Poet-ish

2010-03-17T07:53:00.003-05:00

Where is the re-set button for this week? How quickly can I push it and how quickly can the last couple of days be filled of Epic Re-do?

2010-03-07T17:56:00.002-06:00

So I totally sent out 5 submissions last week on my "scheduled" Journal Submission Jam Out Day. I have 2 others that I need to send but haven't yet for two reasons: 1. I have been swamped and these are online submissions, which means taking a few minutes to make sure that I properly create and format documents for them and then sign up for the journal's submissions manager--and blah blah blah, and I have just been bizz-eee, and 2. they are journals that are really new for me to submit to, and while I all on all like the direction they move in, I have noticed some pieces in the last few years that I don't really love. Not like just a small 2 stanza poem that reminded me of the poetic equivalent of limp spaghetti, but I all in all did. not. like. them. And this has lead me to a huge internal inquiry over whether or not I can define a journal--and whether or not I like it enough to "ask it out on a date" vis-a-vis my poems--on the few pieces I don't like or whether I should go with the majority of things that I like so much that I reach for the journal whenever I find it on a bookstore magazine rack.

Oh holy shit that was a long sentence.

Anyhow, this inquiry has become more complicated than it may have been, say, a year ago, because I am now what I was not a year ago: the poetry editor of a small-but-respectable literary journal. It has made me think about the poems I selected for my journal (out next month! Come find us at AWP!) and how other people will make their submissions decisions based on what I have chosen. All in all I like them, but then again--they are reflective of the aesthetic range that tends to excite me and that I think I could confidently share not only with my friends and the people I look up to but also with anyone who is one of my students in an undergraduate poetry workshop (ok, ok, there are maybe a couple of poems that might make some of my students from last spring look at me in a panic, but if those poems are read in the context of the section, I think that my students could dig on them when push comes to shove). All of this is to say that I have been driven to this long, meandering question-river in my head over the responsibility of an editor to her readers (even when she doesn't know who they really really really are...) and what responsibility an editor has to make her section something that is so engaging to her that she suspects that maybe the right readers will find the journal, that these 'right readers' might ultimately become 'the right people to submit their poems next year', that all of this might have some role--miniscule though it may be--in giving authenticity to voices that she believes in and giving hope to people who might want that same sort of validity.

And I realize as I am typing all of this out that there is no right answer. I think ultimately what I need to do is, on Thursday when I know I can schedule a half hour to prepare online submissions, just put that time in my day planner, open up my laptop, and not think so damn much over something that has no objective answers, and just send the submissions. Come hell or high water (or, well, come long wait or quick rejection).

Anyhow, lovelies, this is all that I have for you. Too bad y'all don't live here. On the fly, earlier today, I decided to invite a couple of my friends over for dinner. I am making my pork tenderloin. It's marinating in a mixture of brown mustard/aged balsamic/ garnacha/herbes de provence/cranberries. It'll be served with roasted new potatoes with rosemary and sea salt and a great salad of spinach, strawberries, goat cheese, walnuts, balsamic vinaigrette (natch). It is time for me to close my laptop, put away the papers I am slowly grading, and put my Super Chef To The Rescue hat on!

2010-03-01T08:02:00.002-06:00

Today I do a realistic, good, solid, "what feels good in my gut" sort of plotting session.
I also play the role of Hunter and Gatherer. Which is to say that today I go to the office supply store and get envelopes, I go to the post office and get stamps, I go to journal websites and get addresses. And then I update and personalize my cover letter template and start filling out the right addresses, the right journal names within paragraphs, etc.

Tomorrow I print stuff out. I stuff envelopes, write addresses on their vast, white envelope-ness, stick the stamps in the corners, and drop things off in the post office box.

I feel good about sending to journals again. The neuroses will be there (I mean--this is ME, after all. Queen of Neuroses. Queen of Heart, yeah, but Queen of Neuroses par excellence. Greek-Girl-Style. Boston-Girl-Style. Whirlygig-Style.) But I can at least try to manage the neuroses by acknowledging when the submission anxiety arises, around which journals it happens to dwell, and then shaking things up--adding in new journals to this year's fold, eliminating journals that in the last 18 or so months have given anxiety, and then just breathing in and breathing out.

So my poems were on 'yoga retreat' so to speak last month. It was nice, towards the month's end, to feel like I needed to submit, even if the anxiety was still there. I guess what I mean to say--really--is that it's sort of nice to feel the NEED to submit and to have that feeling come more swiftly and strongly than the anxiety over what will and will not reach my mailbox and when.

It's March. It's time to get back to work. The weather this morning feels a bit "lamb"ish, but I need to be a bit "lion"ish in how I approach the business of my writing (even though the art of my writing has been more 'fallow field' than 'field of sunflowers and awesomness' lately).

2010-02-23T11:32:00.002-06:00

I think that reading lunch and reading the e-mailed rejection letters are two things that go together. It goes something like this:

Make really quite nutritious lunch that's quick and easy (thank you, frozen foods aisle from Trader Joe's!)
Curl up on sofa with a big glass of water and a bowl of Quite Nutritious Lunch
Open laptop, turn to Preffered E-mail Website
Click on the new mail button
Notice with a mild "oh, it only took them 4.5 months..." that I have mail from Journal In Question
Read new e-mail
Take another bite of Quite Nutritious Lunch

And it goes something like this...

Dear Stephanie...Thank you for sending us your work...blah blah blah...E-mail submissions are new to us...blah blah blah...Your work made it all the way through our reading cycle...blah blah blah...Sorry, we're not publishing you...blah blah blah...Submit to us again...blah blah blah...Sincerely, Your New BFF Wanna-bes At Journal That Rejects You After A Sizable Wait

And as I chew my lunch and diligently (notice that adverb! Rarely am I diligent! Rarely, I tell you!!! And rarely do I use adverbs in my own writing! See how special this is??) wash my dishes as I listen to iPod music (Radiohead and The Killers make for excellent dish-washing and kitchen-cleaning music, by the way), my mind does that overactive thing it does:

it rewrites the rejection note.

