Submitting

Ivy Alvarez has some first-rate comments on journals and rejections yesterday. Speaking of some tricks she has in categorizing journals, Ivy says “I think any trick that makes this caper easier on myself is grand.” I say Amen to that.

I’ve had some helpful tricks in the past. My greatest one was just not to submit. (Interesting word that: submit.) I went for years without submitting any poems after one series of submissions were all rejected. This was a difficult plan, for I belong to a workshop whose poets have not only published in the best journals but have issued books and won awards, the grand dame of them all whose name I believe can be uttered with the greatest American formalist poets (or just poets, period.)

But I wasn’t ready. I wrote and revised and wrote and revised and even started avoiding the monthly workshops in order to circumvent bouts of jealousy and overwhelming periods of influence from one or another of those brilliant poets. I began hanging around the corner online workshop trying to learn from the unseen, one in particular who tore my English apart time after time and rightfully so.

Last year I sent out about a dozen submissions involving over fifty poems, the first time I had sent something out in over five, maybe as many as seven, years, and vowed if only one acceptance came back I would continue to write. But on the other hand, if all were rejected, I would quit. Luckily, for my own sanity, two submissions were accepted, involving a grand total of two poems.

So I continue to write. And since then four more journals have accepted five poems (not including one poem published on an op-ed page of an Outer Banks newspaper.) It’s probably luck (no way! it's craft! ok, maybe some luck.) And Ivy has me thinking again, reflecting on a Terry Teachout blog I read last month. Two of his Notes on Blogging stick with me:

10. Blogs will be to the 21st century what little magazines were to the 20th century. Their influence will be disproportionate to their circulation.

11. Blogs are what online magazines were supposed to be.

So I’m thinking (I think I'm beginning to sound like Carrie Bradshaw here.) Will submitting poems to small journals become so twentieth-century? Will blogs become the places where we share our work, and will permalinks in fact become the way that poems are published and become read by a small coterie of readers? And the really good poets be linked by many many bloggers (and maybe even register on blogdex?)

I know I started to wonder about these issues after I posted a poem of mine last week, a rough first draft albeit. But now that I’m in this blogosphere, I’m beginning to breathe in the fresh air. And Ivy is Here has me thinking over here. Any thoughts there?


Postscript Cassandra Pages led me to an Evan Maxwell letter on L.A. Observed. In it I think he makes an argument that parallels the 'blogs are the new little magazines': "The Web, with its ability to publish all kinds of opinion at the cost of a few electrons, is ultimately threatening to the institutions and corporations which rely on their monopoly of the means of publishing."