A friend wrote me and asked the following:

“Hope you don’t mind a submitter-type question. There are a couple of journals that I’ve been rejected by more than once. I’d like to keep submitting there because these are journals I admire and where I think my work (in general) kind of fits, but I wonder if journals have an “oh no not her again pile” for folks who submit more than once with no success. I mean my submissions are normal — I don’t put anything about the story in the cover letter and I don’t send peanut butter sandwiches — but I still wonder if there is an “auto reject” pile that someone might go in, at say, The ____ Review, after a couple of rejections. What are your thoughts? Thanks for your perspective on this….”

I asked her if I could post her question, since I hear variations on this a lot.  Here’s my response:

“In short: I wouldn’t worry too hard. We get so many submissions that we mostly only remember the crazies. I do know a couple of names of frequent submitters who aren’t crazy; those are people who have new stories or poems in within 48 hours of their most recent rejection. I think that constitutes “a bit much” (though, being the softie I am, I’m still rooting for them to land one).

Journals that use electronic submissions can track all your old submissions when you send them stuff, and can even go back and read comments on your previous stories to see if you’re coming along or if your stories are getting worse.

I’d say a good rule of thumb is that unless the magazine has a policy to the contrary, waiting 3-4 months after your most recent rejection to send again is the most appropriate course of action. (Unless they’re sending personal rejections encouraging another submission.)”

–

So, what do you think?  Comments welcome.

My students had their midterm exams today, so I am anxious to see what sunk in and what still needs work.

We’ve just finished A. Van Jordan’s M-A-C-N-O-L-I-A, though we’ll come back to it toward the end of class, when students begin thinking about how collections of poems work.  Response to the book was terrific… though a couple students were skeptical when they first finished it, I think most had come around by the time they’d written papers on it.  A couple listed it as the best thing they’ve read in class on their midterm evaluations.  (Brigit Pegeen Kelly showed up on that list a lot, as did Zbigniew Herbert and Mark Jarman.)

Reading list #4 came out today; here’s what’s on it.

Thomas Lux, The Cradle Place
Charles Simic, Charon’s Cosmology
Kara Candito, Taste of Cherry
Dan Albergotti, The Boatloads
Donald Hall, Without
Mary Oliver, American Primitive
Tony Hoagland, What Narcissism Means to Me
Pablo Neruda, Winter Garden
William Matthews, Time & Money
Nickole Brown, Sister
Carl Dennis, Practical Gods
Donald Justice, The Sunset Maker
Ross Gay, Against Which
Mark Jarman, Unholy Sonnets
Geri Doran, Resin
Thomas Lux, God Particles
William Matthews, Flood

My students continue to make really interesting and bold choices.  (They request five books they’re interested in; I assign one.) A couple of these books didn’t appear on request lists but will be really helpful to the students who got them, but most were directly requested by students.  I was really pleased to see Ross Gay’s name pop back up.  After reading one of his essays and his poem “Jet” in class, Tony Hoagland’s name was on many of the lists this time around.  Hey, UNC faculty member who has had all of Tony’s work checked out since the beginning of the semester and doesn’t have to return them until 2-23-10, get over yourself and return these books to the library so I can assign them! One student had to resort to saying, “I’ll buy the book if you’ll just assign it to me.”

So, my students are nearing the end of their first book, and have made their requests for a second book.  Some went directly for the books that they commented on in the first two weeks, some went back to the list they used for the first requests, and some went in new and surprising directions.  All three strategies seem like worthy ones to me!

Some of the old favorites have made it to the list this time.  It always seems to work out that I’m able to include one book that I have not yet read; this time, it was one by an author with whom I was pretty familiar.

Here’s the list:

Linda Pastan, The Last Uncle
Theodore Roethke, The Lost Son & Other Poems
Elizabeth Bishop, Questions of Travel
Brigit Pegeen Kelly, Song
Wallace Stevens, Harmonium
Jennifer Grotz, Cusp
Kay Ryan, The Niagara River
Thomas Lux, God Particles
Carl Dennis, Practical Gods
Mark Jarman, Unholy Sonnets
Vievee Francis, Blue-Tail Fly
Philip Larkin, The Less Deceived
Billy Collins, Questions About Angels
Donald Justice, Departures
Eavan Boland, Domestic Violence
Elizabeth Bishop, Geography III
Update: I left one out!  Paul Otremba, The Currency

I began Ellen Bryant Voigt’s The Art of Syntax last night, and though I haven’t yet attempted to apply what I have learned to my readings of poems, I’ve actually found that her translation of some of Robert Jourdain’s thoughts on music (in Music, The Brain, and Ecstasy) had a deep, profound effect on the way I was listening to music this morning.  As someone who has never had any real musical talent, I have always been deeply envious of musical craftsmen and people who have an intimate and seemingly natural (or unrehearsed, though I know that is not the case) gift for the language of music.  Seeing musical terms translated into the terms I understand– or rather, the terms I am only beginning to understand– finally gave me enough context to map the way my brain works with language to the way I am able to hear music.