And, ultimately, it reads something like this:

Dear Stephanie,

We hope that you'll let us say that you shit rainbows, that all of your activities are morally upright and environmentally friendly, that every word you right is a perfect illumination of the rainbows you have just shit, and that you understand how very much and how very facetiously we are sitting here trying to kiss you ass. We hope that you will focus on that--and let us enrich your vocabulary with great adverbs like facetiously--instead of focusing on how long we took to give you a thumbs up or down. And we hope that you, in your overworked, overly-neurotic little poet-mind, will make it "mean something" that we did take our time! Maybe you will even think you are good! That your shit deserves to look, smell, and taste like rainbows! But, when push comes to shove, we think your poems suck for our collective taste and have determined (through great, vast, grant-funded and hugely important scientific research) that your poems are in fact shit, not rainbows. We like rainbows in our journal. Send to us, especially if you write a poem about shit being alchemically transformed into rainbows. That might be something worth our consideration. Include a pretty adverb or two, while you're at it. We might like that. Or, at least, we might chuckle facetiously at it.

Sincerely,
People Who Want To See Rainbows Everywhere We Go

* * * * *

So yeah. That's what happens when I am diligent and I wash my kitchen dishes after eating lunch like someone who is a good, responsible, cleanliness-minded adult. My Inner Snarkalopoulos seems to come out in spades and get all revisionist on the asses of the journal editors that have decided--despite numerous months of consideration (that I should sincerely feel honored about!)--to pass on my work even though they liked parts of it (perhaps what they liked--to bring out My Inner Joke-alopoulos again--was my minimal use of adverbs and my distinct inability to write the words "shit" and "rainbows" into my poems?).

And I am, the next day, left with an apathetic "ehh" and shoulder shrug and a sense that after I get through this really quite hectic and exhausting week and weekend (in which I think it will be "a damn good night" if I get 5 hours sleep on any given night) I should turn back to My Robotic Self's propensity to send work out and not really overthink it. And see wherever I may land.

2010-02-21T15:29:00.003-06:00

So as a brief bit of confession: right now I have no desire whatsoever to send my poems out. None. Zilcho. I'm sort of fed up with submissions and waiting...and waiting...and waiting...and the little neurotic workings of my head that want to make the waiting mean something.

But I am going to push that aside. February has been a bit hard with the not sending out! And looking at my submission tracking sheet, it's really maybe 1/3 of my poems that are out right now at journals (and maybe more than that out at contests, but let's not go there...). I think I need to just trust, right now, the robotic activity of sending things out, buying more envelopes, and sending more things out. I think I need to not make my general air of apathy mean something but, instead, let the lack of passion and desire inside me sort of be my cue to send my work out.

So I am organizing work into packets for March 1 send out. I think I am only going to send out to 3 journals per month. Just to put a bit of a limit on my frustration but to still keep my stuff out there.

Oof. There are definitely days (and sometimes this means weeks...or months...) when I wish I hadn't been shoved down the rabbit hole. Seriously...

2010-02-14T09:59:00.002-06:00

So the last few years in poetry have been so full of crazy loss. For me, at the very least, it is felt like this:

Liam Rector
Jason Shinder
Deborah Digges
Rachel Wezsteon
Lucille Clifton

I think there's more. Somehow, these five are branded into my heart. The loss of these people is something I feel deeply, because even though I have never met any of them, many of them are close friends of some of my greatest mentors and guides in this world. And all of them, through their poems, have taught me something and have been there for me more profoundly than I can really say right now.

At the same time though, a new space has been etched out. And then filled. There are these new poetry friends I have made. (It's one of the reasons why I think I will always keep a facebook site, no matter how high I build those protections...) And there are these young new poets whose books (glory be to first book contests!) have entered my world of understanding and love.

And I realize again and again how the world is not the sum of its parts (i.e. some wounds appear and others come in to fill them). It expands. And the risk for how much there is to lose expands, deepens, gets more oaky and rounded. And I am humbled by it all. Even in times where my faith in everyone and everything is starting to reach a serious pitch and when my heart is in the middle of the strangest hardening, I am overwhelmed by the vastness of it all. And somehow, I am reminded that even though I might have very little faith right now in my own capacity to love and be loved (and--through this--to write), I am, beneath my doubt, profoundly loved and spreading love. And I am in the most amazingly glorious matrix of loving and being loved. I am in the middle of such a vast and intensely awesome world of poetry.

2010-02-10T13:24:00.002-06:00

I'm taking my poems on a yoga retreat, y'all. This means that they can't be submitted to places and things (except book contests and a couple of very specific contests that I had planned a long enough time ago to send to). They also can not receive your cell phone calls (no reception on Yoga Retreat Island), or your e-mails, tweets, facebook status updates, or anything else.

I'm not a twisty-bendy person, and I don't write twisty-bendy poems. But I am taking them off to Yoga Retreat Island--in a lovely place of seclusion and easy-breathing--so that they can try twisting and bending and recover without having to face the world. They might be back and in the routine of submissions (or, as I think of it, walking the Poetry Catwalk--up for acceptance or rejection in what sometimes feels like scarily visible ways and which could result in SHAMEFUL gossip on Page Six of the New York Post...for sure...) maybe in March or maybe in April. But definitely by May. They just need a major time out right now.

That's all. Carry on.

2010-02-01T10:14:00.002-06:00

The options:

1. January was just a bad journal karma month (rejection in my e-mail on New Year's Day, silly and sismissive message from a journal when I inquired about something I submitted over the summer and their "oh sorry, we're behind"--but somewhat annoyingly written--response, a rejection last week from a Journal I Officially Love after they had my work for 4.5 months, which is fine, but the fact that my note was on a very ripped up piece of paper was not fine). February might be better?

2. The stage has been set up for a Bad Karma Year for journal submissions (see #1 parenthetical). I should hide under a rock until it begins 2011?

3. The journal submissions might be bad this year but, in a cosmic and karmic sense of equillibrium, my book manuscript will do well in contests.

4. I am just fucked. 2010 marks a decade of gloom and doom for me, and I may as well hide out in a Crazy Person commune in, I don't know, South Dakota and grow my hairs long and do the Oogie Woogie dance around a campfire and not do anything related to the business of writing until at least 2020.

My thoughts:

I would like to be an optimistic little bugger and say that #1 is the case, but I fear #2 is the case. I would be OK with it if #3 were the case, because then at least there might be the chance that I would emerge from a bad journal submissions year with a book (!!!). Which could be fabulous. If #4 is the case, then please shoot me now and bury me in a coffin filled with camembert and Spanish goat cheese because if I really am fucked, I should at least have as much good cheese as possible.

