... SWAT!

Rejection is a fly you have to wave aside continually until
you die. You can take it as a tragedy or you can take it as...a fly.

diane tucker

(-- from a discusson on the League of Canadian Poets' list
serve. Diane gave me permission to quote this.)

Evergreen

A prose poem of mine was just accepted by Evergreen Review, the online incarnation of the famous print review edited by Barney Rosset, founder of Grove Press; Rosset, at 87, is still its Editor In Chief. (The prose poem, by the way, is also forthcoming in my collection, Passenger Flight.) It will appear the March #118 issue.

According to this Wikipedia article, the original Evergreen Review, published between 1957 and 1973, debuted pivotal works by Samuel Beckett, Jorge Luis Borges, William Burroughs, Marguerite Duras, Jean Genet, Allen Ginsberg, Gunter Grass, Jack Kerouac, Norman Mailer, Henry Miller, Pablo Neruda, Vladimir Nabokov, Frank O'Hara, Kenzaburo Oi, Octavio Paz, Harold Pinter, Susan Sontag, Tom Stoppard, Derek Walcott and Malcolm X.

The people in the online version are mostly relative unknowns, as I suppose many of those august names were at that time; but from what I've read, the actual writing in the current Evergreen is no better nor worse than any of a plethora of other fair/middling reviews on the market today. Clearly Rosset isn't able to draw on the same kind of pool of concentrated calibre he could then. Oh well. I liked some of what I saw, and there's an edgier flavour here than what we typically find in Canada -- could we imagine, say, RW Watkin's Jesuits in Fiddlehead? (it was Watkins, a frequent commenter on this blog, who first drew my attention to this review) -- so I sent what I imagined they might like, to see how I would do.

This, incidentally, is the longest wait for an acceptance yet. The poem was part of a handful originally submitted on Dec. 28, 2007; a letter of inquiry last June went unanswered, and I started sending the poems elsewhere (they came back). Then a couple of weeks ago, I got an e-mail requesting me to resubmit my poems, et voila!

From the land of bards...

Today is the deadline to contribute to Crannóg's upcoming Canadian issue. I was just getting ready to send in some stuff myself, when I started reading over PDF's of previous issues. Couldn't believe such trite stuff comes out of Ireland! The prospect of having my work in there just didn't thrill me. Pass on that one...

Literary half-way houses

As Labour Day approaches, so too the labour of what Mary Biddinger calls the BFS: "The Big Fall Submission." So many poets, including Mary, talk of "finding homes" for their poems. But aren't literary reviews half-way houses on the way to the real home, the published book? If not kinky residences, reviews are locales to work out kinks -- overcome bad habits, wean free from addictions, get adjusted to the "real world".

-----------------------------

Pris Campbell (my favourite blogging namesake) asked me for clarification on the above; since it could be taken the wrong way, I reproduced her question and my reply below.

Pris said...

Hi Brian
I always enjoy your perspective, but wasn't clear what you were saying here. Did you mean you prefer to go for the book and feel that journal submission isn't that important?

Saturday, August 30, 2008 7:19:00 AM

Brian Campbell said...

Perhaps I crossed the line from concise to cryptic. Actually, I think journal submission an important *step* for the writer. Submitting your work to public scrutiny forces you scrutinize the poem yourself in a way that you may not otherwise, and can aid revision and proof-reading. It's a valuable proving ground. Sometimes an editor will give you feedback that can help you to put those poems up to snuff, and connecting with that editor who accepts your work can be a special thrill. (I'm sure you know that thrill, Pris.) Even seeing the poem in journal or chapbook form can lead to further revision: how many times have we seen something to the effect of "a number of these poems, some in previous incarnations, were published in..." Also, those journal credits can add up to a certain credibility, reducing the stranger anxiety so many book editors feel when faced with a new manuscript, particularly that first book manuscript.

But at the same time, the readership of reviews -- excepting, perhaps, the biggest ones -- is limited: oftentimes they aren't even given a thorough read by their own contributors. There's just so much to read, after all! Ron Silliman once compared the journals to a kind of white noise that's always back there, but easy to ignore. So a journal doesn't seem like a permanent home, but a kind of half-way house to the "real thing", the book, which itself may be a half-way house to that anthology in the skies we all wish to be a part of someday.

Cruelest month?

