interview with Buck Downs

"kt: can you elaborate on why contributing to a publication is uniformly humdrum, perfunctory and gray?

DOWNS: I'm not sure if I can elaborate, and I think many if not most folks would disagree if I did. Getting published by someone else is kinda the gold standard for literary discrimination, right? I'm sure that my opinion gets read as some kind of sour grapes and/or blithering contrariness. But I would put it to anybody who writes poetry and is baffled or unhappy: stop sending poems to strangers who edit magazines; make a list of the friends & fellow poets you want to share with; send those people your poems, & expect nothing. If the results you get are half as gratifying as mine, you'll never go back. "