And this, my friends, is as articulate as I get on a Monday morning.

doo-wopping the day away...

2010-01-22T17:22:00.002-06:00

doo-wop doo-wop doo-wop
doo-wop doo-wop doo-wop
doo-wop doo-wop doo-wop
doo-wop doo-wop doo-wop

doo-doo-doo-doo
(snap snap snap snap)

doo-doo-doo-doo
(snap snap snap snap)

Oh mister postman...oh I love you so...
Oh mister postman...oh I hope you know...
I waited by my box, but oh I had to go...

(snap snap snap snap)
(hum hum hum hum)

It just seemed so wrong to wait again...
I hope that you will decide to be my friend...
Oh mister postman...when will my torture end...

(snap snap snap snap)
(hum hum hum hum)

doo-wop doo-wop doo-wop
doo-wop doo-wop doo-wop
doo-wop doo-wop doo-wop
doo-wop doo-wop doo-wop

Oh mister postman, I want your stuff...
Those envelopes, the ones that aren't all fluff...
My box's empty days have felt so rough...

(snap snap snap snap)
(hum hum hum hum)

So now I'm telling you, my heart you break in two...
Whenever you hold letters and say "they're not for you"...
Please tell those editors to tell me what to do...

With all of my poems, the ones that I have sent...
Oh mister postman, won't you be my friend...
Oh mister editor, won't you let this waiting end...

doo-wop doo-wop doo-wop
doo-wop doo-wop doo-wop
doo-wop doo-wop doo-wop
doo-wop doo-wop doo-wop

(snap snap snap snap)
(hum hum hum hum)

.................yeah, so I am still sitting here in a virtual USPS no-man's land. The advertisements for stupid Domino's Pizza keep on coming. Reminders to pay my electricity bills keep on coming. My January submissions have all ("long since" given our placement in the month of January...) been sent out, and this afternoon I had my first thought, while washing my hands for what I think is the millionth time today, of where I might want to send out poems for February, whether I might want to hit the mail trail extra hard given that most journals-at-schools will be well enough into the semester that reading-and-deciding activities should be kicked into relatively high gear, and so on and so forth.

And I wonder about the stuff I have out from two submissions from summer sending that I still have no response to. And I wonder about the one or two September submissions I still have no response to. And I wonder about the October submissions I have no response to (but somehow think I might hear from in the next couple of weeks). And then I look at the slowly growing pile of pennies by my little stereo, and I wonder if I should start finding little wishing ponds or water fountains to toss them into and make lovely and hefty wishes. Not that it will do anything (I am, these days, in a pretty significant low-belief-in-magic zone, which is potentially ruinous...). But still. Praying for carrier pigeons to bring me notice does nothing. Rubbing the little preserved square of the basketball court's flooring at the gym at my university--which PROMISES good luck--does nothing. Sending out more poems, so far, does nothing (and sending out my manuscript--well the jury is out on THAT one...).

It's all a crap shoot. Nothing will do anything and everything will do nothing.

So I choose to make up stupid, wishful doo-wop songs to my very own Mister Post Man and hope that he will, for once, bring me decisions from journals instead of more advertisements for horrible American fast-food, or bills, or catalogs for stores I can not in the life of me build up a desire to shop at.

2010-01-16T12:18:00.002-06:00

Dear Journal I Like:

You are awesome. I want you to like me and my poems as much as I like you and what you publish. I know you're down with simultaneous submissions, but you have had my work for over 5 months. What I think is great about you, though, is that when I e-mailed you and asked about the status of my submission, you responded. Promptly. As in: within four or five hours. I appreciate that. What I hate is the diplomatic-sounding line that goes something like "yeah, the recession and small operations mean that sometimes we take forever...sorry..." That wordage gets really tired really fast. Still, though, you responded quickly and told me that y'all will get around to reading my poems. For that, I appreciate your quick response. Even with the totally beat-out words.

The jury is still out on whether or not you get my love.
We shall see.

toodles-poodles,
SK

Dear Other Journal I Like (NO: Make that Dear Journal I Really Kind Of Sort Of Really Love),

You've had my work for over 4 months. I really hope this means that you've been reading and re-reading and falling more and more in love with the poems I sent you. I know this may not necessarily be true. I'm down with the fact that you have this sim-sub friendly policy, but still. Please. You are situated at a university, and I think this means you have students reading for you. I hope to hear from you soon. I hope that your lag time in responding to me doesn't mean that my poems are STILL sitting un-read and my envelope is still sitting unopened in your wire-mesh little inbox. Can you wrap it up please and let me know? My mailbox longs for your response. I long to get mail that is not bills and not flyers for ridiculous shit like Domino's Pizza. I long, specifically, to get my lovely little SASE back from you. I did, after all, purchase a stamp and stick it on the envelope. And I did, after all, write my name legibly and spell your name--and your state university (which is in the state of my current state university)--all nicely and properly.

Send me some love. Or send me some non-love. Whatever. Send me something.

I Will Virtually Bat My Eyelashes At You If It Means You Will Respond To Me Soon,
SK

Dear Journal I Sometimes Like And Sometimes Don't,

I have not sent to you this time around. Not since the summer. I got a response, and that was cool. I think I am not sending to you in a few years. I want to like you. Really. I do. You're well respected, you're housed at a well-respected MFA program (and in the state in which I was born!), and you have published some of my friends. But really? After years of getting your personal notes of "thank you for sending to us! We liked your work!" and smiley-faces at the bottom of rejection slip after rejection slip, I just don't think that I can bring myself to send to you again. It's sort of like when my mom took a look at her holiday card sending list, a handful or two of years ago, and shifted around based on who had been sending her cards and what seemed like just an unreciprocated effort.

You give me no love, and though you put together a decent rag (even if there are a handful of issues in the last handful or two of years I didn't find thrilling), I think that I don't have energy to give you love anymore.