To celebrate National Poetry Month, the League of Canadian Poets has opened a blog called "Poetry Without Borders". League of Canadian Poets members are invited to submit poems for its Poem-a-Day feature on a first come, first served basis.

I am not sure why it's called "Poetry Without Borders", since all the poetry comes from within the borders of Canada (or at least, is by Canadians), and what's more, within the borders of a national poetry organization. I suppose they're referring to international access via internet. But what with Doctors Without Borders and Words Without Borders, the name suggests something much more along those lines...

Compared to the poem-a-day email subscription feature of Poets.org, this is still fledgling affair. This is not really reaching out to the broader public in the way that Poets.org does. But it's a nice start. I like the informality of the submission process.

Some try to write a poem a day for the entire month. It's a fabulous idea -- for others. With all the editing I've been doing of late, and have yet to do in the coming weeks, I'm not in that kind of mode.

In the MiPOesias blog, editor Didi Menendez writes in a post entitled "ME ME ME ME ME":

May I suggest that during National Poetry Month that instead of just thinking about your own poetry that you also consider writing a review (at least one a week = 4 reviews) of someone else's poetry (book, individual poem, magazine, journal, broadside, etc.).

Great idea, too. I may just take her up on it.

What I've decided to do, though, is send things off every day -- very ME ME ME -- but something I've lagged on far too often over the years.

Sent some stuff out today -- by e- as well as old fashioned snail.

"If a fellow wants to be a nobody in the business world, let him neglect sending the mail man to somebody on his behalf."
--Charles F. Kettering, American engineer, inventor of the electric starter, 1876-1958

Could be said of the literary world.

(I wouldn't mind having that man's starter...)

My spacey reflexes

Under the manuscript guidelines of Contrary, an internet review I quite like and that I sent work to yesterday, I discovered the reasoning behind the one-space rule at the end of sentences. A friend told me a few months ago that was de rigeur nowadays, but I didn't believe him.

Well, unfortunately for me, that seems to be the new standard. Here's what Contrary says:

Use only one space between sentences. Only one space is needed between sentences unless you are using a typewriter. Typewriters are monospaced – they allot exactly the same amount of space for an i as for an m – and monospacing tends to visually obscure the transition from one sentence to the next. So for many years typing teachers have taught their students to use two spaces between sentences. But word processors, including the one you’re sitting at right now, are capable of proportional spacing – they allot about one-fifth as much space for an i as they do for an m – and a single space is sufficient to distinguish between sentences in a proportionally spaced document. Have a look at any professionally-produced book or magazine and you’ll usually find only one space between sentences.

Personally, I still prefer the look of two spaces -- despite all the single-spaced typesetting I read every day. Besides, I was taught way back when by none other than Miss Bernstein, my Junior High School typing teacher, to type two spaces -- and that's my reflex (even here, writing about it... although I see Blogger software automatically changes it to one space). But, if one space really is the standard, that means I'll have to change my reflexes -- and start changing work I send out.

I can relate to this...

....if it takes you a year to reject me, you need to send me your home address with the rejection letter so i drive to your stuffy apartment and smack you across the head for wasting my time and feeding my irrational dreamworld.

... safe sucks. programs like iowa, houston and columbia are injecting this industry with writers that are very polished technically, and most of the time, don't have one ounce of soul, originality, rebellion or ambition to save their lives. for every tc boyle there are a million ethan canins, most of them, far more boring and safe than he is.

In this doggy dog world...

Since Jan. 3, I've been marking CEGEP English exit exams six and a half hours a day, and this week (Monday to Wed.), doing double duty, teaching my evening ESL class for three. Add in two and a half hours of commuting, and that makes for some full days...

English CEGEPs graduate about 8 - 10,000 students a year, each of whom has to write a standardized English Exit exam -- a 750 word essay analyzing either a short story or literary essay -- to prove that he or she has achieved an acceptable degree of proficiency in the language of, if not Shakespeare, Hemingway or Atwood. There are about 50 markers -- about half are CEGEP teachers, about half "externals" like me (although I have taught in CEGEP for a session or two...). This session there are about 4,000 exams to be marked -- the papers are graded by two independent evaluators who then consult to come up with a consensus on two of three criteria, going for the higher grade of the remaining criterion if it remains a grade apart. Failures are passed on to supervisors for further adjudication. Ultimately, all this byzantine-sounding complexity adds up a system that ensures a maximal degree of fairness, I believe -- although sometimes I wonder what it says about trust (or trustworthiness) in CEGEP standards that this sort of test has to be given for students who have already passed their way through the system.

