Thou shalt not omit commas

Here’s one of the oddest requirements for submitting to literary journals that I’ve ever come across:

‘Ensure that poems are properly and fully punctuated’.

So at a stroke this particular journal would presumably have excluded, for example, e e cummings, T S Eliot, Sylvia Plath, Nick Laird and Ilya Kaminsky, to name just a few that come to mind.

I suppose it’s a good way of reducing the amount of submissions they have to read. But glancing through a print issue I happen to have, I note that one or two seem to have slipped past the editor’s attention.