I knew when I got the acceptance note that the editor and I were going to have problems agreeing on what to print. He will remain nameless, but his note said: I will accept Tree of Seasons [my poem]; I will make some changes, but exactly what, I don't know. His phrasing raised every hackle this former English major owns -- how could he presume to edit anyone else's work when his own letters were so grammatically incorrect?-- but what he was telling me caused me to bristle all over.

The editor in question was referring to a poem I'd labored over before submitting to his amateur magazine. The poem was planned so that each line in each of the four stanzas echoed other lines in the other stanzas. I thought it had worked up nicely, comparing each season of the tree's life to the seasons of the year, hence the poem's title, Tree of Seasons. Yet here was the editor blithely telling me that he'd make some changes to my carefully crafted poetry. Argh!

Then the real blow fell. He sent me the galleys with his few changes. I hit the roof. He'd taken out my verse separations that showed each season in turn. His version made it look like one complete poem, when each of the four stanzas was really a complete poem in and of itself, each blending into the other. He'd cut out most of the "Autumn” verse, reworded other verses, changed my imagery entirely in three different places, put in ellipses where they didn't belong...

I was, and still am, furious at this blatant editorial butchering. As all poets know, each word in a poem is specifically chosen to create a specific effect. That rule was especially true in this minimalist poem, Tree of Seasons. I can live with editing that is necessarily and properly done, but this editor changed things that altered the intended meaning of my verses.

I wrote back to him, explaining what I'd attempted to do in the poem. I even sent the galleys back with some compromise suggestions of my own. He wrote back to me telling me that he couldn't take those suggestions. The poem would go in his way or not at all. He refused to see my point; just couldn't understand about the effect I'd been trying to achieve.

The end result of all this discussion was that I pulled the poem and have since had it published elsewhere... with praise from those editors, who apparently liked what I was trying to do with the words.