I got the news today that I didn't make the CBC shortlist this year. I could have guessed as much: last year they notified me I was on it on Dec. 18. (Therefore, fellow competitors, if you haven't heard from the CBC by Xmas, don't hold your breath -- definitely, send that work elsewhere!)

Funny thing is, this year's submission was much stronger than last year's -- a new-and-improved version. Shows you how subjective these things are. Boo hoo.

A lot of the CEGEP exams this term are quite good (some, of course, are atrocious), but occasionally we come across funny phonetically-based spelling errors. One student wrote, "This is a doggy dog world."

Yes it is. Woof woof.

Guzzle your ghazals

I just came back from dinner at a Peruvian restaurant with five of my students; they wanted to have some fun over the Xmas break, and invited me out; I was happy to join them. We got stuffed on seafood and plied ourselves with sangria, and had plenty of laughs. The same five are captured in the above photograph taken at a school Xmas party about ten days ago (I have more than 20 on my class list: this is a small "core group" that hangs out together). They are, across the top, Gabriel from Columbia, Dary from Cambodia, Choun Ming from China via Paris (he actually grew up in France), and across the bottom, yours truly, and Svilen and Alexandra from Bulgaria. Lovely people, all of them.

Today I spent much of the day making three submissions (assertions?) to various reviews -- an occasion to look over the poems, fine tune with changes and deletions (one good reason to send things out: revisit your own work, and by implication, your life). A submission to CV2's upcoming Jilted Issue took me on a trip through time: I revisited a very lonely poem from almost two decades ago (it's a good one); the three more recent ones are a good measure of where I've come. A poignant experience, going through those: I'm sure CV2 is going to get a crop of heartfelt poems.

On Xmas day, I put up the post below. An exploration of ghazals, it's a kind of implicit Good Cheer. So I didn't bother with the usual huzzahs.

I remember I was distinctly disappointed when I learned how "ghazal" is pronounced in official Arabic: it is not a variation of gazelle, but rather more like "ghuzzle" -- perhaps appropriate for a poem form traditionally centred on drinking and love.

Right now, though, I think I'll make the implicit explicit: Season's greetings, everyone!

Feeling Rejected?

I just came across this nice post in my meanderings: The 8 Rules of Rejection. A good tonic for anyone who receives those pesky things. My only crit is that the writer even uses the word: I've pretty well struck it out of my vocabulary.

Bye bye, Blackbird

Funny, having been a denizen of blogland lo these many years and published in net reviews coming out of places as far-flung as Berlin, London, Geneva and Santa Fe, I've come to assume that pretty well any internet journal that did not expressly state otherwise was open to writers from the world over. Well, welcome to Blackbird. Certainly one of the handsomest and most distinguished literary journals on the net, this one claims at least to have excellence as its sole criterion. But looking through the poets it's published over the last three biannual issues, virtually all -- about sixty in total -- are American. I've never seen anyone not from the US publish there. Hard to believe that there haven't been plenty of good submissions from other places. (Indeed, impossible -- yours truly was turned back a couple of years ago. Not that I mind. No, really...OK, a bit.) Anyway, the pattern is clear, and I rather doubt I'll go through the effort of perpetuating it again.


P.S. I just sent this post to the editors of said review, with the letter below (they do invite reader feedback). It will be interesting to see if I get a response.

Dear editors,

I just wrote the post below on my literary blog, Out of the Woodwork. I wonder if you would care to refute it? Is it because of the complexities of international payment that you don't have more international representation on your web pages? If so, why not just say so -- or say that you publish the best in American writing? Anyway, I do respect much of the content of your review, despite the rather huffy tone of my post.

Sincerely, from Canada,

Brian Campbell

RENTRÉE

Truth and beauty bombs.

Back to school this evening. My advanced ESL class at English Montreal School Commission. The fact that after all these years of doing this I'm looking forward to it -- intrigued by possibilities of doing new activities I as well as improving on the old, saying Hi again to colleagues and welcoming back returning students I enjoy -- testifies that I must be made for this. (In measured doses, of course.)

