Why Is Cheers Still Relevant? Because Submitting to Lit Mags Still Sucks.
Diane Chambers is one of TV's most insufferable know-it-alls, but you have to feel for her in the episode where she submits a poem to a lit mag and is outdone by an unlikely character.
You’re reading Part I of a two-part series on Cheers, Diane Chambers, and literary magazine submissions on PopPoetry. Subscribe to get the next installment in your inbox as soon as it posts!
Unlike fine wine, good denim, and Ted Danson, Cheers hasn’t aged well. The NBC sitcom, which ran for 11 seasons on NBC between 1982 and 1993, garnered massive ratings in an age where huge swaths of the population could still be expected to glue their eyeballs to the same things. The show is routinely cited on “best shows ever made” lists and the like and still boasts many devoted fans.
However, the volatile, even violent relationship between Sam Malone (Danson) and Diane Chambers (Shelley Long) is downright hard to watch, and part of the show’s larger problem with attitudes toward women and marginalized people. Tired “my wife the nag” one-liners from Norm, Carla’s quips about women wanting to be “controlled,” and garden-variety homophobia litter the episodes as well, which is to say nothing of the show’s overwhelming whiteness. It’s not easy to watch in 2022.
And yet, I’ve found there’s one thing that’s still relevant about the show: its depiction of the difficult and emotionally draining process of submitting poetry to literary magazines.
Having your work published and sharing it with a community is thrilling, but the process just sucks, right? It takes a great deal of time (if you’re doing it right), often requires money to accomplish, and results mainly in rejection. Many journals take months (and yes, sometimes a year or more) to respond. Some never respond at all.
And then there’s the rejection notice itself: sometimes it’s a dead-eyed form letter, other times it’s a long and flowery rejection that attempts to make you feel better about your work but just ends up making you indignant. Other times you receive a “tiered” rejection of a higher order: the close but no cigar of these kinds of letters. The process of submitting to a lit mag is so strenuous and competitive that often all one has to hold onto for ages is a series or sprinkling of such tiered rejections.
But sometimes your work makes it into print, and you start to feel like the protagonist of your own story: every song is for you, every patch of sunshine and every smile from a stranger an indication that life is good and you are doing the thing. You get to have your work communicate with the work of others, and you have the chance to move someone who might need your words more than they know. And, let’s not forget, publication is expected and even required of many folks who teach or aim to make their living (or at least some of it) in literary spaces.
Thus many of us keep involving ourselves in this process even though it means living in a constant state of rejection punctuated by bright spots. And there are many problems with the current landscape of literary publishing: its whiteness, its patriarchy, its insularity, its capitalism… I could go on. There are those who are unafraid to call this system out on its face, but they are few and far between.
Though publishing is somewhat more diverse and has moved many of its activities online since the 1980s, the universe of rejection and gatekeeping that writers who wish to publish must enter hasn’t changed all that much since the mid-1980s world of Cheers’ fifth season. Episode 10 is almost entirely about the submission of poetry to a literary magazine, and though some of its territory is well-worn, revisiting the plot of this episode offers an encapsulation of submission blues, some interesting insights about women’s authorship, and a handy Dos and Dont’s guide to submitting. Thanks, Diane!
Diane Chambers: Aspiring Poet
In the Season 5 episode “Everyone Imitates Art,” Diane submits her poetry to a fictitious literary journal called Szygy,1 which is apparently “dedicated to publishing the prose and poetry that’s right on the cutting edge.”
In response to her poem, Diane has received a letter that she profoundly misunderstands. She hands it to Frasier, glowing. He tells her that it’s a rejection letter, to which she replies “It’s not a rejection letter. It’s a soon and inevitably to be accepted letter.”
Diane reads out the part of the letter that excited her most: “‘Your work is not entirely without promise…’ They’re almost begging for another submission!” she gushes. Ah, to have that kind of delusion. It must be comforting. Like one of those oversize knit blankets made with yarn the diameter of a softball.
But even Sam recognizes that Diane has received a form letter. In this respect, he’s right. But he soon shows off his limited understanding of what poetry is and can do. When he bets Diane he could write a poem and receive the same kind of “soon and inevitably to be accepted letter” as she did, Diane chides him, reminding him that poetry is “very difficult.”
“What’s the big deal?” he asks. “All you gotta do is rhyme.”
Diane points out that modern poetry doesn’t have to rhyme, and Sam pronounces the task “even easier, then.” The time-worn erroneous idea that free verse poetry is, to quote Robert Frost, like playing tennis without a net, is on full display, here. And so are some other formatting notions of the time: “Don’t forget to capitalize the first letter,” Diane calls out to Sam as he begins to scribble on a notepad at the bar.
Sam sets out to get himself rejected just to prove to Diane that the letter she received was indeed a rejection for her poem. But things don’t quite work out that way.
Sam Malone, Published Poet
Three weeks go by. Diane comes into Cheers and finds Sam with a copy of Syzygy next to him on the bar. He tells Diane that he wanted to get to know the journal better if he was going to get serious about poetry. Diane calls this effort “commendable,” and she’s right! More about this later.
Sam says he’s found a poem he really enjoys and asks Diane to read it aloud. “Page 37,” he directs her.
“Nocturne,” Diane reads out, “by Sam Malone… AH!!!!”
It seems that Sam didn’t just get the same treatment as Diane: he did better. The journal has apparently published his poem. Perhaps the most unrealistic aspect of the episode isn’t that Sam could write a poem that could be published in a literary journal, but that said poem would go from submission to print publication in just three weeks, but I digress.
Sam’s poem contains the following lines, which Diane reads out loud:
I fly through a puckish arena where echoes dance where echoes dance where echoes dance
Diane accuses him of plagiarism, but Sam just gloats and enjoys watching her squirm. Distraught beyond words, Diane sets out to find the source of the poem she believes Sam to have plagiarized, and along the way writes a string of unfinished, vitriolic poems with obvious, terrible titles: “Hurricane of Wills,” “The Death of a Shallow Man,” “A Bartender Dismembered,” etc.
It gets worse before it gets better: at the episode’s climax, Woody sends in a poem and gets rejected as well, compounding Diane’s misery and leading her to announce that she has “peaked” and is nothing more than a waitress who will never publish poetry.
But all is not lost! In a subsequent post, I’ll dig into the episode’s extremely weird resolution, its link to the issue of women’s authorship throughout time, and some Dos and Dont’s for literary magazine submission.
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