Got a rejection letter last week. All authors, and especially poets, are used to them. What was striking for me was that I hadn’t sent off any hard-copy submissions in the last three years. Repeat, THREE years.
As I’ve explained, a while ago I shifted over to online-only submissions as a consequence of much higher acceptances that way and of simplifying the difficulties of trying to maintain duplicate sets of files. (One for online, and a duplicate for hardcopy.)
So it took the editors of this particular journal more than three years to decide? What’s their problem? No wonder they’re feeling swamped!
This also touches on the issue of exclusivity in sending out work for publication. In the old days, meaning when I started, you didn’t dare send your work simultaneously to different periodicals. It was more a kind of serial monogamy. Or serious business.
Although the hard-and-fast requirement started melting, I stayed with exclusivity more as a matter of keeping track of what was out where – but I did keep an unmentioned caveat: after six months, if I’d heard nothing, it was fair game to send out again. In more than a thousand acceptances, I don’t recall more than a half-dozen cases where this became a problem.
Suppose I could look up the five poems to see if they’ve been published elsewhere in the interim, but frankly it’s not worth it.
You might have even seen them here, at the Barn.
Jnana's Red Barn 
Poetizing is a strange, wonderful, and mysterious profession, isn’t it?
The practice certainly allows us to appreciate and engage the strange, wonderful, and mysterious world around us! Wouldn’t life be pretty flat without those dimensions?