But for me, being an editor I've been an editor of all kinds of books being an editor of poetry has been the way in which I could give a crucial part of my time to what I love most.
quote by Peter Davison
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Related quotes
Which editor? I can't think of one editor I worked with as an editor. The various companies did have editors but we always acted as our own editor, so the question has no answer.
An Editor becomes kind of your mother. You expect love and encouragement from an Editor.
quote by Jackie Kennedy
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The writer who can't do his job looks to his editor to do it for him, though he won't dream of sharing his royalties with that editor.
quote by Alfred A. Knopf
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You know, people always think if you start out as a film editor, you shoot less footage. Actually, just the opposite is true. I tend to grab as much coverage as I can because as a former editor I know how important it is to have those few frames.
quote by Robert Wise
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I lived through a classic publishing story. My editor was fired a month before the book came out. The editor who took it over already had a full plate. It was never advertised. We didn't get reviewed in any major outlets.
quote by Anita Diament
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I sent The World Well Lost to one editor who rejected it on sight, and then wrote a letter to every other editor in the field warning them against the story, and urging them to reject it on sight without reading it.
quote by Theodore Sturgeon
Submitted by Lucian Velea
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It's all about who's where on the food chain. When I'm the story editor, I expect my writers to follow my vision. When I'm working for another editor, I'm obliged to follow their vision.
The Editor
tonight
he will read many poems
and he cannot sleep because as always there will be many poems from me. he asked for them anyway. and everything i have in my mind
will always be poems.
the editor is an insomniac.
and from the hundred that i emailed for his perusal.
i guess. i need only to see one
that he thinks deserves
his choice.
i laugh. how can he ever find that piece of little garbage
as art form?
funny. dear editor, everything is a fake.
poem by Ric S. Bastasa
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Another Plan
Editor Owen, of San Jose,
Commonly known as 'our friend J.J.'
Weary of scribbling for daily bread,
Weary of writing what nobody read,
Slept one day at his desk and dreamed
That an angel before him stood and beamed
With compassionate eyes upon him there.
Editor Owen is not so fair
In feature, expression, form or limb
But glances like that are familiar to him;
And so, to arrive by the shortest route
At his visitor's will he said, simply: 'Toot.'
'Editor Owen,' the angel said,
'Scribble no more for your daily bread.
Your intellect staggers and falls and bleeds,
Weary of writing what nobody reads.
Eschew now the quill-in the coming years
Homilize man through his idle ears.
Go lecture!' 'Just what I intended to do,'
Said Owen. The angel looked pained and flew.
Editor Owen, of San Jose,
Commonly known as 'our friend J.J.'
Scribbling no more to supply his needs,
Weary of writing what nobody reads,
Passes of life each golden year
Speaking what nobody comes to hear.
poem by Ambrose Bierce
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Jeduthan Hawley
There would be a knock at the door
And I would arise at midnight and go to the shop,
Where belated travelers would hear me hammering
Sepulchral boards and tacking satin.
And often I wondered who would go with me
To the distant land, our names the theme
For talk, in the same week, for I've observed
Two always go together.
Chase Henry was paired with Edith Conant;
And Jonathan Somers with Willie Metcalf;
And Editor Hamblin with Francis Turner,
When he prayed to live longer than Editor Whedon;
And Thomas Rhodes with widow McFarlane;
And Emily Sparks with Barry Holden;
And Oscar Hummel with Davis Matlock;
And Editor Whedon with Fiddler Jones;
And Faith Matheny with Dorcas Gustine.
And I, the solemnest man in town,
Stepped off with Daisy Fraser.
poem by Edgar Lee Masters
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I Am Visited By An Editor And A Poet
I had just won $115 from the headshakers and
was naked upon my bed
listening to an opera by one of the Italians
and had just gotten rid of a very loose lady
when there was a knock upon the wood,
and since the cops had just raided a month or so ago,
I screamed out rather on edge—
who the hell is it? what you want, man?
I’m your publisher! somebody screamed back,
and I hollered, I don’t have a publisher,
try the place next door, and he screamed back,
you’re Charles Bukowski, aren’t you? and I got up and
peeked through the iron grill to make sure it wasn’t a cop,
and I placed a robe upon my nakedness,
kicked a beercan out of the way and bade them enter,
an editor and a poet.
only one would drink a beer (the editor)
so I drank two for the poet and one for myself
and they sat there sweating and watching me
and I sat there trying to explain
that I wasn’t really a poet in the ordinary sense,
I told them about the stockyards and the slaughterhouse
and the racetracks and the conditions of some of our jails,
and the editor suddenly pulled five magazines out of a portfolio
and tossed them in between the beercans
and we talked about Flowers of Evil, Rimbaud, Villon,
and what some of the modern poets looked like:
J.B. May and Wolf the Hedley are very immaculate, clean fingernails, etc.;
I apologized for the beercans, my beard, and everything on the floor
and pretty soon everybody was yawning
and the editor suddenly stood up and I said,
are you leaving?
and then the editor and the poet were walking out the door,
and then I thought well hell they might not have liked
what they saw
but I’m not selling beercans and Italian opera and
torn stockings under the bed and dirty fingernails,
I’m selling rhyme and life and line,
and I walked over and cracked a new can of beer
and I looked at the five magazines with my name on the cover
and wondered what it meant,
wondered if we are writing poetry or all huddling in
one big tent
clasping assholes.
poem by Charles Bukowski
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The Subdued Editor
Pope-choker Pixley sat in his den
A-chewin' upon his quid.
