Dear Editor,

Your signature matters when you're sending a submission.
Make sure it comes out looking smart and confident!

Submitting poems to editors is an act of faith.

Here's how I do it: I carefully select my poems for each journal, choosing the ones I am sure are going to make the editors swoon with delight. Then, with some kind of ceremony, I sign the cover letter. I use my best pen - the only one with a nib! -- and make sure the signature is flowing and gracious, and somehow also looks smart and poetic.

Finally, I fold the poems precisely in thirds, as though each fold has been exactly considered -- just like the words in my poems.

I even select the stamps, because editors might look at those to make their decision about my poems. I want the stamps to say something. The 61-cent Richard Wright stamp seems perfect these days. It says that I am  aware of current issues in the world (only sometimes true), and that what's in this envelope is no namby-pamby junk; it's honest, and relevant, serious and perhaps slightly controversial...

(Anyway, that's what I expect editors to infer from my stamp choice.)

So, when some months later, I find an SASE in my mailbox so skinny that it seems there couldn't possibly be anything at all in there, an immediate depression sets in.

This is not a post about those times. This is to say "hurrah!" to the editors who take a moment to write an encouraging word on those minute, form rejection slips. Rejections like these are actually uplifting -- not quite as much as an acceptance, but they make me want to get back to my desk and write, or send out another submission.  

In a Poetry Reading, There Should Be Humor

I have decided that someone, somehow, should make the audience laugh - at some point in a performance. It breaks the ice; it lets the audience move around a little in their bodies. Laughter does this; it loosens you.

I got to thinking about this yesterday afternoon. Three women I know had put together a reading at the Women's Club in town. The women were all sophisticated in their outfits (each in some shades of black and gray), and I expected the same sophistication of the poems. I knew these women's writing, and admired it.

But, there were funny parts, amidst the poems of memory and obsession, health and worry. Someone used the word "fart" in a poem, and we laughed. One of the women read a dog sonnet. I think something changed in that room when we giggled and snickered.

If poems are everything that is, poems are also body parts that don't do things right in public and snorts and stupid little imaginings.

It felt good to laugh, and then to have them turn us back to more serious subjects. Then, I was ready again for the heavier work of poetry - the grittier, powerful poetry of anything else.

I need to remember this. I so rarely write funny poems....

Poetry Is Impossibly Difficult to Define

A broadside from al-Mutanabbi Street Starts Here, a wonderful project
begun by San Francisco writer and bookseller Beau Beausoleil.
See the collection at http://www.library.fau.edu/depts/spc/JaffeCenter/collection/al-mutanabbi/index.php

Kim Rosen, in an interview in The Sun (December 2010), describes poetry as "containing the grit of humanity right next to the vastness of being."

The other night, at a reading in memory of Baghdad's book-centric al-Mutanabbi Street, New Mexico History Museum curator Tom Leach introduced the event by saying that poems are "the opposite of war."

These thoughts cheer me. Poems are what I turn to to smooth away the distress of war, and to express my sadness/madness/uncertainty. These are also, often, the reasons why I write, though there are others.

Yesterday, getting ready for an upcoming performance, I pulled a recent favorite poem of mine, a stream-of-consciousness block of poetic language with myriad twists and turns. Trying to find it in my collection of papers, I passed numerous poems I had written that are fragmentary and challenging.

So, I see, in my own writing, there's room for every style of poem - from narrative to abstract, from disturbed to grateful.

What Poetry Is - Part 4

They don't exactly look like their poetry!
Stephen Dobyns on the left,

 and Laura Mullen on the right 
(www.lauramullen.biz/index.htm) 

So, in the past few days, I've looked at two books that randomly caught my attention. The books are at ends of the poetry spectrum. Neither offers exactly what you'd expect from a poem. Both take some amount of work to decipher or hold onto.

Is this poetry? Sure.

Is this poetry you or I like? Well, it depends. There are things to admire in both books, but sometimes I just want a kick-in-the-stomach sort of poem, something that makes me feel an immediate response. Something I can follow and fully get on my first reading. Sometimes I don't want to float and I don't want to be pinged around. Other times, I don't mind doing the work of coming into the poem slowly, of feeling excluded, and then - slowly, included, in what it's trying to tell me.

... Or the work of being pulled around on a leash. Of being told something, but only getting it - really - at the end of the walk.

What do YOU think? What kinds of poems do you like?

Next post - a wrap up and some quotes
Previous post - Laura Mullen's Dark Archive

What Poetry Is - Part 3

 This 1976 pinball game was called Surfer. It looks so charming compared to today's designs. The game cost a quarter, and the player got five balls per game.  I found this photo at www.lyonspinball.com.

Continuing my discussion of two poetry books at polar opposite sides of the spectrum...


The other book, Laura Mullen's Dark Archive, has the feeling of an undertow. Where Dobyns floated us through one incredibly long stanza, Mullen's poems pulls us into words and phrases that jump around the page, dislocated words that are tabbed into phrases that create strange steps, and phrases that lead into ... nothing at times, or as Mullen says in a poem entitled "OWN:" "and apparently abandons that subject."

The poems feel, perhaps, like sinking. In one of the book's early poems, she says: "I fear I can no longer think / I fear I am no longer that which things / Or that a certain kind of thinking's lost"...

Mullen's poems, like Dobyns', are about contemporary society. She, too, looks around and comments on the disasters and inadequacies. In her poems, I feel like the little metal ball pinging back and forth in a game of pinball.


Next post - Putting the books together
Previous post - Stephen Dobyns' Winter's Journey