Rat’s Ass Review: why should you care?

Well, there’s no reason on Earth why you should, of course. There’s only one editor here, one person whose taste determines what gets into the RAR, and if you don’t like my taste, I don’t give a rat’s ass. Go someplace else for your poetry dose. (I don’t really think that makes me different from all the millions of others with online poetry zines, but I’m willing to admit it.)

But you’re here to find out what to send me so that you can partake of the glory that is Rat’s Ass Review. And I’ll tell you.

Send me your best poetry. I don’t particularly care whether it’s formal or informal, metrical or free verse, rhyming or not. I’ve written all those possibilities myself. A good poem isn’t one that gets the grades for following particular rules. And I’m sure I’ll reject plenty of good poems anyway. I’m not even sure I’m looking for good poems. I’m looking for my kind of poems.

Now we’re getting to it. What is my kind of poem? My favorite poets are Richard Wilbur and Elizabeth Bishop and W. H. Auden and Edna St. Vincent Millay and W. B. Yeats and Robert Hayden and a bunch of others who don’t have much in common. What they do have in common is that, if you read their best poetry carefully, you will understand something about what’s going on the first time you read it. You will get a lot more out of each poem the more you read it, but you don’t have to study it to get the first level of enjoyment. It isn’t work. You don’t have to tie the poem to a chair and beat it with a hose (apologies to Billy Collins).

I do want to see something going on beyond the surface, so that I can read the poem over and over and still get pleasure from it. But I need that surface pleasure. I’m not a great thinker about poetry, and I need my immediate gratification.

And what don’t I want to see? Well, I have my own prejudices, after all. I am not much interested in poetry about God, unless you are Alicia Ostriker or Mark Jarman and are wrestling with God in an interesting way. If you are a young poet with angst, I’ve been there and done that, and I don’t see any need to put it into my journal. I’m not interested in how evil any person or group of persons is. If you must write about Saddam Hussein or Dick Cheney, show me his warm, charming side. If you are impelled to write about the evils of the political left, take it to someone who agrees with you.

And don’t send me anything I’ve seen a thousand times before. Send me the poem that no one but you, in the entire history of poetry, could have written.

Send me as many as five poems, in fact, in the body of your email. I’ll get to them when I can. We have three levels of form rejection letters: insulting, regular, and encouraging. You’ll be able to tell which one you get. If you aren’t rejected, you’ll get the glory of having your work posted on this site, and nothing else; you’ll give up first electronic publication rights, and nothing else. If I remember, I’ll register the copyrights as a compilation.

If you want to send me a translation, it’s up to you to clear the rights to the original.

I’m a writer too, so I understand about your not wanting to tie up your work in one place for a long time. I try to answer within a week, and unless you state otherwise, I’ll assume it’s a simultaneous submission.

Send your submissions to rats.ass.review@comcast.net.

David M. Harris, editor