A Conversation with Timothy Green

Mark Danowsky: My understanding is that Rattle now receives approximately 350,000 submissions per year. You’ve been Editor of Rattle for almost 20 years now. If I’m doing my math correctly, then it sounds like you’ve read about 7,000,000 poems. Is that about right? I’m wondering what effect this has had on you. 

Also, I like what you wrote in an interview with Inlandia Journal in 2015. 

“[Our associate editor] Megan and I read everything, and we’re always reading. But, then, this is the 21st century; everyone is always reading. We’re just always reading something very specific: boxes of submissions.”

Timothy Green: That’s definitely an overestimate, because the submissions haven’t always come at that level. In 2004, Rattle had about 500 subscribers and maybe 20,000 poems coming in a year—mostly through the post, if you can believe it. Everything has increased steadily and now we’re at 8,000 print subscribers and 250,000 poems. In any event, it’s a lot. 

All those poems have to change your brain, but it’s hard to say how. I probably read faster, get a sense of the voice faster, get bored more easily. But gradual changes are hard to see. 

MD: Can you share what your daily routine as an Editor looks like? My impression is that you read poetry for Rattle 7 days a week / 365 days a year. This is probably not the reality, right? I’m sure you have a life outside of reading slush submissions. 

TG: Reading submissions has never been the majority of the day, and at this point Megan reads more than I do. It probably is the majority of her day. What I’ve always loved about this job was that I get to wear every hat—so it’s layout, design, web editing, sound editing, livestreaming, workshopping, advertising, strategizing, accounting, coordinating. There are always things that need to be done, and my days are based around whatever deadline is coming up or whatever podcast I’m doing that day. I’m the kind of person who is always doing something. I don’t really know how to sit still, and I like a job that lets me move around.

MD: You live in the woods, yes? Can you talk about that decision and what brought you to it? I don’t know much about your background (where you grew up, how you came up). I do know that your educational background is in the sciences. I think that is a super interesting inroad to poetry and becoming a poetry magazine editor. I’m aware that this is not something that you predicted would be your life’s trajectory and I’m hoping it’s not something you have regrets about. When you’re not reading poetry, what do you like to read? 

TG: We moved up into the mountains because it was somewhere in California where we could afford a house, and the schools are good. I’d never lived in a small town before, but I love it. Everyone knows everyone, and the sense of neighborly kindness is such a stark contrast to Los Angeles, where I’d lived for several years before. We do have to evacuate for a fire every few years, and there was six feet of snow in one storm this winter, and the San Andreas Fault runs right through town—but it’s all worth it. 

For the longest time, the only subscription I had was to New Scientist. But I don’t really read anything anymore other than poetry. What used to be reading is now listening to lectures and podcasts while doing the dishes or walking the dog or entering orders for Rattle into the database. So I listen to interviews with scientists and philosophers and historians now. Taking advantage of that “found time” is so much faster and more efficient. When I want to dig deeper into a topic, I’ll go read the study. 

MD: I’ve heard you say a few times, including in this interview with Long River Review, that everyone submits the same way and no one receives special privileges. Is this because you want everything to be above-board, democratic, or is it more about ensuring that you’re focusing on the quality of the poems without feeling any pressure to publish someone who is considered established and respectable? 

TG: Rattle was founded by Alan Fox in 1995 with that specific purpose in mind—to create a poetry venue that treated everyone equally, ignoring all the cliques and credentials that matter far too often within the structure of literary publishing. And personally, I’ve never cared at all about what’s established and respectable. It was never my dream to be established or respectable. I just like poems sometimes. That sentiment is probably why they hired me, and I just continue with that principle. Poetry is the oldest form of art, maybe the second-oldest tool invented; we evolved to make poems. Everyone has a chance making one that’s profoundly interesting. 