I don't hate you. I just need to bat my eyelashes at other people. I hope you understand.

ta ta,
SK

2010-01-13T16:34:00.003-06:00

OK, so it goes something like this: I had down-time on Saturday afternoon after finishing the work I wanted to get done and before meeting up with Some Dude I Had A Strange Coffee Date With at the cafe where I was headquartering. This meant that, wanting to keep myself busy, I pulled out a scrap paper, wrote down the list of journals I want to submit to in January, wrote poem combinations I thought might work, and began the submissions strategy that I thought I had sufficiently cordoned off until Sunday. When I got home, I compared my little squiggles and scraps of thoughts to my meticulous (!!!) and shiny (!!!!!) and long-standing (since 2001!!!!!) Excel spreadsheet that I have as my own low-fi, super-reliable sort of submissions tracker just to make sure that what I thought I wanted to send was really what was best for me to send.

It happens like that. One day off, but in the moments where the downtime strikes and in proximity to when I thought I would do This Particular Work. (Capital letters needed there. For Sure.)

And it happens like this: sending things off on Monday turns into sending things off on Wednesday. Six journals became four definites, one "gotta wait till later because of the website's submissions guidelines" sort of a submission for me to re-think and one other submission that I want to think through very carefully before I send out. Note that when I say "think through carefully," it's not a matter of some ridiculous reality television show-like sort of strategy and neuroses. It's something entirely different. It's more like, for as much as I think I get the journal's general gist and as much as I have known I wanted to submit there, it's a new place for me to send poems. And I want to dig through their website, read table of contents that might be archived from the last couple of years, and make sure that I am entirely cool with the grouplet of poems I am sending off into the world.

When I think about it--and when I look through my submissions spreadsheet--I think about how my submissions have changed over time. I still get rejection after rejection (which makes me utterly un-special...it's sort of the name of the game, right?), but I at least feel more solid about the poems I send out. When I was younger (and ahh! more carefree! maybe more daring! more easily romanced! and maybe more filled with that little kick of je ne sais quoi!), I just submitted. I was like a robotic little bullet train. If I had a poem that seemed free or that I liked, I sent it out like crazy. It's good, because I wasn't so emotionally invested in the business of my writing and what happens with it, but it's also horrible. There's a naivete to that sort of an approach that is, perhaps, not the most becoming of me to portray to journals that I hope, somehow, someday, will publish what I write. I simultaneously submitted like crazy. I got rejected, but if I were to get a poem into a journal, I would have been overwhelmed with the amount of places I had also sent it and had to try to get into quick contact with.

But now, it's a bit different. I try, often as possible, to remind myself that I am not a precious precious snowflake when it comes to my work. What I write now is infinitely stronger, more interesting, more textured than what I wrote when I was starting my MFA program and sending out like wildfire (it BETTER be more interesting, after all of this time and education...), and I generally have more faith in the poems as they are. I care about the arrangement of my poems in the submissions and what poems I group together. It doesn't matter, to me, that some journals will just accept one poem per poet and others like to publish multiples. I want the poems themselves to stand in the best possible light for being read by first-tier readers and then genre editors of the journals I send to. I want to make sure that whatever poem I send to the journal I choose to send it to seems like the most appropriate fit for the journal. I want to make sure that I don't overwhelm the reader with some of the things that seem strongest for my voice as a writer and then turn these same things, for my reader, into absolute weaknesses that I just can't seem to get past. I want to charm my reader and seduce my reader and totally "wow" my reader. Or, at the very least, make sure that I have done everything possible to even think that I have tried to win my reader over. And, at the same time, I want to give my poems a fair shot at publication (I still simultaneously submit) while keeping the tracking work, for me, to a reasonable level (I tend to not sim-sub a poem to more than 3 places at any given point in time. This has proven manageable for me to handle).

The shift in approach has changed bit by bit over time, but I think that my shifting vision--and my time-shift into scheduling "submission days" (despite the fuzzy thing of having it actually be a day before or a few days later...)--came *most* powerfully when I began editing the poetry section of a journal at my university. There's something about reading submission after submission and balancing my vision with the integrity of the submissions I have in front of me to read--and in thinking about who my first readers are (and what they know and might not know, what they might and might not care about in poetry, etc.) that has made me just a bit more thoughtful, on the whole, of what I send of myself out there. I feel quite fortunate to have gotten a journal acceptance in May, one in late June, and then two during this past fall semester (which makes that *four* acceptances within one calendar year--and within a 6.5 month time span--not bad!!). And I know that the poems I am sending out these days are perhaps the best I have ever had to send out. But still--it makes me think about how much I have learned in just this small business of submitting my work. And it makes me realize that for as much as I have learned, I have more to still learn. And I think that's pretty damn awesome.

More coming soon. I think I like, though, how this journal is going. I think I am going to keep it focused as much as possible (though perhaps not exclusively) on my journey through the "business" of writing (journals, contests, etc.) and on some of the insights, distinctions, and other lessons I have learned--and am learning--in the world of being a student in a doctoral program that works very hard to set its students up for the "business" and "professionalization" side of this thing that we do.

For those of you who've been reading the little bits and pieces I have been putting up here these last few months, thanks! Y'all are awesome!

2010-01-08T11:38:00.003-06:00

Dear Poetry Journals I Like Very Much,

Next week you will not know what hit you. My poems will be in your mail pile. Sunday is my 'January strategy day' and Monday is my 'journal blitzkrieg-style mail-out day.' You'd be fools to not read my poems with love and openness. No matter what you ultimately decide. But if you ultimately decide to publish me, I just might have to give you big hugs. And tubes of deep red lip gloss. Because that's how I roll. I may not be so frilly and girly, but I am serious about my lip gloss. And trust me, your life will be better for it if you find gifts of appreciation and love from me in the form of lip gloss fabulousness. And then we can meet up with each other at AWP and give high-fives and go get glasses of wine. And maybe some cheese. Because the world is better with cheese and wine. And lip gloss. And kick-ass poetry.

That's all. Now go shine on. Even in the face of all of the nasty snow and the biting coldness and the brillo pad-grey skies out there.

Bye bye,
SK

PS--I am sending my friends your way, too. Their poems are pretty freaking amazing and kick ass. Y'all better have the good sense to read their work very closely and carefully, too. You might find yourselves in a far better karmic place than the editor of That Journal That E-mailed Me A Reject On new Year's Day. And you don't want bad karma on your skin or on your book binding machines in a time when budgets get slashed and some journals are in jeopardy when it comes to their life span. Seriously. I'm just sayin'.

