With four grad school packets in this semester and very little worry about how I will accomplish the fifth (my writing schedule this month has been such that I will have no problem whatsoever coming up with 25 hours per week), I’m getting back into some other projects. I’m exploring the possibility, along with Bill and Jeremy, of purchasing CLMP’s electronic submissions manager for Inch, which would allow us to go paperless and I think it would help our response time (which has been pretty good, I think… we’ve never held anything for more than a quarter and get most back within a month; it’s the ones we like that take us longer, so we generally respond personally to any rejection that we’ve held for more than two months).

I’ve also asked the CLMP listserv for some strategies for soliciting work, and I’m preparing to send some gushing fan letters to poets I don’t know this weekend, asking them to send us short poems. I like that when I solicit, I’m not just saying, “Hey, send me some good poems.” Anyone can do that. I get to ask for the short work, the peculiar tidbits that some poets don’t know where to send, otherwise. I’m excited. With one exception (an author I adore but never heard back from), I have never solicited work from someone I hadn’t met at some point, even if it was just in passing.