MD: Also, in this same interview with Long River Review, I’d like to note that I appreciate what you wrote as advice to younger or unpublished poets:

“Just keep plugging away.  It is a game, and rejection is part of the game.  The most “successful” poets aren’t necessarily the most talented, they’re just the ones that stick in it the longest without getting bored or giving up.  If you’re patient, there’s no doubt you’ll get things published, and if you keep working at telling your story, there are people who will love to listen.”

Anything you’d like to add?

TG: Well the game is still much the same, but more and more I wonder how much of it is worth playing. The U.S. is supersaturated with MFA poets, always competing for a smaller and smaller slice of the pie at the top of that pyramid. Self-publishing work, whether with print-on-demand or social media or NFTs, is much more appealing than it was 20 years ago. None of the options are easy, but there are more options than ever, and I’d suggest exploring the whole range of them. 

MD: You’ve mentioned getting nasty notes from people you rejected. I remember you once gave advice not to send rejections at night because there is an increased likelihood that someone will be intoxicated and may respond in an unkind manner. I’ve had a few unpleasant notes sent my way but nothing compared to some of the stories I’ve heard from other editors (yourself included). How do you shake off the icky (or worse) feelings that come with receiving an unpleasant or aggressive note? As a follow up, and I’ll understand if you don’t want to answer this, have you blacklisted anyone for bad behavior or is that not something you would consider a fair repercussion?

TG: I just remind myself that there’s an epidemic of loneliness, and I’ve just returned the little piece of their heart that is a poem. Most often, if I give them any kind of reply at all, they’ll write back to apologize for forgetting that I’m a human, too. 

No one’s blacklisted, but there is a growing list of people who are blocked on social media. They’re blocked for the negativity they inject. More and more, I find that to be worth simply avoiding. 

MD: We have both made public statements about where we stand on Cancel Culture—especially in the realm of the literary community. Can you speak a bit on this topic? Has your perspective shifted over time?

TG: It hasn’t changed at all; I still find it to be repulsive behavior. We should be clear what “cancel culture” means, though. I don’t mean that bad behavior shouldn’t be exposed or that no one should suffer from the consequences of their actions. But social media pile-ons are a modern consequence of an ancient and deplorable human impulse; it’s the enactment of the fascist drive within our cognitive programming. Everyone wants to think of fascism as right-wing nationalism, because the Nazis provided such a salient example, but fascism is really the bundle-think of the fasces—a stack of rods tied together into a bludgeon. The fasces also had an ax at the top, and the symbolic message is this: our group-think is powerful, and we’ll use it to beat you into submission. If you still resist, we’ll chop off your head. Nazism was fascism, but so was Dekulakization under Stalin. So were the Salem Witch Trials and the Spanish Inquisition. I can’t look at an online mob in action and not hear the “Burn the witch!” at the root of it. The facts and context no longer matter to a mob; it’s no longer an individual mind, it’s a collective consciousness out for blood. Even if the blood online is only figurative, there are real-world consequences, and it causes significant psychological damage to the target, without any regard for the actual facts or how justified it is. 

It’s both frightening and disgusting to me. And there’s something particularly disturbing to see well-meaning, otherwise kind and caring people caught up in something so toxic and dehumanizing. Any time we see a mob like that starting to form, I think it’s our moral and ethical duty to try to stop it. And that’s why I never give the mob an inch, even when it puts me in their crosshairs. 

MD: I know you’re always on the lookout for new Special Features for Rattle. Recently, you learned about NFT poetry and then started to try it out for yourself. You’ve co-hosted a few Twitter discussions with Katie Dozier (KHD) on the subject. What are your thoughts on NFT poetry? Does this crossover into your thoughts on InstaPoetry? I know you’ve shared concerns about the monetization of poetry which is historically frowned upon.

TG: For centuries, really, visual art has benefited from the fact that it’s not reproducible, which makes it collectable. Because it’s collectable, it can serve as a store of value, and money flows to some extent from the people who have wealth to store to the artists who don’t. Poems never worked that way—even before Gutenberg, poetry’s primary purpose was the transfer of storytelling through memory. You could never sell a poem, because remembering a poem is free. 

