Though I’m not sure Bill, Jeremy and I have come close to mastering it yet, Inch is now using an electronic submissions manager. This should make it much easier for cheapskate poets to send us high-quality work.

This may sound like I’m being snarky, but I’m serious when I say I know a couple of terrific poets who are complete and utter cheapskates. But I’d go to great lengths to get some of their work in our little magazine.

I don’t know why the majority of today seemed rotten. I think it started early, when I checked my morning e-mail and found some very unwelcome news; I just felt like I’d committed a serious social faux pas even though the missteps were unintentional, probably harmless, and hopefully easily forgivable. Couldn’t shake that feeling after I got to work, where I stared at my to-do lists and felt a little helpless; I would have been happier today chasing the instant gratification of answering every e-mail as it came in, but not many e-mails came in. I spent some time tinkering with non-work stuff, figuring that if I could get any mojo at all, I’d just make up the time tomorrow when I take a writing day. No dice.

I think I started the paragraph above intending to come to some moral or cathartic thought, but now I can’t remember what it is. Rats.

Oh, yeah, here’s what it was: throughout the day, the only thing that made me feel like a normal human being was reading a manuscript by this guy. It’s freaking terrific. I can hear his teacher’s voice behind a few of the poems, nudging them into where they want to go. There’s an unexpected authority in some. It’s heartening.

It feels like November has gotten away from me. I was reading through the month’s articles at Instructify and found that I’d written a whole lot less for that than I thought I had. I bought the CLMP submissions manager (built by one of my favorite journals, One Story) for Inch at the beginning of the month, but it’s the 28th and I still don’t have it working. (Wade installed it for me… I just have to configure it.)

I did a poetry reading today, my first public reading since I was an undergraduate. It was part of the West End Poetry Weekend, which was arranged by the Carrboro Parks and Recreation Division. I’m grateful to the folks who set it up, particularly Kim Andrews, who did a great deal to make it happen.

Ellen read just before I did, and in case there was any question, Ellen rocks completely. If you have not bought her book yet, you should buy it from Bull City or from Amazon.

After the reading, I sat in football traffic for a little over an hour trying to see the Four-String show. I’ll be working with them tomorrow night, coaching improv for the first time since I walked away from DSI in early 2006. I don’t know what to expect. I’m nervous. I really thought I had shut the door on improv for good. There’s not another team I can think of that could have even coaxed me this far. Part of me hopes that I go and just don’t feel it at all, and we call it quits there. Part of jme hopes it’s a perfect fit. Either way, I’m a little more excited about it than I thought I would be.

Issue 4 of Inch features poetry from Jeffery Beam, Sebastian Matthews, and Mischa Willett, and fiction by Michael McFee and Cynthia Reeves.

After a brief visit to the library today, I have ended up with several new books, and none are non-fiction. Ladybug and I are driving to DC for a wedding next weekend, so I’ll be reading a fair bit on the road. I’m almost wishing that I were done with the book I’m reading, so I could dive headfirst into the Ander Monson book I picked up. Ander Monson is one of the best authors you’re not reading, so get on the stick, people.

The Regulator will soon be the latest bookstore to carry Bull City Press books. They should have them in stock next week. Stop by and support your independent bookstore. If you don’t use them, you lose them.

I need suggestions on great dance songs that people aged 16-66 would comfortable getting down with. Please please please, leave them in the comments.

Another way it could pay off and I’d be happy: I could be a little more like Carl Phillips. I spent a wee bit of time thumbing through The Rest of Love tonight, and I’m consistently awed by that man.

Bill Ferris, co-editor of Inch, is a father. Elliott Ferris was born earlier this evening at the healthy weight of 9 pounds.

(When you’re looking for poem lines about babies, look no further than Thomas Lux.)

Just finished printing the new Inch, but man, it’s gonna take some time to get them folded, cut, and stapled. Bill’s expecting a baby any minute now, so I will probably be flying solo on getting the issue out.

Ladybug is in the other room poking through WWC worksheets. So far, we agree on some of the poems that rocked it out.