2010-01-04T08:43:00.003-06:00

Dear Editors of Journal I Like So Very Much:

I appreciate your reading my work, and I appreciate that you e-mailed me a not-dickheaded-sounding rejection letter a reasonable and approximate 2 months after I electronically submitted my poems, but why you had to e-mail me your rejection slip on New Year's Day--when we poets are a tightly-wired, neurotic, sometimes suspicious lot prone to interesting conceptions of good and bad luck--I have no idea. You run a savvy journal. It's why I submitted my stuff to you. Why does your sense of savvy-ness not extend to your sense of manners and etiquette? Is there a charm school you can go to to right yourself?

Please.

Think about it.

Despite the rejection, and despite your dickheaded timing, I still love your journal. And I will still continue to submit my work in the hopes that someday I will get an acceptance from you. But still, I'm just saying. Consider timing. No one wants one of their first e-mails (ok, ok, their first NOT SPAM e-mails...) to be a rejection note. It colors the year ahead (and--gulp--the DECADE ahead...) in a slightly ugly kind of way. And it's definitely not cool.

Thanks.
And keep on putting out a good journal.

Yours,
SK

Recipe for Poetry Awesomeness (read: how to build community with poetry friends and colleagues)

2009-11-24T09:03:00.004-06:00

The ingredients:
poetry friends
laptops & a wifi connection
a running list (or printed out stack) of poems we want to send to literary journals
wine
cheese & crackers
chocolate
one afternoon when we know we can knock out a few hours without interruptions

Directions:
1. Invite poetry friends, colleagues, workshopmates, programmates, acquaintances, etc. over to your house on a designated day and time for a journal submission jam-out. Promise wine and cheese, so much as your budget (whether expansive or tight) can afford. Invite them to bring snacks or beverages or nothing but a big ol' smile. Promise to hook friends up with the password to your wifi and promise to play DJ for the stereo and that the music will include a little bit of what everyone likes, so far as you know listening preferences.

2. Clean apartment before designated day and time.

3. Open a bottle of wine and let it breathe. It can be your secret weapon--the $5 garnacha you love and use as a good old stand by. So long as it is lovingly and sincerely offered to your guests and so long as it's not shit from a box that's strawberry flavored, everyone will appreciate it regardless of whether or not they love it as much as you do. After you open the wine to let it breathe, take cheese out of the fridge and out of its wrappings so that the flavor can develop. Even a simple, inexpensive, plain cheese can be delicious if it's given enough breathing space (I had a simple, inexpensive block of colby cheese from the ONE place on campus I could get groceries and charge to my student account...the signs of a broke grad student) and the right crackers (I had flax seed multigrain crackers, which are just mild and just complicated enough in flavor--pairing that actually with a simple, not-complex block of mild colby turns out to be just right...).

4. Keep an open door policy. Whoever shows up shows up. Whoever can't make it this time might make it next time.

5. Light candles to make your apartment feel cozy and lovely. Keep certain lights strategically on and off. The key is to make people feel comfortable and warm and cozy enough that they can slug through this business of managing journal submissions OR that they feel cool enough with sharing resources. As you light candles, start thinking of a standard list of literary journals you would encourage anyone whose writing you know is engaging, interesting, lovely in its lyricism, and worthwhile-to-you to submit to.

6. Welcome guests as they trickle in. Pour glasses of wine. Set people up with your wifi connection. Put music on (Cat Power! The Decemberists! Stevie Wonder! Andrew Bird! Ella Fitzgerald! Radiohead! Iron & Wine! Death Cab!). Make pleasant and easy chit chat with people who are easy to talk to (that's why you like them!).

7. Spend the next couple of hours pulling books of poets off your shelves and looking, with friends, at the acknowledgements page--and looking at lit journal websites--and creating lists of "must submit here" places for each other--and finding a good base of 5-6 journals to submit to within the next couple of weeks--and organizing submission packets (even poem titles scrawled on a piece of paper next to the name of the journal is fine). Make sure that everyone has a good submissions tracking system, especially if they simultaneously submit. Sprinkle shop-talk with fun-talk. Drink more wine. Address envelopes.

8. After a couple of hours, once everyone has a good game plan, make sure that you all have a "promise date" for each other. In other words--if my friend L does not send her poems to the journals she said she would 'target' for now by 15 December, then I have the right to chew her out for not submitting, to breathe down her neck until she does, and to even shove addressed and stamped envelopes in her hands as I somewhat bullishly show up on her front doorstep. Make sure that she understands this. And vice-versa.

9. Give everyone huge hugs.

10. Do this again. Every month or every other month.

The result:
A good way to get to know people better. A good way to shift things from always workshopping poems to encouraging the life and possibility of these poems. A good way to build community with the poets around you that isn't based on the fact that you go to school together, or are part of the same reading series, or ________________, but that IS based around the reality of what it is to write and take it seriously: you write. You finish poems. You look for all of the pathways to connect your poems to a readership. When people do this together, it makes this whole thing feel less isolated, more real, more community-minded in a sincere and lasting sense. When this happens in an environment as calm, cozy, and laid back as someone's home, then it is as much about welcoming awesome people into your life as it is about building a work- and craft-based community. And you can sneakily feel like you got away with a little bit of 'partying' (wine! cheese! music! casual talk and laughter!) while you were doing your work.

It's worth it. Trust me.

Thankful as All Hell: A Few Thoughts on Mentorship

2009-11-22T20:09:00.000-06:00

The motley group of us--from such a strange mix of places as southern Indiana, Minneapolis, Boston, deadwood-land Illinois--had survived a strange, long week of orientation and shot-gun preparations to teach college kids for the first time. We were tired and excited for what was ahead of us and we were nervous. Who the hell were we--poets and story writers and all, despite our ages, just kids ourselves, really--to teach a bunch of college kids how to write, especially to teach future computer programmers and engineers how to write business and technical documents? Who am I now, 8 1/2 years later? But anyway. This long week was over, and we had a party to go to at a professor's house on the edge of town. He was the director, I guess, of composition or undergrad writing or whatever it was (or is), and he was equal parts distinguished academic and straight-out dude. His house had pictures everywhere of his SCUBA trips and his fishing conquests, and in that evening, these signs of his dudishness were comingling with the reminders of his academic life (i.e. the life that provided him with salary enough, I guess, to afford his version of dudishness). Students in my department and professors in my department were there. After an intense week of being around people I didn't know yet, I was in a house with tons of people who I would come to learn with and from. My head was spinning.