NFTs have the potential to give poetry some of that juice that’s always benefited visual art. A poem can, in theory, become collectable, and because an NFT is really a kind of smart contract, it can direct that capital back to the artist. I don’t know if it will work, but it’s an interesting idea that seems worth exploring to me, and that’s what sets it aside from Instagram poetry, which treats poetry like a brand accessory in a marketing pitch. Here at least, with NFTs, the poetry itself has the potential of economic value in a broader marketplace. We’ll see how it plays out.  

MD: As a follow-up, I’m wondering if Rattle has had Special Sections on Contemporary Jewish Poets? What about Atheist poets? As an aside, the issue featuring landays remains one of my personal favorites. It was both educational and full of beautiful work. I also got a lot of value out of the haiku issue where you interviewed Richard Gilbert. It led me to have an interesting conversation with Michael Dylan Welch and I learned quite a bit about the contemporary haiku and Japanese forms scene. 

TG: Landays, the feature on Afghani women poets, was actually an issue of Poetry magazine, but I’m glad you brought it up, because it was amazing, the best issue they’ve ever put out, and I still think of it all the time. I don’t have the resources to put an issue together in that way, but I really admire what they did, and the poems were fascinating. The other suggestions are good, and already on my list for the future. Another thing to check out is the Slam issue, which included a CD in the back (remember those?) of the poets performing. Believe it or not, the stuffy halls of literary journals all scoffed at performance poetry back when we put that out. “Political ranting,” they called it. It’s always fun to shake things up. 

MD: You just started to send out your own work for the first time in a long time. 10 years, right? Can you talk a little about why you put your own work on the backburner? 

Here’s something you said in an interview with cahoodaloodaling some time ago. “[…] I care more about reading to my daughter than writing poems—and, frankly, I care more about bringing other voices into the world than I do about my own voice. My own voice is boring; I have to listen to it all day. When I happen to have time I’ll fiddle around with words on a page, and I’ll love it, entering that space of pratityasamutpada where nothing exists except the oneness of yourself and the language … but I don’t write much and don’t publish much these days. It’s low on the totem pole.”

Where does your writing rank on the totem pole now?

TG: Having my own poems curated by literary magazines is still very low on the totem pole for me, but as the kids get older, I have rekindled the joy of writing as a meditative practice. And sharing poems is part of that practice. A lot of it has to do with the Rattlecast open lines, where I share a poem every week. It gives me a deadline and something to do with the stuff, which is just enough of a spur that I never forget how valuable the writing itself actually is. Every Monday for the last few years, I write a poem, and it sustains itself. 

I still feel very awkward, as an editor, submitting my poems to other editors, who are also likely poets who have submitted poems to me. No matter how much we speak against it, there’s an implied quid pro quo. If they publish my poems, I have to wonder if they think it will make it more likely I publish theirs. I won’t—but publishing my own work is always a little soured to me for that reason, and it’s hard to feel especially enthusiastic about it. I think it’s actually the biggest sacrifice I make as an editor. I can’t play that game authentically anymore. 

MD: What would you like to see Rattle accomplish in the years to come? You have Rattlecast and a weekly workshop. What else do you have in mind insofar as future endeavors? 

TG: I’m always thinking of new things, which is a part of the job that I love. The Ekphrastic Challenge, Poets Respond, the Rattle Young Poets Anthology, Critique of the Week, the Rattle Chapbook Prize, the Rattle Poetry Prize itself—these are all models I developed, and that’s really what makes Rattle grow. I’m sure I’ll keep coming up with new things, but I don’t know what they’ll be until they are. 

MD: Where would you like to see the poetry scene go over the next decade? What changes do you think would result in a better community? 