Obviously, I have more work to do, much more work to do.  I’ve got to finish the book, and I’ve got a lot more listening to do– both to the music collection with which I have a new tool to work, and to a million and a half poems.  But it was an exciting morning, because I was hearing new things in familiar songs, or rather, recontextualizing things I’ve already heard many times before.

Next up today: Beatles Rock Band (and how participation also changes the way one hears the familiar) and my first read of student poems.

My first independent reading list is done for the semester.  I do six reading assignments throughout the semester (though this time they’ll all read the same book for the third assignment), and students are expected to write about the books they read four times. There were a couple of books I was hoping to assign but no one asked for them or asked for work that might have informed the choice.  Students asked for a much wider range of contemporary books this time than in previous classes, which is good; I think they’ll have ample opportunity in literature classes to discover work by poets like Frost, Hopkins, Stevens, Eliot.

Keeping true to my general rule, I assigned one book that I had not yet read, though I have finished reading it since the assignments went out and I think it will be very helpful to the student who requested it.

William Matthews, After All
Weldon Kees, The Fall of the Magicians
Philip Larkin, The Less Deceived
Robert Hass, Time and Materials
2 x Natasha Trethewey, Native Guard
Kay Ryan, Say Uncle
Ellen Bryant Voigt, The Lotus Flowers
2 x Carl Dennis, Practical Gods
Jack Gilbert, Refusing Heaven
Louise Glück, The Triumph of Achilles
Mark Jarman, Unholy Sonnets
Eavan Boland, Domestic Violence
Elizabeth Bishop, Geography III
Richard Wilbur, Things of This World
Ross Gay, Against Which

So, if one looks at the list above, is it painfully obvious which books were directly requested and which I suggested to students who chose largely traditional books?  The first round is the hardest– I have not yet seen student work to inform the decision, so I was forced to go by their early comments in class (if they have made any) and the poem that they brought in as exemplary.  Really, the biggest determinant was the five books they requested.  Only three students did not get an author they requested; two students ended up with an author they requested but not one of the specific books on their list. The big surprise from the students: no one requested any beat poets.  I think that’s the first time that’s happened in the first round.

How many of my old favorites for this assignment didn’t make the cut this time?  (For example, when was the last time I did an independent reading assignment without Donald Justice?)  Some of them were requested but not available in the library, some weren’t sniffed at.  This will change.  By the time the second assignment rolls around, they’ll be making spectacular requests.  We just need more time together.

Though you hardly notice a difference, I’m now running a more advanced version of WordPress, which is pretty great on the back end.

In my Intro to Poetry class, we spent some time last week on Shelley’s “Ozymandias,” giving it a close reading and looking for ways that the sonnet form provides some tension with the content of the poem.  I tend to be somewhat conservative when teaching my poetry classes, in that I tend to do close readings only of poems that I’m really, really comfortable with: poems that I’ve written about critically and therefore spent hours or days dissecting, or poems that I have read closely in other classes (sometimes classes taught by someone else) or long discussions.

“Ozymandias” was a last-minute choice.  I first encountered the poem in high school but never gave it a great deal of thought, and it’s been circling around the work I’ve done for a couple years now.  It’s made an appearance in the assigned reading in my other classes but I never looked at it with students during our class period together.  The context provided by our textbook always seemed sufficient for what I hoped students would gain from the poem.

But as I reviewed the assigned reading this time, I ditched my initial choice of a William Matthews poem for Shelley.  I spent a little time with it the night before class and then another chunk of time with it the day of.  But, of course, it wasn’t until I was in the classroom, in the middle of the conversation, that I was able to articulate the strategy that must have drawn me to the poem so keenly in the eleventh hour: the layering of voice.  Take a look:

Ozymandias

I met a traveler from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert . . . Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear:
“My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!”
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

Look at the distance between the speaker and the spoken.  The speaker (1) meets a traveler (2), who says that an artist (3) built a statue that quotes Ozymandias (4 – it’s the only direct quote of the poem, but is attributable to both the artist and Ozymandias, which is another nice complexity).  Of note: the speaker does not put the traveler’s words in quotes, suggesting that the made-ness of the iambic pentameter belongs to the speaker (and, for two lines, the artist/Ozymandias tag-team).  It’s in this distance that the tension between form and content– the intense made-ness of the poem contrasted with the futility of making– is fully realized.