SW walked into the party, and I recognized her from her picture on the back of the dust jackets of her poetry collections. She had this lovely and easy charm and gracefulness about her, and I admired that. As someone who was so far away from knowing herself (despite the ways that I think my past experiences had gotten me very much in touch with "knowing myself"--at least in a way more intimate than a garden-plucked 24 year old could), I looked at SW and in an instant knew that she conveyed the way I wanted to be as I grew older and more settled in my skin. We met, and in that moment of saying hello and exchanging hugs, I knew that there was a strange, strong, and sturdy sort of a 'click.' I recognized that this was a person I would learn from and that this was a person whose criticisms and feedback and advice would circumvent the usual path straight through my insecurities, my defensive structures, and my own self-shaming. I recognized, in short, that aside from all of the reasons I had told myself that I wanted to go to this MFA program above all others, meeting this person and understanding that there were entire worlds I could not even imagine that could open up to me--or that I could open myself towards--by knowing her and learning from her--was the real reason I was there.

And I was damn lucky that it played out like that. I learned to open up my imagination, to leave myself vulnerable to things that seemed so frightening and risky in my writing--to get a bit wild, to embrace threat and uncertainty in my writing and to consider the worth and deliberacy of language and to start to translate from Greek. And I learned that I could maintain a professional sense of how to engage in an academic and creative career with someone who was also a safe space for me to deal with all of the "life shit" that had been thrown my way. I found a professor who was also my thesis advisor who, my second year of my program, made herself available to me every single week to work on my poems, talk about ideas I had about poetry and poetics, to talk about my growth as a writing teacher, and to consider ideas I had for the future--regardless of whether or not I was ready to engage in them. SW encouraged me and challenged me and pointed out, just gently enough, if it seemed like I was slacking in my writing. She encouraged me to open myself up creatively but never demanded that I write according to her sense of logic, aesthetics, imagination, or engagement. She supported my decisions when a poem was 'done' or not--no matter what she thought--so long as I could convey my reasoning with a clear, engaging, and thoughtful level of articulation. And when I was getting ready to leave my program and move back to Boston, she took me out for tea as many times as it took to make sure that I was ready to leave the program, go back to a place that I had called "home" after I had changed and grown so much, figure out a game plan for getting a job, and find my own ways of exiting this writing community that my program had fostered and be in a city with so many writing communities that, if one could find her way in (which does take T I M E), just might welcome her.

SW has been a dear friend ever since. Sometimes she e-mails me with information on fellowship or contest deadlines. Over the summer, she looked at my manuscript and offered rather helpful and important advice. When I was in Florida last March, she made the time to get together with me (despite the fact that it was 1. the middle of thesis defense time and 2. the middle of "wooing admitted applicants" time) for a glass of wine and spend some time together. She wrote recommendation letters for jobs, as I needed them written, and she wrote recommendation letters to PhD programs. She has continued to take an interest in my writing, in my publishing, and in my understanding of where my writing is headed and what work my poems do and seek to do. She really sort of made my program as memorable, productive, important, and interesting as it was for me, and she is still one of the absolute prime examples of how I want to be in this world as I continue to grow up.

In short: she wound up being a mentor. One of my two. The other, L, is a poet I worked with for most of my time in Boston post-MFA program. I joined this group that met in her house on weeknights in the summer months just hoping more than anything to have some structure for my writing (which I had strayed from as I sort of gave myself a break post-MFA and as I gave myself distance from the thesis poems--and the voices that affected them--that occupied so damn much of my writing, my time, and my thought process). I wound up with someone who showed me unconditional acceptance and love, who would encourage me to do things that I cared about even as she would be straight-up honest with me about my chances of making them happen, and who would fold me into her arms for a never-ending hug when things in my personal life neared their various breaking points. L--in ways that are quite different than SW and in ways that are as important as SW--affected my writing (she was the first person who hugely encouraged and *challenged* me to get as personal and as vulnerable as possible in my writing) and affected the way that I engage in this world with honesty, love, uncertainty, desire, and a drive that is utterly unquenchable. I learned how to be incredibly courageous in my writing from L (and from our writing group), and I learned how to journey as boldly as possible into the world with all of my love, passion, and belief as my guiding light even in the face of all of the propulsive forces towards being constantly hurt, constantly afraid, and constantly uncertain.

Mentorship is something I'm hugely passionate about and think about quite a lot, because these two experiences have left a very profound stamp on my heart and on the shape of my writing. Neither one was forced. Both were somewhat accidental and unexpected, even if I let the context in which they happened, well, happen. I keep on asking myself what happens when one has a deliberate mentor as opposed to what happens when one finds oneself in a mentorship situation. Specifically, I came to my doctoral program expecting that whoever I would ask to be my dissertation director would be that person who I just recognized as a mentor. This is maybe incredibly naîve, but I will own up to the thinking I had when I came here. Last summer, I thought about this idea a lot. My program director reminded me that I do not necessarily need any one person as my mentor. At first, I sort of bristled at that. My experiences had been otherwise, and my instinct to find a mentor (of a sort) from what was available to me seemed hugely questioned.

But something happened in my thinking. As I worked more and more on my manuscript over the summer and as I transitioned from "hey, I have enough like-minded poems for a manuscript! Let me figure this cool thing out!" to something more solid, more knowing, more inquisitive and more thoughtful and focused on what the poems in front of me needed to really hold together as a manuscript, and as I transitioned from the novelty of having a manuscript towards a sincere desire to give my little baby every chance possible ot make it in the big bad world of first book contests, I learned that maybe Scott was right. Maybe it's that I have everything I need right in front of me (the poems were mine, after all, and look--there they were, in their nice collection, with their own confidence in some things and their own room to grow in other ways). Maybe it's that I could benefit from someone to oversee a process (which the dissertation is--it's a process--you choose a reading list, you take your comprehensive exams, you write a scholarly introduction, you present them in front of a committee that cheers you on and wants to see you do well, and you work--more and more and more--to know yourself as a scholar, as a professionalized writer, and as a scholar-writer). Maybe it's that, while I still had a lot to learn and still HAVE a lot to learn, more of the answers were already deep inside me if I would still myself enough to listen for them from beneath the insecurities, the doubt, and the questioning.