TG: The real heart of the problem Rattle was founded to resist still exists, no matter how much the form shifts. “The Poetry Community” itself is a monoculture, driven as it is by MFA programs and academia, which always brings a certain perspective and sensibility. I always want to see poets embrace a wider range of perspectives. Poems are little empathy machines; they connect us as human beings on a deeply spiritual level. My breath becomes your breath. There’s a beautiful, connective power to that, and it still remains relatively untapped. I’d love to see poetry become more than a “scene” or “community,” but something many people use as a tool to enrich their lives. It should be more like yoga or therapy—that’s what poetry is on a spiritual level, and everyone should participate in it. 

MD: Can we talk a little about the value of gatekeeping? My understanding is that when you started Rattle you immediately wanted to break down some of the long-held, some would say arcane systems that were created by the old guard. What is your advice to today’s editors?

TG: I don’t know about advice, but Rattle was founded as an effort to provide a home for poetry outside of academic hierarchies, and I do still think that’s a useful focus. There still is a system in place that’s not too different from a multilevel marketing scheme where poets compete to climb to the top of the pyramid so they can benefit from those still trying to climb at the bottom. When we talk about gatekeeping, it’s usually in reference to that system of awards and professorships and status, and I don’t think that kind of gatekeeping provides any value. It’s only there to maintain the present hierarchy. 

But more fundamentally, editors aren’t really gatekeepers; we’re curators. We should be sifting through submissions or scouting for poets at open mics, poaching the best from other journals, whatever it takes to highlight the most memorable poems we can find, so that the most people can read and appreciate them. It’s that gatekeeping, if anyone wants to call it that—the act of curation—that has value. We should be reading a million poems so you don’t have to. 

MD: Do we have too many literary magazines?

TG: I don’t think there can ever be too many literary magazines, but there are too many sadly closing, and the way they flicker here and then are gone like fireflies in a forest is unfortunate. I think anyone starting a literary magazine should try to have a plan to make it sustainable. There needs to be some kind of continuity structure in place. Because the truth is, the job of making a magazine is tremendously fun for about a year, and then it becomes a lot of work. It’s difficult for any journal to cross that hurdle, and when they vanish after a year or two or three, the history of those poems it had curated is lost. 

MD: Is ranking journals useful? 

TG: Rankings are always useful, but a ranking never is. What is the metric you’re looking at? Circulation? Social media presence? Prestige? Measured by what? Maybe what’s most useful is to have a personal ranking for yourself of which magazines feel to you like a good mood, where you’d most like to see your own work, after thinking about exactly why.

MD: Let’s be real, some see journal publication as simply stepping stones in the process of getting enough poems published in a collection to meet common requirements (often 50-70%) for poetry manuscript submissions. How do you feel about this? 

TG: This is a world of games, and I wouldn’t find that the most rewarding game to be playing, but to each their own. 

MD: What do you think is reasonable to include in Submission Guidelines and what is questionable or downright unfair?

TG: Now that simultaneous submissions are generally allowed, I think the biggest problem is charging submission fees without being up front about what percentage of the work in the journal is solicited. Fees are fine if you’re only publishing writers who paid the fee, but it seems unethical to me that anyone is charging for the privilege of being rejected while the editors are quietly inviting others in through a back door. 

MD: What do you think is fair to put in a Publication Agreement? Many journals, to the best of my knowledge, take first rights and say that rights revert to the poet upon publication. There’s often an added stipulation about allowance for future publication in anthologies, reprints online and in print, and fair use of the work for promoting the journal or something to that extent. 

TG: Any kind of first rights and non-exclusive rights are fine, but the poems should always belong to the poet. I get reprint requests regularly, and the thought that I’d have the authority to decide where someone else’s poem is published later always strikes me as odd. We use First Serial Rights and non-exclusive online permissions at Rattle, so I always tell whoever asks to go ask the author. 

MD: What’s your stance on the “Pay to Play” situation? I’m thinking specifically about poets having to pay for submissions with the knowledge some of these payments are used to offset the costs of Submission Management Systems (like Submittable). I’m also thinking about the cost of contests. As a sort of ICYMI, it was not too long ago that I first learned about the so-called “Jorie Graham Rule.” 

