It’s been three weeks since we launched our electronic submission system. Print submissions are mailed back with a note, asking authors to resubmit through our website. Only a few dozen print submissions languish in the vicinity of our editor’s desk, awaiting his final decision, having receiving a thumbs up from readers. For presumably the first time since 1925, the stream of paper has dried up. This is what’s become of our incoming submission bins:

Incidentally, it was widely reported in 2002 that white plastic mail bins (or “flat tubs”) disappear at the rate of five to ten million per year. They cost $3.25 to manufacture, and the fine for stealing them is $1,000. They’re also fantastically useful storage containers. Which is why the USPS will happily take back wayward flat tubs with no questions asked. It looks like somebody here will be taking a trip to the post office.

Not it.

Jennifer Howard, over at The Chronicle of Higher Education, has taken issue with my earlier blog post about Paul Muldoon. I wrote:

Maybe we can also hope that an Irish poet such as Muldoon will have an eye for harder-hitting, more topical poetry than we’re used to seeing in mainstream American magazines.

Howard responded by asking:

So being Irish makes you hard-hitting and topical? I thought we weren’t supposed to generalize based on nationality any more. It’s a good question, though: Is Muldoon’s appointment (or Simic’s, or Maxwell’s) really an example of a new internationalism in American literature or something less dramatic? Poets, speak.

I encourage our readers to respond there, but also leave your comment here. For your ease, here’s the response I posted:

There’s generalizing based on nationality, and then there’s drawing conclusions based on facts. The title sequence of sonnets in Muldoon’s latest book, Horse Latitudes, deals with the outbreak of the Iraq war. Can you name a prominent American poet who has dedicated similar space to the protest of the war? Almost any Irish poet is more politically engaged (at least on the page) than almost any American poet. Yes, Muldoon, but also Heaney, Ní Dhomhnaill, Longley, McGuckian, Mahon, and on and on. In this country—rife with poets with MFAs and prize-winning books and tenure-track jobs—where are the poems about the Iraq war? We have Brian Turner’s Here, Bullet. We have Operation Homecoming. Who else? Where is our Whitman writing poems at the bedside of the wounded? Maybe he or she is out there, and Muldoon will bring him or her to the pages of The New Yorker. Let’s hope so.

Jump into the fray, folks. Let’s talk about the place of the political in poetry.

Today is a special day here at the VQR offices, one of four each year. We draw inspiration from Steve Martin’s The Jerk:

Navin R. Johnson: The new phone book’s here! The new phone book’s here!
Harry Hartounian: Boy, I wish I could get that excited about nothing.
Navin R. Johnson: Nothing? Are you kidding? Page 73 - Johnson, Navin R.! I’m somebody now! Millions of people look at this book everyday! This is the kind of spontaneous publicity - your name in print - that makes people. I’m in print! Things are going to start happening to me now.

Yes, one hundred copies of the Fall issue have just arrived by truck. That’s our in-house allotment of the thousands that will soon be winging their way to subscribers around the world. They’ve all got that new VQR scent. (Which is sort of like new car smell, only less cancer-y.) We’ll each pore over the pages, obsessively IDing every little mistake that we let slip through, as a form of self-flagellation. You can play along at home, too.

Expect your copy in the mail shortly, and for all of the articles to be on the website in about a week. Unless you’re not a subscriber, in which case, get on it — our rates are about to go up, since they’re pegged to both inflation and awesomeness.

Pulitzer Prize-winner Paul Muldoon has been named the new poetry editor for The New Yorker. The Irish-born Muldoon (who also edited the Best American Poetry anthology in 2005) joins the ranks of English-born Glyn Maxwell at The New Republic and Yugoslav-born Charles Simic at Paris Review. And Simic is also now the Poet Laureate of the United States. Has anyone spoken to Lou Dobbs about this? Should we be concerned that Europeans are taking jobs away from American poets? Or is editing the kind of work that Americans are no longer willing to do? All kidding aside, this seems another example of the healthy internationalization of American literature that has been going on recently. Maybe it’s time to put away ideas like Best American this-and-that in favor of publishing the best work, period—regardless of where it appeared or where the writer was born or lives now. Maybe we can also hope that an Irish poet such as Muldoon will have an eye for harder-hitting, more topical poetry than we’re used to seeing in mainstream American magazines.

The ten most common titles of submissions that we’ve received in the past year:

1. Remember
2. Smoke
3. Revelation
4. Work
5. Grace
6. Waiting
7. Insomnia
8. Voyeur
9. Butterfly
10. Reunion

Since you were wondering.

