The best compliments are the ones that people don’t expect you to see. Sure, it’s nice to hear in a cover letter that someone really loved some poem in the last issue, but you obviously have to take that kind of statement with a big bucket of salt.
Every few days I check our web traffic and referral stats, mainly to see which attempts at getting the word out are working. Today I stumbled upon this comment, at StumbleUpon, posted last week by “ragingtexin”:
Just got a free copy of this from my Creative Writing professor, and surprisingly it doesn’t suck. Definitely voted as worth a look-see, and I fucking hate poetry.
It’s great to get a blurb from your favorite poet saying how much she enjoyed the last issue, but this type of comment is what we live for; it’s so perfect it could be a plant. Our whole reason for being here is to show people who’ve become distrustful of poetry that, hey, it doesn’t have to suck. It really doesn’t.