memorial for a brilliant woman

Thursday, March 27, 2008

Are you common?? Gotta love stats

From the Virginia Quarterly Review:
The ten most common titles of submissions that we’ve received in the past year:
Remember
Smoke
Revelation
Work
Grace
Waiting
Insomnia
Voyeur
Butterfly
Reunion

and (from their blog)

Those Vital Clichés
By Waldo Jaquith
March 14th, 2008
This was supposed to be a blog entry about how authors submit poetry to us covering clichéd topics that there’s just no way we’re going to print. But then I did the math, calculating the percentage of our submissions and published work that contain any of a dozen mainstays of poetic terminology, and found that precisely the opposite is true.
submitted/published
water 19.9%/24.8%
death 14.1%/15.2%
blood 11.7%/13.8%
stone 11.1%/16.0%
bone 9.1%/ 7.8%
poetry 7.6%/10.3%
heart 7.5%/6.7%
fish 7.0%/5.3%
birth 5.5%/7.4%
darkness 3.9%/17.0%
rust 3.3%/2.5%
cat 2.3%/2.8%

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