83º ~ feels like 87º ~ all bright sun, calm winds, birdsong, freshmown grass, a full moon waiting
∞
One of my goals for the summer is to submit work for publication to literary journals. Publishing poems is one of the criteria on which I’m judged as I make my way toward tenure, but the weight of prepping courses new to me, building a national conference from the floor up, doing my other service work (committees, volunteering for campus activities, etc.), and keeping up on professional development activities prevented me from sending much out this past academic year.
As with reading and writing, I’ve re-engaged with the “po-biz” side of things. As I explained in my recent post about how the poem “A Coward for a Daughter” came to be published, the usual route is to submit work and then not hear anything for months. On the other hand, there are some well-established journals that have perfected the quick turnaround. This week, I submitted poems to The Threepenny Review on Wednesday. By Friday afternoon, I’d received the rejection, which yes, always stings. As Threepenny does not take simultaneous submissions, I appreciate the quick response, but, yikes!, I hadn’t even had time to “forget” about the submission (forgetting sometimes blunts the sting of a rejection just a tad).
∞
I’ve been thinking about grit (regarding the stick-to-itiveness it takes to be a writer) as I’ve been drafting more poems lately. In working on my last poem, I noticed, again, that there came a point when I felt the urge to just stop and drop it. Here is the moment of either persistence or giving up, a moment when one’s grit is called into question.
In general, I get this feeling at one of two points. The first opportunity happens when I’m scribbling longhand in my journal. I might get three or four lines to come together and then nothing. When this happens, I tend to let it go. However, the more crucial turning point is when I’ve gone from journal to computer, and the “meat” of the poem is beginning to appear, word by word, line by line. Even with the energy behind that movement, there is usually a point where I’m confident in the opening salvo of the poem, but then become uncertain of where its going. In this uncertainty is the opportunity for me to waver and lose my grit. In that last poem, I remember sighing; I remember thinking I should just quit. But, then, I had to think about hitting “save.” Seeing that the poem had not reached a critical mass, I knew from experience that hitting “save” was the same as never finishing the poem for me. I had to take control of that little voice inside my head and tell myself, “try again, figure it out, keep your butt in the chair, tell the truth, write it.” Thankfully, I listened to myself and stuck with it to a finished draft.
(Working in forms makes this extra important, as I can save a free verse draft knowing that it is nearly “there,” but not quite. In a formal poem, I’m not sure I could come back and complete an impartial draft.)
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This morning, I grabbed the lit mag waiting on top of my to-read pile: Beloit Poetry Journal (67.3) Spring 2017. I confess that the number of books that I own but haven’t read yet is overwhelming, and having the lit mags arriving on the regular simply adds to the overwhelming. However, as soon as I open a cover and begin to read, all the other books drop away.
BPJ is one of the most well-established, long-running, consistently-stellar poetry journals out there, and this issue lives up to that reputation. It was an extra delight to find that friend and fellow Little Rock poet Seth Pennington designed the cover.
I believe in Daniel Pennac’s Reader’s Bill of Rights, which stipulates that it is okay to skip and/or not to finish. When I read journals, I give each piece my full attention at the opening. If the writer can’t hold me, I’m gone. In the case of BPJ, I read all but three of the poems completely, and in about 50% of the cases, I read the poems a second time (they tend to be shorter than longer in this journal). Some of the poems that stood out to me were:
Doug Ramspeck’s “Winter Trance”
Martha Silano’s “I have to deepen my know”
Denise Bergman’s “he opened the window’s slit and climbed in”
Xandria Phillips’ four poems from Black Eyewitness Directory
David Salner’s “A Shift of Sand and Steel”
Lauren Camp’s “Father to Narrow then Stranger”
Michael Brown, Jr.’s “Freedom”
The whole issue is worth your time and attention.