Though I am still working a lot on how I reach out for help (right now it winds up looking like a huge spitwad of my insecurities and unknowing being flung with a great, crazy Greek girl "oh my god you need to help me, you know so much, can you help me?" I know that it will transform into something much more composed--something that is wrapped in the charm and articulation that I continue to learn from my dear SW and something that can still convey the passion, desire, and love of my beloved L), I think I have gotten better at listening to myself and listening for the answers in my heart of "Stephanie, trust your instincts on this one...go with your gut feeling" and "you should ask __________ for help, because he might have some ideas for you." I'm proud of that. I see a huge difference, right now, in needing someone to be my director because (s)he can oversee a process that is as much related to my work as it is administrative in nature and in recognizing a mentor in someone who's got stuff for me to learn and to understand.

And I'm starting to see how mentors--though your interactions may be with them during specific times, the lessons you learn from them are nutritive in a long-term sort of a way. I continue to learn from L, even in thinking about some of the memories I have with her. I continue to find answers to my questions from SW when I think about how she handled other situations that may somehow seem translatable. And as I reach out to people around me--the people that I seek out because my attempt to listen to myself becomes more careful and more deliberate and more focused as well as the people I have lately been coming to know whose knowledge of the world, whose writing, and whose insights just blow me away in the most surprising and delightful of ways--I learn more and more about taking advice, about mentorship, and about becoming a better person, a better thinker, and a more confident writer.

And it makes me thankful. More thankful than I can really say, to be honest, but so thankful that it humanizes me in the most delightful, huge, and important ways. And it makes me feel lucky to have such amazing mentors in my life. And it makes me feel humbled at how much I have yet to learn and, at the same time, how much I have already learned.

And when I think about this, it's like a huge "reset" button has been pushed and I am restored to this wonderful sense of equilibrium and wonderfulness. I love my writing. Though money is tough and though a lot of things feel like compromises, I love my doctoral program. I miss Boston and my friends there like crazy, but I love my little apartment, my kittens, and the strange community of people that has sprung up aorund me--both the in-real-life community and the virtual poetry-world-community. And I love my writing all over again, and I love my little manuscript--for which I have so much hope and so much belief--in the most important and insane sorts of ways.

2009-11-20T10:37:00.000-06:00

I owe some posts. They're brewing. Continue to hold, please.

(cues the muzak)

Also, check it out: the Fall/Winter 2009 issue of 32 Poems is out, and my poem "Old Age" is included along with the poems of numerous friends of mine--all of whom are great poets and all of whose poems in the journal are fantastic. The journal also has a couple people (including Lisa Russ Spaar) who, in my Dream Life, are friends of mine.

2009-10-07T11:15:00.000-05:00

It is a lovely, lovely, lovely thing to look in the table of contents of a journal galley I get to see (by nature of the fact that my poem is in it and I get to proof my stuff) not only me and the lovely friend of mine who I know is being published in the same issue of the same journal (my dear friend Carolina Ebeid) but to also see a handful of my other poetry friends. It makes me thrilled from top to bottom, particularly because I have held this belief that I should want to be invited to the same party as the poets who fill the table of contents of any journal I consider submitting my work to. I know that sounds silly, and the logic sort of wonky, but it's true. I want, so much, for my poems to be "at the same party" (and I consider the issue of a literary journal to be very much a party!) as work that I admire and think I can have stuff to say to (and--to extend the metaphor even more--my poems are what I have to say and their poems are the responses and rebuttals...). I am excited beyond belief that this poem in particular will appear in a journal that has been a favorite of mine since it started, during my MFA program days (despite the time after time that I have gotten rejected from Said Journal). I am excited beyond belief to have these galleys in my hands and to see my poems and how they create a dialogue with the poems that surround them. I am excited beyond belief to be in the same issue as poets who I admire as poets and who I admire enough as people to call them nothing less than my friend.

In other news: I placed one of my favorite poems from last spring in a journal that comes out of one of my favorite creative writing spaces on the East Coast (if not in the entire country...). It is a thrill of its very own. And it is utterly moving to me the dialogue I have had with the journal's poetry editor over the last week or so about poetry as stuff we read, about poetry as stuff we write, about poetry as the necessary stuff that make or break our lives.

2009-09-02T17:06:00.000-05:00

Two people--my mentor and my dissertation director--gave me feedback on my book manuscript over the summer. I've sort of been struggling with it, and a lot of my own personal demons have come up (my inability to trust others, the ways in which I vastly question myself and doubt my instincts, the ways in which I feel entirely "locked" in really articulating what my instincts are and where they come from being chief among them), and it's lead, over the last couple weeks, to more than a few of the following: breakdowns over my manuscript and how to prepare it for its reader, crying fits and sincere beliefs that nothing I ever put together will be good enough for anyone or anything, blank stares at the wall when I am trying to be in a moment of thinking through where my work is headed and what my reader might want from me, and whiny outbursts over what the hell I should do, how the hell I should refine this "beast" that I have created, and how the hell should I know who or what to trust and look for.

In short: I have been lacking rather significant faith in myself. I have been forgetting that, while this manuscript is new to me in the sense that I have never had a manuscript before, I am not new to manuscripts. Part of my editorial internship involves reading manuscripts that come in for open submissions period. Part of my job as a teacher is to discuss how things work (from poem-level to book-level) with my students and to guide my students in sincere, thoughtful discussions about what makes the work they are considering either thrive or fail. Part of my passion, as a writer and a reader, is reading whatever work is out there. I know what I have a huge response to and what I have immediate and negative reactions to. So why am I taking away my own legitimate authority in how my work can be effective and engaging? Why am I bashing myself up so much over what I have put together and why am I focusing only on the things I can not anticipate (which largely revolve around a reader's ability to engage deeply with my work as it is presented to them)?