He thought it was Leo Thirteen, and then
He bit it intenser, he did.
The amber which overflew from the cud
Like rivers which burst out of bounds
'Twas peculiar grateful to think it blood
A-gushin' from Papal wounds.
A knockin' was heard uponto the door
Where some one a-waitin' was.
'Come in,' said the shedder of priestly gore,
Arrestin' to once his jaws.
The person which entered was curly of hair
And smilin' as ever you see;
His eyes was blue, and uncommon fair
Was his physiognomee.
And yet there was some'at remarkable grand
And the editor says as he looks:
'Your Height' (it was Highness, you understand,
That he meant, but he spoke like books)
'Your Height, I am in. I'm the editor man
Of this paper-which is to say,
I'm the owner, too, and it's alway ran
In the independentest way!
'Not a damgaloot can interfere,
A-shapin' my course for me:
This paper's (and nothing can make it veer)
Pixleian in policee!'
'It's little to me,' said the sunny youth,
'If journals is better or worse
Where I am to home they won't keep, in truth,
The climate is that perverse.
'I've come, howsomever, your mind to light
With a more superior fire:
You'll have naught hencefor'ard to do but write,
While I sets by and inspire.
'We'll make it hot all round, bedad!'
And his laughture was loud and free.
'The devil!' cried Pixley, surpassin' mad.
'Exactly, my friend-that's me.'
So he took a chair and a feather fan,
And he sets and sets and sets,
Inspirin' that humbled editor man,
Which sweats and sweats and sweats!
All unavailin' his struggles be,
And it's, O, a weepin' sight
To see a great editor bold and free
Reducted to sech a plight!
poem by Ambrose Bierce
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Dawn Tomorrow
Another letter may come today
from the same editor at Poetry Paradise
telling me he'll pass on the poems
I sent a year ago because
they aren't a good fit for his pages.
But this time, he says, he'll give my poems
to his brother, the skywriter,
who will emblazon them in snow
against a sky so blue
millions of people will love them
almost as much as I do.
poem by Donal Mahoney
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Died Of A Rose
A reporter he was, and he wrote, wrote he:
'The grave was covered as thick as could be
With floral tributes'-which reading,
The editor man he said, he did so:
'For 'floral tributes' he's got for to go,
For I hold the same misleading.'
Then he called him in and he pointed sweet
To a blooming garden across the street,
Inquiring: 'What's them a-growing?'
The reporter chap said: 'Why, where's your eyes?
Them's floral tributes!' 'Arise, arise,'
The editor said, 'and be going.'
poem by Ambrose Bierce
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Ignore the ad above this poem
I deeply resent
the ad above this poem
(well it was there
last time I looked)
for Carcanet Press
as if we were chums
them and I
far from it
not only am I
not published by them
in case you thought I was
but
they don't even answer my emails
offering them my poetry
at 100% off
and their
selecting editor
is quoted as saying that
'amateur' poets should
be wiped out
so much for
love of poetry
I guess courtesy
isn't award-winning
these days
(dammit, it's a different ad this time...)
poem by Michael Shepherd
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While writing my first 90 books, I was magazine editor, publisher, book publisher, executive, etc., so I was established in publishing. three of my seven or so books were biographies of sports stars and really opened doors for me in that area.
quote by Jerry B. Jenkins
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Mortgaged
These spotted trousers, now too short,
Were once some verses smoothly wrought,
The worn-out bluchers on my feet
Twin sonnets to My Lady Sweet,
This 'decker' hanging round my nose
The product of an ODE TO ROSE;
The collar, tie and underpants
Are still an editor's advance
For some wild Bacchanalian song
The gods, I hope, will send along...
To work a dead horse off one's hand
(More so, of Pegasus's brand)
Is what a poet hates to do,
Yet still is what Fate drives us to.
Ah me, I feel my soul is ripe
For forty couplets' worth of tripe,
Three lines of beer, a verse of bread,
But O ... I'll have to pay instead
That d___d old Editor!!
poem by Hugh McCrae
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Problems Of A Journalist
“I want to get away somewhere and re-read Proust,”
Said an editor of Fortune to a man on Time.
But the fire roared and died, the phoenix quacked like a goose,
And all roads to the country fray like shawls
Outside the dusk of suburbs. Pacing the halls
Where mile-high windows frame a dream with witnesses,
You taste, fantast and epicure, the names of towns along the coast,
Black roadsters throbbing on the highways blue with rain
Toward one lamp, burning on those sentences.
“I want to get away somewhere and re-read Proust,”
Said an editor of Newsweek to a man on Look.
Dachaus with telephones, Siberias with bonuses.
One reads, as winter settles on the town,
The evening paper, in an Irving Place café.
poem by Weldon Kees
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A factotum editor
A factotum editor
An editor
All in one
Factotum
Requested for a poem
I sit down
With a pad
Holding the pen tight
I look up
Marvelled with the architect
Crystal clear
Of the blue sky
With a blasting frustration
Bursting disgust
I leave my cushion
At the far distances
No trace of any cloud
Or rain
I am blocked
In the way
Of my rushing out
i see a face
totally worn out
out of grace
it is of humanity
tortured by injustice
deceit and hypocrisy
the cloud bursts
the dyke breaks
I am drowned
In emotions and tears
can not compose
even a verse
I am totally confused and lost
among the words
again I am blocked
poem by Abdul Wahab
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Dealing with poetry is a daunting task, simply because the reason one does it as an editor at all is because one is constantly coming to terms with one's own understanding of how to understand the world.
quote by Peter Davison
Submitted by Lucian Velea
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