Whoa last issue of Kenning!? That's a bummer. QUESTION: What was your biggest takeaway from Kenning? REPEATED QUESTION FROM IRC: What was so good about the production value of the chapbook?
OK, so, to answer your first question/questions about Kenning - Yup! Last issue! As you can tell by my complete lack of Kenning Blog updates for several months, we have had this (our closing doors) planned for a while. I think we did good work while we were at it. Some people seemed to even really like us, which is nice, and I think we three editors can be sufficiently proud. My biggest takeaway is that reading through slush piles is soooo hard. Doing it week after week, month after month? Really hard to keep doing it. And corralling multiple editors into doing it, and leaving comments, and coming to a consensus on any potentially interesting piece? VERY HARD. Over my time in the trenches I definitely gained much more understanding of why it can take literary magazines so long to respond, and I also began to appreciate much more the time that editors put into literary magazines. I actually added a little sentence or two to my general cover letter template stating that I understand how much time it takes to run a magazine like they do, and thanking them for the investment of their time and themselves in me and my work. Also, running Kenning blog was good for me - it made me look at poetry a lot more, do a lot of reading, and analyze greater trends and so on, I think it really made me more knowledgeable about and aware of poetry - but damn that shit was hard and I was not sad to let it go after 2.5 years. That was a solid time to keep a blog running with an average of a post every 2 weeks. I am not sad to see Kenning go, but I am glad for the time I spent with it and the lessons it taught me.
Here is some extra - pictures of chapbook attempting to demonstrate 'production value' Note especially presence of ISBN