This is also ripe time for putting things in the mail -- submissions (oops! assertions), manuscript samples to publishers, etc. I thought I might prepare things in the final weeks of August so I'd "hit the ground running" -- but beyond working on the manuscript itself, just couldn't get into it. "The bare-limbed hedonism of summer", as Don Delillo put it once. Why, when I think of this sort of thing, do I imagine bending over some round porcelain bowl, sticking a finger in the back of my throat? Must counter with images positive -- my missives floating off like white birds over the ocean, the resounding cry of "land, land!", applause from all assembled animals (my poems) on deck and below. Something of that sort. "Turn that frown upside down!" etc.

The Saranac Review (une autre fois)

Is Saranac Review ever good! Last night I got up in the wee hours (insomnia) and read about half the poems in the current issue, #3. Just lapped them up. All of them are interesting, engaging, or excellent; and so far there is one lengthy poem, Alphabet of Bones by Alexis Lathem, that is a true tour de force. Quality like this in reviews is so rare, as Jordan Davis so eloquently pointed out in a blog post about a year ago. (Kinda makes yrs. truly feel good to be included.) Almost all the poets get one or two selections, and yet the poems blend harmoniously and reflect off each other. The magazine as a whole has a sense of flow and completion. It's well- and purposefully edited, in other words.

This review, by the way, allows simultaneous submissions on the condition that poets notify them of acceptance elsewhere. Clearly, this gives the lie to editors who forbid "sim subs" on the grounds that it makes a coherent selection next to impossible.

Pressed & dried

Two copies of Saranac Review arrived today, with my poem somewhere in the midst of its 170-odd pages and 50-odd contributors. Initially it was a kind of a bitter-sweet feeling, finding oneself in the midst of such a huge lineup after such a long wait (nearly a year, in toto). It is, though, a glossy, lovely review... and it's a pleasure to see one's words in old-fashioned print. Other Canadian contributers I know: Barry Dempster, Brian Bartlett, Tom Wayman, + Louise Warren, a Quebecoise translated into English, whom I should know. The rest Americans I don't know, some with impressive credentials. I read a couple of poems with interesting imaginative leaps. Good company, in other words. I look forward to looking at their work over the next few days.

Today (now yesterday) I spent 4 hours or so cleaning house -- it was that rainy day we were waiting for after so many sunny days and scorchers. Then I spent about 6 or 7 hours going through online lists of Canadian poetry book publishers at the Canadian League of Poets website and at CV2's site, reading & copying their submission guidelines, paying special attention to whether they want whole manuscripts, samples, etc., looking at their author lists etc. and sorting them into an A-list, B-list, C-list and D-list according to prestige/desirability, + an additional category, Chapbooks & Alt. Formats. I actually got the whole job done: it's possible to cover this whole country in one long sitting. There are about 35 book presses in all -- just under one for every million of us, think of that! -- 20 of which got onto my A and B lists. For a break, I played some interesting 8-bar blues riffs I learned off the net. Right now, my back and neck are sore.

SUMMER SPECIALS, ANYONE?

Does anyone know reviews that read (or at least accept) submissions during the summer? Three off the top of my head: Harpur Palate, West Coast Line (its reading period is July-August), and the internet review Octopus. Internet reviews tend to be more flexible in their reading periods as well as publication schedules than print, so many of which are affiliated with universities ... going through my links lists, I don't doubt I could find several, but you know these lazy summer months. I would prefer that they came to me! (If I find others, though, I'll list them here...)

OUT OF CIRCULATION

Last week I got two more "returns" from revues to which I had circulated work -- check here for a nomenclature I came up with to replace those stinging, tail-between-the-legs terms, submission and rejection -- and found I now have practically nothing out there: one set of poems sent to one tardy review, and a couple of contests.

Time, this Easter weekend, to resurrect myself -- at least as far as poem circulation is concerned.

Yesterday I spent a couple of hours organizing my return slips and letters into alpha-order in a binder for easy reference, with acceptances under a separate category. I've found Excell spreadsheets too time-consuming, and am using this simple system: simply mentioning names of the poems sent in the cover letter, printing out an extra copy for myself and sticking it in a binder. That way I have all the information about names of editors, poems sent, etc. Is there a simpler system, a better spreadsheet that works for you?

My record over the last two years or so: 45 returns, 10 acceptances (14 poems in total), a finalist for a major contest. On the return slips, I have 9 positive handwritten comments.

