it just prose broken into pieces, or is the author working with the line as a
unit of meaning and of sound? (I may as well confess it, no doubt damning myself within the current
trend: “prose poem” is an oxymoron.) From among the poems that meet these criteria, I choose those that tell a good story, those that make me laugh (or want to cry), those that teach me something, those that scare me, those that make me want to know the author, those – what else can one say, finally? – those I like most.”
Jeff provides feedback to many of the poets who make it into the semi-finalist round, which along with your subscription copy of the journal, make entering our Applewhite Poetry Prize contest a win-win situation, whether you actually win or not. Submission window closes April 30! Don’t delay!
Read the entire article by purchasing a copy of the 2007 issue (and don’t miss “13 Ways of Thinking About the Poetic Line,” thanks to Measure: A Review of Formal Poetry.)