Sadly, I’ve since gone looking for this poem in places other than the textbook, and sometimes the traveler’s speech is put in quotes!  Well, that sure changes my infatuation with this poem.  Not much, but some.

I always feel a little silly writing discoveries like this in my blog.  Someone else has had them before and articulated them more eloquently.

One of the first poems I teach in my intro to poetry classes is William Carlos Williams’s “This is Just to Say.”  It’s a short poem with an amazing amount going on, though at first glance, many students dismiss it as slight or unworthy of being a poem.

My favorite thing about teaching it is the inevitable flurry of “This is Just to Say”-related humor that follows.  Perhaps you remember this post.  This time around, I tweeted that I had taught the poem, and got this message on Facebook a couple days later from a friend:

This is Just to Say

I have stolen
the Manguso
that you
leant me

and which
I meant to return
on the drive
home

Forgive me
it’s wonderful
so smart
and so funny

I have, over the last few months, given up on being a regular blogger because my carpal tunnel has been inflamed pretty much all of the time.  Which is, I guess, OK, since it forces me to limit the amount of time I spend on the computer.  It got a good two-week rest just recently, which is why I’m feeling good enough to poke into this blog and provide you with this list of potential topics for conversation.  Should you see me on the street, in a bar, or in a local department store, these topics would make for spirited chat, if you’re interested in chatting mostly about me.

List of Potential Topics for Conversation, Based Upon My Whereabouts and Interesting Experiences From the Past Few Months

• Warren Wilson MFA July 2009 graduation (subtopics here include: Matthew Olzmann who is cooler than you are, things Tua’s students say to her, joining Mike Puican’s family for an afternoon)
• Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference 2009 (subtopics here include: waiting tables, my reaction to a NYT kill piece, Bread Loaf brain loss, workshop leader Arthur Sze and fellow Stephanie Brown, some of the best poems about pigs I have ever read, BLARS, my visit to the laundry room, Voltron and my love of the scholars, Kara Candito’s Taste of Cherry, Brigit Pegeen Kelly giving a reading that may actually have killed someone because it was so good, the Dank Tank, Weather Walrus, my roommate Matthew Olzmann who is cooler than you are)
• NC state budget crisis
• Warren Wilson MFA Alumni Residency at Mount Holyoke College (potential subtopics include: panel on subject matter with Robin Black and Tracy Winn, an amazing welcome, staying in a dorm that is waaaaay nicer than my home, a future motion picture)
• the night Chelsea showed up on our porch
• El Bandito’s new cat and its potential names (potential subtopics include: the pros & cons of “Maurice,” my temptation to bring forward the name “Matthew Olzmann”)
• recent and upcoming publications (potential subtopics include: magazines listed on the “About” page of this web site which has been recently updated)
• arm removal (partial)
• going to Los Angeles (potential subtopics include: Dodgers, Angels, Frank Lloyd Wright, convergences of friends)
• new book from Bull City Press — State Street by Katie Bowler
• editorial changes at Inch, including exciting upcoming guest editors

Also, a reminder: if you’re still coming to this page, one of the following is true: I love you dearly, you are a spam robot, or it’s OK to stalk me from afar but please do not come to my home.

Thirty seconds after receiving one acceptance, another came in.  I figure that if I blog this one, too, more will arrive before the end of the day.

Sweet… my last two poetry submissions have been accepted, which means I have poems forthcoming from three magazines in the next couple months.  Holla!

Busy poetry week. On Monday, I was featured on Poetry Daily, which was wonderful. I’m indebted to the editors for the opportunity. On Tuesday and Thursday, I subbed for some classes at UNC. Then, this weekend, I sent my completed manuscript to a contest for the first time and applied to be a waiter at Bread Loaf this summer. (And here’s how stupid I am– when I applied to Bread Loaf, I inadvertently left Poetry Daily off of my publications list. Dangit!)

I didn’t get to go to AWP and had to read all kinds of tweets and Facebook statuses from those who did. So I feel pretty good that I at least got something done.

Next up tonight: Sending the manuscript to a press that actually solicited a manuscript from me, and writing a poem. Because, did I mention, I’m on a poem-a-day duty until the end of the month? Oh yeah, I am.