TG: I discussed what I think is a moral imperative above, but I do also think submissions fees in general should be avoided if at all possible. I don’t think it’s a good long-term model to fund a press that way, because it breeds resentment and feels discouraging, and generally decreases the overall enthusiasm anyone has in the entire artform. Occasional contests as fundraisers are great—obviously I think so, as we have two, the Rattle Poetry Prize and the Rattle Chapbook Prize—but I don’t think it’s a good idea to let it become the bulk of what you do. 

But it’s not easy. Literary magazines are almost all non-profits for a reason: it’s not profitable. I call this the Ouroboros Problem, but Billy Collins put it simply as “The Trouble with Poetry”: reading poems makes you want to write poems. Poetry is the grand dialogue of the human species, and we can’t read them without eventually wanting to participate. So every consumer becomes a producer, and we have no audience to export our products to. We’re like an island with no exports and no tourism, and it’s impossible to sustain an economy that way. In 20 years of thinking about this problem, there have only been a handful of attempts at a solution. Slam poetry works by focusing on the performance aspect, building on a speaking tour model like a comedian might, going from campus to campus in search of student activity fees. Instagram poets made poetry a brand accessory, and can sell it like shoes as they sell themselves. Right now, NFT poets are trying to get poetry into the artworld economy, making poems collectable objects in digital space, so that they can become a store of value for those who aren’t actually poets. The last of those might end up working best, but none of them are ideal, and the Ouroboros Problem might just be intractable in the end. We’ll see.  

MD: It’s been about 10 years since you last answered interview questions for Duotrope. If you look back now, can you elaborate on anything that has changed since May 28, 2013?

I love this line (btw): “Poetic language can't disguise the fact that a poem has nothing important to say.”

TG: I’m on a plane over New Mexico right now with no wifi, so I can’t look, and haven’t the foggiest recollection of what I wrote, but I like that line, too! I’d already been thinking hard about poetry for many years, and I doubt that my opinions about anything would have changed in the time since. I might have spoken about the unconscious or subconscious as the source of poetry, but I have come to learn more recently, through the work of Iain McGilchrist, that it’s really the right and left hemisphere of the brain that we’re connecting through poetry—which translates the holistic understanding of the right brain into the concrete language of the left. I didn’t know, at the time, how deeply we’re all two minds, and how important the interplay between them is in the process of creating art. So if I went into that at all, the meditative nature of poetry, the self-forgetful, perfectly useless concentration of it, etc., then I’m sure I left out the bifurcated brain as a key aspect of it all. 

MD: Can you talk about the value of maintaining Rattle as a print publication. We hear “print is dead” talk all that time. As readers and writers, we know there is something special about holding a physical book in your hands. 

TG: Speaking of 10 years ago, I wrote an article around that time predicting that print wouldn’t really die, because books provide a respite from our electronic, hyperconnected world. Even reading on a stripped-down Kindle is too much like looking at a phone, which already has us conditioned from the dopaminergic reward of a pop-up notification. Ding. Because we’re always ready for that ding, just by the nature of the device looking so much like a screen, we can never really relax and lose ourselves in reading. And we do want to relax and lose ourselves in reading. The bigger problem is usually time—we do so much these days, and there are so many ways we can be stimulated. But we know, deep down, that we want to rest inside the glue-bound pages of a paper book, and that will continue to be the best way to really consume meaningful literature for a long time. And because poetry is the most meaningful of all literatures, it’s the most direct and intense creation of meaning we have, poetry really benefits from continuing to be produced in print. 

MD: I love the Rattle chapbook contest. It ties into how a Rattle subscription is an absurdly good deal. I’ll let you say it in your own words. The basic facts are that if you subscribe to Rattle you also get four chapbooks. And a subscription to Rattle is far less than many respectable journals. It’s almost too good to be true. Please take a moment to shamelessly promote why Rattle is beyond worth it for readers.