Not too discouraging, but I'm very slow at this stuff. My batting average may be quite good (.182, by my calculations, apparently not bad in the Literary League), but I just don't get to bat enough. I lag, procrastinate, spend a long time mulling on what to send where, lose focus, make all kinds of absurd mistakes. It's a task for which I have to make special efforts to psych myself up. For years, I sent out nothing -- demoralized by the process, the editors, the reviews, everything. But if, like most writers, I feel underpublished and underappreciated, I have only myself to blame.

Kelly Russell Agodon wrote a recent post about her over-thinking of submissions. I like the advice a friend of hers gave: send three you think the review will love, and one you think they'll hate. Chances are they'll take the latter. Kelly, by the way, just won a prize.

QUINTESSENTIAL POETRY MAGAZINE

Send only your BEST work.

It is strongly suggested that you read several issues before submitting. We do not publish religious poetry, erotic poetry, sound poetry, concrete poetry, or poetry with words or phrases already under copyright. Poems, in other words, must be entirely original. We rarely publish poetry that rhymes, unless it is very good.

Every few issues, we run a theme issue. To learn what the upcoming theme will be, please purchase the previous issue of our magazine.

Because of our fixed format, poems must not be more than 32 lines long or 27 characters wide, single-spaced only, in Times New Roman font.

We do NOT accept simultaneous submissions. Please copy the following text into the covering letter with your poems:

I certify that I am the author of these unpublished poems, that they are not under consideration by another journal, and that should one or more pieces be selected for publication, I will grant QUINTESSENTIAL POETRY MAGAZINE the right of first publication. In the event that they are reprinted in *any* form (print, web, electronic media), I will cite QUINTESSENTIAL POETRY MAGAZINE as the place of first publication.

If it is discovered that you have ever simultaneously submitted poems while under our consideration, you will be placed on a black list to be automatically circulated to all other magazines on our data base.

Out of 5 million poetry submissions last year, we published seven. Two of these were unsolicited ms.

We are currently seeking volunteer readers. We have a considerable backlog, so we may take up to 24 months to respond.

If you should happen to pass away while your work is under our consideration, please notify us through your next of kin. Posthumous submissions will not be considered more than six months after the poet's death.

Please include SASE.

Should your poem appear in our magazine, it will be considered for our annual QUINTESSENTIAL POETRY PRIZE. Winners will be declared QUINTESSENTIAL POETS, win a cash award of $1,000 US, and a life-time subscription to our magazine. They will also receive immediate solicitation from Poetry, The Hudson Review, The Kenyon Review, Paris Review, Blackbird...

From the belly of a different beast...

I enjoyed this post by Simon on editing his latest venture, Absent, a lot. Anything from an revue editor's perspective is interesting to me, since I've never actually done that beast of a job. I think he may be exaggerating when he says,

If you have not read an issue of the magazine to which you are submitting, do not submit. If you read an issue and do not like it, or (which amounts to the same thing) do not grok it, save everybody's time and do not submit. There are many towns in poetryland, and you can "take a train" to "a different town" very easily. In this "different town" you may enjoy "the buildings" better, and your work is much more likely to be accepted by the "town planning comission."

About grok: I think if I didn't send until I was sure I had "grokked" the magazine (which sounds like more of a complete intuitional grasp than simply "liking"), I'd probably be waiting 'till kingdom come.

Sometimes I send to a review because because I sense -- even not reading it in its entirety -- that poems I have might fit in. Sometimes one issue can be misleading: I've read issues I've disliked of magazines that I later learned published poets (and even poems) I really appreciate. Some of the older reviews one can get a bead on if one looks through the review AND knows the some of the poets they have published. Then there are occasions where I study a review, think I have something right down their alley that doesn't elicit any interest at all.

I don't send out much, but have a fairly good batting average (over the last 2 years, 1 acceptance of one to three poems for every 5 or 6 five-poem submissions), so I guess I'm doing something right.

"Let Us Compare Mythologies..."

Write a poem -- say a dramatic monologue -- from the point of view of a character from the Bible and just try to get it published in today's literary journals... you will find this a particularly hard go. This is just not cool today. You will probably end up having to resort to the cloying sub-realms of "Spiritual" journals. Ibid for almost anything that comes out of our greco-roman mythological tradition. Ibid for other mythological traditions, generally considered too obscure (they're all obscure). Except perhaps Icharus. Icharus is particularly emblematic of our times, as our planet warms and our wings melt, as we veer closer to the sun.