Why I Read the Slush Pile

Why I Read the Slush Pile Peter Brown (bio) I've spent years reading submissions for journals and contests, including Antæus, The Walt Whitman Award, The National Poetry Series, Columbia Magazine, Salamander, Off the Grid Poetry Prize, and now the poetry pile for Consequence. Maybe it's a syndrome—serial slush-pile reader—a kind of codependency amongst all these unfiltered, unpolished, unsolicited, unselected authors and me. Or maybe the work I do is more valid than that, my truest contribution to American letters, more than anything I've written or published. I can't rule that out. We all need readers, don't we? Are these my truest brothers and sisters, all these writers, the lost shades in suspension outside the carnival lights, along the banks of the dark river? Maybe what I have in common with them is more significant than with anyone else, beyond nationality, identity, sexual joy, or dietary restrictions. We are a strange society, largely invisible to each other, a secret freak show whose only audience are the bats, moths, and nighthawks scrambling in the dying light. Each time I open my laptop and join them, I experience my reading as an act of imagination, too. I'm Alice stepping through the looking glass, Hunter S. Thompson bound for Vegas, a desultory Dante descending into Hell without Virgil to guide him. Crossing this threshold is a way of asking a question, not only what I might find in that lurid realm, but also what I imagine myself to be. This act of reading is about my own dis-orientation and secret suffering, as well as my own emptiness, my own experience of isolation and cultural disdain. Shouldn't I be an editor by now? Assistant editor? No doubt. Am I reading the slush again? Oh, dear. And yes, I have again become, if only in my own dark ideation, a kind of hero, not Alice or Dante or a carnie with a flashlight and a squashed pack of Winstons in his fist but a lifelong foot soldier who dies in the mud as his grandchildren back home are being born, whom everyone pretends to love, whom everyone takes for a sodden fool. There are other benefits. All delusions of heroism aside, it's too commonplace to say every young writer should grab an internship reading for a journal, publisher, or agent, to get a glimpse of the endless carnage out among the poppies. If what you're writing is hackneyed, you'll see it quickly there. The reading can even be a little hazardous. You might End Page 6 discover what you hate is what you are, what you've been, what you've become. You might see that what you cherish hasn't made sense in two hundred years and give it all up, deciding to learn Russian instead, to return for good to reading Pushkin. Reading the slush, like everything essential related to real literature, is about humility and death—your own as well as everyone else's. What happens when no one reads our poems, these impassioned missives we fire off into the future like rockets to nowhere? There's something to be learned in thinking about that nowhere and what it means to us. It's the deepest thing we face. It's what separates every last one of us, what we all share, no matter your obsessions or language. I once heard W. S. Merwin say young poets should learn to write by translating, since they likely don't have anything to say yet. Reading the slush is similar to translation, I'd argue, because if you're doing it honestly, it teaches you to think and work outside yourself. Each submission you encounter allows you a new opportunity to put on the white wig and black robes of the judge, a new responsibility with real consequences. This is about finding literature, after all, and to do it well, you might have to go deeper than you want, to discard ideology, to leave whichever of your identities fascinates you the most under your seat for a minute. Wouldn't the time be better spent reading Sappho? Rilke or Saadi...