If you ever get shot or suffer heat stroke in the San Fernando Valley, the Encino Medical Center might be your best bet for a no-fuss trauma unit.  We’ve had to go a few times, and it’s always empty — which gives one the comforting impression that if there ever was an actual life-threatening situation, the doctors would turn off the Lakers game and treat you without a 4-hour wait.

There’s a sign in the waiting room that I always notice, proclaiming it “The Best Kept Secret in the Valley,” which strikes me as a strange thing to brag about.  Why would anyone want to be “kept secret” — or even worse, the unfortunate inversion, “a secret best kept”?   Wouldn’t you rather be doing something good, and have people talking about it?

Unfortunately, I think I might be at the helm of the same kind of ship.  Is Rattle the Best Kept Secret in Poetry?

Yesterday I received an email from David Lee Garrison, letting me know that his poem “Bach in the D.C. Subway,” from the current issue, will be featured in Ted Kooser’s American Life in Poetry column this fall. Congratulations to David — the column is terrific exposure, and I think the poem is perfect for it: simple in language and short enough to keep the column brief (a necessity for the project), but a poem that expands outward to show non-poetry-readers how much feeling we can cram into a few lines of text.  This will be Rattle‘s third appearance in the column, and it’s always a treat.

At the end of the note, Garrison added: “I also heard from an old college friend who saw the poem and an editor contacted me out of the blue and said he saw my poem and invited me to submit for an anthology.  A lot of people notice what you publish!”

I get this kind of response from our poets quite often, and it’s one of the most rewarding things they can say — that the feedback they get, the “fan mail” after having a poem in Rattle, is more than they’re used to experiencing.  This means not only that our issues are reaching a lot of eyes, but also that the poems are moving enough for people to go through the trouble and the slight embarrassment of writing a note to a stranger out of the blue.  A few very well-known poets have told me the same thing, and those are the comments to treasure.

At the same time, there’s always an implication of surprise in those statements — they don’t expect fan mail after publishing with us.  They think of Rattle, maybe, as one of their favorite journals to read, but they don’t seem to realize that we’re among the favorites of so many others as well.

I’ve discussed our circulation on this blog before, and it’s still surprising even to me that we rank so high — one of the top 5 poetry-focused magazines in the country, probably top 10 in all of literature.  It sure doesn’t feel like it.  The Poetry Foundation website doesn’t list us.  I can’t get a panel at the AWP for the life of me, no matter how many great poets I put on it, or how interesting the topic.  If we get any press, it’s from the underground press.  Has Rattle ever been mentioned on the pages of Poetry or APR or Poets & Writers, other than in their contest listings?  I think Poets & Writers mentioned the slam issue once, in a three-sentence paragraph in their Newsstand column.  I keep waiting for us to turn some kind of corner, but this hallway is loooong.

Does that mean I’m a bad editor, because I can’t create a literary “buzz”?  And why is it that I can’t?  What do other editors do?  More press releases?  Is it the schmoozing?  The conferences?  The soliciting famous poets?  Is it our reputation?  It’s not that we’re too young — in my short time in this business I’ve seen at least a dozen other magazines appear, generate a lot of attention, and then disappear just as quickly (what ever happened to Swink?).  It’s not that we don’t innovate — we were the first magazine to feature slam poetry with a CD, Poetry copied our visual issue 6 months later, dozens of journals now use our system for reviews…and I bet we’re one of the first to start what’s going to a huge trend of publishing a new poem every day in a blog format.

As far as I can tell, it must be my poor social skills, with a dash of our reputation.  I’m not a real go-getter.  I’m not good at making friends, and even worse at keeping them.  I couldn’t be buddy-buddy with Christian Wiman if I wanted to (as much as he seems like a really great guy).  I lack the confidence and poeto-political clout to call up the Beinecke Library archives and arrange to publish newly discovered marginalia by Langston Hughes.

I’m not a go-getter, I’m a do-it-yourselfer.  A black sheep all my life, I find myself running a black sheep poetry magazine.  Of course, I wouldn’t want it any other way.

After years of sleeping from 4am to 10am*, I recently stumbled onto an article about Delayed Sleep Phase Syndrome — and lo!, there are other people who gravitate toward jobs on the nightshift or that let them keep erratic hours!  Let’s see…in my life, I’ve worked a 12-hour swing shift at Kodak, the C shift at an electronics company, as an overnight counselor at a group home, and as an editor where I’m reading submissions at 2am most nights.  Twenty-eight years and it took Wikipedia to point this out to me.

The point is, I’ve always alienated myself.  I’ve always been cold and cocky or awkward and aloof.  I have leadership skills, but don’t play well with others.  I care about people, but I lack people skills.  I have a superiority complex, an inability to make small talk, and am more likely to remember your poem than your name.  Time to accept it.

And maybe it’s time to accept that Rattle is always going to be a Best Kept Secret, too.  All those things you can say about me, you could have said about Rattle before I even got here.  So maybe I was a good choice, after all.  And maybe it doesn’t matter that I’m about to feel like a schmuck half the time as I bumble through another ignominious AWP.  We do have thousands of fans — so what if most of them think they’re the only ones?  So what if I never get invited to the prom?  That just means I can always crash it, right?

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* Note: It looks like I’m posting this at 8am LA-time, but really I’m fast asleep, and will be for another couple of hours. I’m writing this at 2:48am, and delaying the posting until the morning, because it seems like a better time to attract readers.