I could give you a thousand answers to this. I could tell you it's my mother and father's fault, or it's that sneaky and stupid Good Girl Syndrome, or that I am too attached to my own work to possibly see it from the perspective of an outside reader, or that I am a student of professors and poets who have infinitely more experience with putting together--and then successfully publishing--manuscripts. I could tell you that there's so much I admire out there and that I have a desire to be as successful as all of that (and my inner competitive bitch says I would like, somehow, to be maybe even more successful...no matter how ridiculous this thought may be). All of these things are true to an extent, but they don't tap into the fact that I have severely been dishonoring my own ability to gauge what works and doesn't work. I have been severely distrusting my own carefulness, thoughtfulness, and intelligence in being able to articulate--without defense or urgent desire to justify--how my work can be read, enjoyed, responded to, and dismissed. It really sucks. With the stuff I have read and with the voices I have heard that have both challenged me and beaten me down, I have somehow come to significantly dismiss and distrust myself. For better or for worse. What this has gotten me is that it has somehow limited the risk involved in putting myself out there (I know I will fail anyway, so who cares, right? I can sit there and send my shit out and see what happens--knowing that I may not get published--and then at the end of the day say that so-and-so lead me astray, or didn't believe in me, or whatever, right? Pshaw...). What this has held me back from doing is really reaching my full potential. And that's hugely not fair.

I'm thinking about this not specifically because I got this semi-finalist distinction in the Akron book contest but because I experienced something strange and new in the process: I got a reasonable acknowledgement of my manuscript that I sent out after having arranged it purely on my own and with a somewhat (admittedly) naive sense of "gut instinct" driving its formation. I got semi-finalist distinction, which is a huge accomplishment and honor and a testimony to the strength of my poems and my talent but which is also a huge awareness that, while my instinct in arranging my manuscript lead me in a good direction, there is still more that *I* have to do to make this thing stand out above all other manuscripts enough to get published. I can take whatever feedback is given to me (and I should take it), but I need to figure out for myself what I want my manuscript to be (and how this compares with the direction my poems lead the manu down...); where I, as a reader, am finding the poems and arrangement to be successful; and where I, as reader, find weaknesses.

This sounds like gravy, right? Yeah, well, not so much. Hypothetically, sure! When I am confident enough to be fair to myself and to cut myself some slack and acknowledge my strengths, I'm a good reader, right? I'm smart and open-minded and considerate, right? I can be good at latching on to whatever feedback seems to work and letting go of what feedback doesn't, right? Hypothetically. Sure. Of course. But I am also human. Really, hugely, insanely human. I am full of desire and impatience and passion. I read a lot and keep up with what happens in the world of my passion and have a neurotic tendency to research research research away--things about contests, things about manuscripts, things about fellowships, things about residencies, things about things. And I am bad at blocking out all of that noise when it comes to regarding my work the way that a *reader* would. What has been collapsed by what I do of being both reader and writer can not so easily be distanced.

I don't know what the answer is or what I need or how I can somewhat easily and effectively find more trust and confidence in myself and my capabilities. I somehow think, though, that when I reach a point in my revisions where everything I do is coming from a place in trust in myself and in my work that I will be primed to not only be acknowledged as a semi-finalist (and then a finalist...) but to come out on top as a contest winner. There are no road maps. No easy answers. No softly lit pathways or how-to manuals for this. I think it's going to be a system of trial and error in figuring out what to do, what to trust from which voice, and how to let the feedback that I get--and choose to follow--find a way to work with what I believe to be important for my work.

2009-08-31T22:23:00.000-05:00

Congratulations to Oliver de la Paz, winner of the 2009 Akron Poetry Prize! The Akron Prize is open to poets of all stages in their career (i.e. not necessarily a first book contest), and the Akron Press publishes these gorgeously composed and designed books. Mary Biddinger, poetry series editor, does an amazing job with her staff of putting out there really gorgeous looking books full of poems that are just, as my classmate TK would say, total stunners.

This contest in particular means a lot to me, because it is the very first contest I entered. I literally realized maybe a week? less than a week? (something like that, anyhow) before the postmark deadline that I had enough poems towards my manuscript to BE my manuscript. I didn't entirely know what I was doing, other than AB giving me a sense of direction on a first and last poem (though I already surmised that last poem). I ordered my poems on this strange sort of gut feeling and went with "what felt right" at the time for an order. I was nervous, because I didn't want MB and the Akron staff that reads the slush pile to think that I am a total amateur, not at all ready to publish my work in a book, or just somehow mediocre. And I was nervous because this was my first contest ever, my first manuscript ever, and my first time seeing my poems--that I had been working on for years and years--come together into something bigger than really just the sum of the poems.

Somehow, I don't know how, by some grace of the poetry gods maybe, I managed to make it as a semi-finalist. Of over 500 poetry manuscripts submitted, there were less than 30 that were semi-finalist/finalist/winner. Oliver de la Paz, whose books are lovely and engaging and real and wonderful, is an amazing winner for this contest. Though I didn't win one of my dream contests, to have had it be my first one to enter and to have had such a noteworthy sort of a result is, to me, a really amazing and overwhelming thing. I am beyond proud of my poems, of how they work together, and of what they make possible.

Link to the Akron Prize announcement: http://www3.uakron.edu/uapress/poetryprizewinner.html

2009-08-30T10:48:00.001-05:00

Week 1 of Year 2 is down, but it somehow feels like it shouldn't be allowed to have even begun. I say this not because I feel a bit lazy and because I wish I could still sleep in every morning without my alarm clock set, but because I have poems out at journals that had open submission period in the summers still. There is a very strange part of me that wants a lovely, happy sort of containment. Like--poems sent out to journals for summer submission time, well, I sort of want to get those back now that summer time is over and school time has begun. I want those poems available to send out to journals that start reading again around 1 September or 15 September.

Maybe this is too hasty of me? Maybe I need to return to the submission model I kept when I was younger of sending things out in a whorish sort of way, taking journals who allow it up on their simultaneous submission allowances and sending the same poem out to, like, ten journals? Maybe I need to be more unabashed about it. I used to do this when I was younger. I don't know why I care so much about keeping things in their happy little categories and spaces right now.

Wait--I do know why--it's because the little control freak inside me is worried about creating the new "submission season" spreadsheet on my Excel file for submissions. I worry about what to DO about the journals that are carry-overs from the summer submission season. Do I cross-list them for the 2009-2010 season? Do I neurotically check both spreadsheets side by side? Is this too much work or too many details for me--when I am in the heady fog of mid-semester and am starting to hear back from places--to possibly remember?

Or is this maybe a wake-up call to me to get better at tracking all of those teensy tiny details that I can, for better or for worse, forget about and get tired enough to stop caring about a little too quickly?