TG: The Rattle Chapbook Series is a consequence of the pricing of the postal and printing industries. Looking at the charts, I realized how cheaply we could add an extra 36-page chapbook to the 100-page issue mailing that we already do. It’s a handful of cents on a non-profit bulk permit. And printing a chapbook at a large run like this is really cheap, too, per copy. So it makes a tremendous amount of economic sense to piggyback a chapbook along with an issue, adding so much value with relatively little additional expense. 

And I’ve always loved chapbooks of poems. They’re the perfect length for taking a little journey with a poet in one sitting. They provide a deeply memorable experience while fitting easily inside a purse. What could be better than that? 

So a subscription to Rattle for the last decade has been four issues of the magazine and four chapbooks coming along in the same envelope—all for just $25 a year. It really is a great deal if you love poetry. 

MD: What do you believe makes a person a good Steward of The Arts? This is a question that I have been reflecting on for several years now as I think about the important work of facilitators, community organizers, those who host regular poetry reading series’, those who wish to carry the torch of poetry’s importance in our ever-changing cultural narrative. 

TG: My general philosophy in life is to give more than you take. I try to give more than I take no matter what I’m doing, whether it’s curating poetry or coaching Little League or standing in line at the grocery store. It’s when we give more than we take that the universe prospers. Being a steward of the arts isn’t any different. Don’t ask what you can get, ask what you can give. When we do that, we’re all better off.

MD: You’ve talked about how poetry has, in a way, been dying “for a long time”. It’s not as dark as it seems. My sense of what you mean is that there are other mediums that can now do certain aspects of poetry better than those versions of poetry. Emerson said, “the new arts destroy the old.” In Emerson’s essay on “Art” he speaks eloquently about the shifting nature of art and how art impacts our worldview. “Destroy” is a strong sentiment. Still, we can see in other artforms or artistic materials (like tv shows) have become carefully tailored with a level of algorithmic precision to hit all the ideal notes for consumers. There’s that famous quote “the medium is the message” that always seems important to consider. I’m going in a lot of directions here but, I hope, you can decipher what I’m trying to get at and help us navigate the perilous topic of “the death of poetry” and, moreover, how poetry finds a way to remain meaningful as both a form of oratory and the written word. 

TG: I do say that tongue-in-cheek, but it’s also true. Poetry is the second tool. Two million years ago, hominids had the hand ax, and that was it. We used it to forage and protect ourselves and spread across continents. After another million years, we invented a slightly better way of making a hand ax, and then did nothing new for another 800,000. But our second invention was language, the digital encoding of information. It wasn’t binary code, ones and zeros that a computer uses—it was a digital string of any sounds we could make come out of our faces. Poetry is the creation of meaning from a string of sound, it’s the Logos that let us create an entirely new symbolic world to live inside. Only once we had poetry could we have a continuous culture across generations, preserving meaningful stories over time. Rhyme and repetition and alliteration were all developed to make stories memorable, to keep them from disappearing in the generational telephone game. 

So poetry was intricately woven into humanity from the very beginning, but it always had these two uses—it was the creation of meaning and it was a store of meaning. When we invented the printing press, though, and became universally literate, we no longer needed poetry as the store of meaning. We have books for that. We have Disney and Ted Talks and Wikipedia at our fingertips. We don’t need to memorize something in order to remember it. So that use of poetry has been dying for centuries. 

What’s left, though, and where all art will continue to thrive, is in the creation of meaning.  Poetry is the creation of meaning through the music of speech, and the creation of meaning is the fundamental task we’ve been given by the universe. It’s what makes us human, finding order in the chaos of our lives, wondering why we’re here, making sense of all the beauty and terror of existence. So poetry’s been dying, on the one hand, as technology takes over, but it’s more alive than it’s ever been as more and more of us use it to make sense of the world. 

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Timothy Green works as editor of Rattle and is the author of American Fractal (Red Hen Press). He also serves on the board of the Wrightwood Arts Center and is a contributing columnist for the Press-Enterprise. 

Mark Danowsky is Editor-in-Chief of ONE ART: a journal of poetry. His most recent poetry collection is Meatless (Plan B Press).