A demobilized paramilitary fighter, “Lorenzo,” in Turbo, Colombia.

A hazard of producing a quarterly with months-long lead times is that it’s not easy to be timely. We have to forecast what will be relevant and informative in light of events six months from now. Our Fall issue (out October 1) is a special issue, dedicated to the topic of South America in the 21st century. We’ve got a brilliant lineup of essays, fiction, art and photography, most of which resulted from dispatching crews all over the continent for original reporting. With one story, though, our prescience was perhaps too acute.

Tuesday brought the news that Chiquita will pay a $25M fine for providing millions of dollars in aid to Colombian terrorist group FARC. There’s a great deal more to the story than most of the coverage would have you believe, though. To that end, we’ve just posted publicly Phillip Robertson’s “The Octopus in the Cathedral of Salt” as a preview of the forthcoming issue. Robertson lays out the history of the business practices of Chiquita (née United Fruit) in Columbia. While Chiquita has defended the payments as protection for its employees, Robertson interviews a former paramilitary fighter who says that Chiquita was knowingly running cocaine on their freighters and providing arms to terrorists. These alleged business practices didn’t come up when the Department of Justice announced Chiquita’s plea deal. Given that, it’s not surprising that many are unhappy with Chiquita getting off so lightly.

The rest of the issue includes essays by Daniel Alarcón, Julio Villanueva Chang, Toño Angulo Daneri, Kelly Hearn, J. Malcolm Garcia, Pat Joseph, Brian A. Nelson, Daniel Titinger, and Gabriela Wiener; poetry by Marjorie Agosin and Odi Gonzales; fiction by Roberto Bolaño and Santiago Roncagliolo; and art & photography by Liniers, Ana de Orbegoso, Juan Manuel Echavarria, and Hwa Goh. It’s one of the most ambitious issues we’ve ever attempted. You’ll love it.

The Council of Literary Magazines and Presses (CLMP), in conjunction with the Writing Program at the New School, is sponsoring in November the second annual LWC}NYC, a three-day conference for fiction, poetry, and creative nonfiction writers featuring a slew of writers, editors, agents, publicists and publishers offering insight and advice on the business of writing.

One of the highlights of last year’s conference was the kick-off panel discussion featuring industry heavyweights Jonathan Burnham (HarperCollins), Morgan Entrekin (Grove/Atlantic), Jonathan Galassi (FSG), and Sonny Mehta (Knopf), moderated by Sara Nelson of Publishers Weekly. Through the generous efforts of agents Judith Weber and Nat Sobel of Sobel Weber Associates, Inc., CLMP, and the panel’s participants, we’re able to offer a written transcript and audio of the panel. And the transcript and audio are even offered under a Creative Commons license, so others can publish or distribute it.

For the third year in a row, VQR has been named a finalist for a Folio Magazine Eddie Award, honoring editorial excellence. VQR’s Winter 2007 issue was picked as one of the best issues of the year in the Association/Non-Profit category, along with National Parks and Trout Magazine. Other magazines honored as finalists include Newsweek, Foreign Policy, Forbes, Harvard Business Review, and Editor & Publisher. Awards will be presented September 23 in New York City.

We’re both proud and a little nervous to release into the wild the VQR electronic submission system. We constructed this system ourselves (on a PHP/MySQL platform) with the primary criterion of making it as simple to use as possible. It’s a snap to submit work, the status of submissions can be checked at any time, withdrawing something is as easy as clicking a link, and it “remembers” authors between visits.

In pursuit of this goal, we went so far as to test it out for a year, tracking paper submissions for our September 2006–May 2007 reading period. That was followed by a twenty user alpha test in July, and then a ten day, 85 participant beta test in August. We’re particularly grateful to the writers who volunteered for that beta test—their input was enormously helpful in streamlining this system. The end result is a software product that we believe will simplify enormously the submission process for authors, our readers, and our own staff.

If you submit work to us through this system, please let me know if you have any problems, suggestions, or comments. It might be done, but it’s certainly not perfect.

Congrats go to VQR contributors Robin Ekiss and Jennifer Grotz, who have just been named as winners of the 2007 Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Awards, given annually to six women writers who “demonstrate excellence and promise in the early stages of their careers,” and include a cash award of $25,000. The other writers honored were Elif Batuman, Sarah Braunstein, Alma García, and Holly Goddard Jones. The awards will given out in NYC on September 27.