Politics.

While I’m a follower of US politics, poetry politics bore the pants off me. I don’t care who’s who. I don’t care who champions what. My life is too damned short to keep track of it all.

I do care when people make absurd arguments, offensive ones even, and I find out about it after submitting work to their journals.

Currently, I have cause to regret that a poem of mine was accepted for publication. That’s a disheartening feeling.

The fact is, I can’t keep track and have no desire to try, but by publishing anything at all I end up on some side or the other of some stupid argument or the other. Even posting a poem on a poetry board becomes a political act.

All actions have consequences, and ignorant actions have more consequences than others. Not submitting means I’m not involved. It means that I don’t have to act as if I’m a free verser or a formalist, or any other label that someone would be so willing to attach. I don’t want to have to read editor biographies just to know if I’m going to end up with the philosophical equivalent of cooties.