Very Like a Whale has been sorting out all sides of the “previously published” debate for a week or two. When I stumbled across these threads this morning, I immediately blurted out my response… which, as it turns out, will probably end up on the Inch website sooner or later. Y’know, when I actually edit it.

Here’s what I said:

As an editor, I can see both sides of this, so Inch’s policy falls somewhere in the middle of the two extremes that I’ve seen show up here.

For the purposes of our print publication, we do not consider work that’s appeared in an online workshop, on a newsgroup, or on a personal blog to be previously published. We wouldn’t consider work that had been given in print form to your workshop group to be previously published, and if you left your diary lying around for your younger brother to read, we wouldn’t hold that against you.

The Internet is letting us do things today that we couldn’t do before, and there’s going to be a tense period while we re-configure our notions of public life and private life. But as long as people continue to post to their blogs with the attitude that it’s a personal space and the public just happens to be able to look in, poems there will remain akin to the poems in a print diary, at least as far as Inch is concerned.

However, if you send us work from a personal website or Internet workshop, we’ll politely ask (without requiring) that you take it down when the issue is published, and replace it with a link to our site. I think most editors do pride themselves on having the good sense to select the boldest and best new work, and we’d like to believe that we “discovered” your poem or story, y’know, for 45 minutes or so after the issue hits the stands. Let us maintain that illusion by sending your readers to our site, where we can claim to have “discovered” you and they can chuckle about how they knew you when. Hopefully, they’ll buy an issue to support you, and find something they love by someone they’ve never heard of.

And hey, we return the rights to your work, so if you put it back online, that’s cool. We thought it was good enough that we wanted people to see it when we printed our issue, and that hasn’t changed because we have a newer issue. We hope you’ll tell people how smart we were to have discovered your work before anyone else, even though all parties know that’s not entirely true.

By this logic, it doesn’t seem unreasonable to disallow previously published work from books, journals and websites that function as professional or semi-professional “publications.” Reb Livingston of No Tell Motel uses an editorial process to make this distinction, and this seems reasonable to me– they “discovered” your work before we did. However, if your work is available for sale in any arena (editor or no), that also counts as previous publication, and you probably feel the same way we do about it because you’ve put a lot of energy into convincing people your book is worth buying from that POD.

I have no illusions about how small the literary community really is, and no illusions about how much smaller Inch’s readership is. I would love to see both grow, but if I have to choose just one, I choose the former. Treating personal blogs as personal seems to allow for this growth more comfortably than the alternative. Poetry is going to end up in blogs, period; I feel little incentive to require that only the bad stuff be posted.

New postage rates are in effect. I wonder what this will mean for all of the journals that have long backlogs of submissions? If the SASEs have the old postage on them, will the submitters just be SOL?

(In case yr wondering, Inch cleared its queue last week– the last set of responses went out on Saturday morning.)

One of the great joys of Mothers Day, for me, was sending dirty text Mothers Day messages to poet-friends who have kids. Perhaps “dirty” overstates things a bit. But in at least three messages, I claimed to be pantsless.

Jeremy turned me on to Rumble this morning. I just ate a sub at my desk, so I have about 20 minutes to spend poking through some microfiction. Rock.

After some fuss, I managed to update my blogroll yesterday. Today, the updates are gone. Well, drat. Guess I’ll update again tonight. Is it just me, or has Rick Barot’s old URL been taken over by some guy named Lloyd? How does this happen?

Ladybug is out with the girls this weekend, which I think means that I will spend my Saturday drafting a paper about Frank O’Hara. I’m reading Lunch Poems again for bookshop. I read this book in my first semester as an MFA student, and I am pleased to return to it. Several students asked for O’Hara while I was teaching, and I learned a thing or two from their criticism. I welcome the chance to return to him as an active reader.

Bill and I are looking at the microfiction landscape, trying to decide whose work to solicit for future issues of Inch. I posted a call for subs on a message board I used to haunt, and was immediately assailed by a nay-sayer who believes that fiction cannot be interesting in so short a space. Others responded before I could– it was really kind of a swarm of support for microfic. I don’t know what I would have said in response; I might have just asked Philip McFee for permission to post his entire story from Inch #2, which was one of my favorite short pieces ever.