This course will introduce students to the editorial principles, material and institutional infrastructure, and collaborative practices of literary evaluation in the making of contemporary American poetry. How does a poem 'make it' into the pages of Chicago Review . . . or The Paris Review? How do individual readers and editorial collectives imagine the work of literary assessment and aesthetic judgment in our time? We will begin the course with a survey of new directions in Anglophone poetry as a preparation for an intensive editorial practicum in the evaluation and assessment of literary manuscripts in the second half of the term. Course work will include reviewing and evaluating manuscript submissions to the Phoenix Poets book series at the University of Chicago Press.