I’ve updated the ways you can stalk me in the sidebar. This does not imply that I need additional stalking, but I was ready to retire from MySpace for good (talk about a service that doesn’t have any value any more) and am now open to being found on Xbox Live.

You can also stalk my poem “Two Swans” in the most recent issue of the New England Review.

I spent the weekend in Swannanoa and stayed through Tuesday so I could see my peoples graduate. A terrific graduating class, one that I’m pleased to have around the alumni association because they’re so damn awesome. Ruba’s reading was stellar, as were most of the readings. I wondered if I was seeing things through rose-colored glasses, because everything seemed better than normal, fiction writers and poets. Nick Fox and Gabriel Blackwell gave astounding, animated readings. Angela Torres knocked my socks clean off. I mean, top to bottom, good readings.

The campus was all a-twitter because of the famous new student, which was hilarious, cute, totally worth mocking, and a little bit contagious. That’s embarassing to admit, but true. But all the new students that I talked to were pretty great and there are plenty of reasons to be all a-twitter if you’re at Warren Wilson right now.

Mc asked if I would battle with him since DJ Reed Turchi had to come back to Carolina, so I put in a couple hours at the dance, which was a sick amount of fun.

Notes on photos: I love the look on Matthew’s face here. Also, Tua is the most photogenic person alive.

• Beginning in January 2009, I’ll be serving on the advisory board for the Pittsboro St. branch of the North Carolina State Employees Credit Union.  I love the NC SECU!  If you’re a member– at any branch!– of SECU, feel free to tell me how it’s going.  Advisory board members love to hear what’s going well and what you’d like to see from the SECU.  Ideas for services you’d like to see are particularly welcome!  (No, “free money” or “money for hugs” are not suggestions I will take to the branch manager.) 
• I have finished the first seven days of a 30-in-30 grind.  30 poems in thirty days.  After seven days, I have five sonnets.  I did not set out to write sonnets, people, it’s just happening.  But I am finding them tremendously liberating.
• This is my first post since election day, and I suppose that just about everything that could possibly be said about this election has been said.  I have nothing new to offer.  I feel a great sense of hope about the direction that this country could take under Barack Obama.  I really believe he’s going to be an incredible President, because more than any politician I can remember in quite some time, I believe he’s an incredible human being.  (And I am delighted with the direction of the Democratic Party under another guy I think is pretty great, Howard Dean.)

  But for all the hope I feel, as proud as I am of the American electorate, I am just disgusted with referenda passed in states like Florida and California that deny human beings basic rights, that relegates some people to second-class citizenship.

  Gay rights are civil rights.  

  According to tax laws, if a tax-exempt group — religious or secular — promotes ideas which contradict important public policies (like desegregation), then the group’s tax-exempt status may not be granted or extended. Tax exemptions are provided in exchange for groups’ providing services to the community; when the groups undermine important goals of the community, then the tax exemptions are no longer justified. 

  I have heard some calls for petitions to strip the Mormon Church of its tax-exempt status for its role in the passage of California’s Proposition 8.  I support this action, and I support the removal of tax-exempt status for any non-profit institution which engages in partisan political activity.  I hope you will too. 

Looks like I am going to be talking poetry (and publishing) to high school students in Chapel Hill later this month, which is exciting.  I have recently been wondering about the viability of proposing a creative writing curriculum at a local STEM high school as an elective.  I mean, my plan so far has consisted of marching in and asking the principal if he would be interested in having me for one year as a volunteer to teach one morning class before I head in to work.  Yes, this is how much I a) want to be teaching creative writing, and b) want to be teaching high school students.  I think about this a lot, and I think I have some support from my boss in proposing it.  We’ll see if I can make it palatable to all parties.

One of my best friends is getting married soon and has entrusted me with reading a poem in his wedding.  This is very, very cool, but it’s also really terrifying, because they’d like me to read one of my poems.  I do not make it S.O.P. to deal with the reader with utter sincerity, but the occasion demands it, so I have been out of my element a little.  The challenge, intellectually, is really enjoyable, but I have a tremendous fear that the poem will end up not being very good (despite the fact that the bride and groom chose it from a selection of poems, not all of which were mine).  I think in the elaborate, fearful fantasy I have been busy constructing, not only do I arrive at the ceremony with a poem that seems workable only to have it be total gibberish when I go to recite it, but the recitation is so awful that it causes the floor of the church to shatter and all of the wedding-goers to tumble into a pit of damnation, which, obviously, ruins the wedding day for the bride and groom, who not only never speak to me, but get a legal injunction barring me from ever publishing the poem, which wouldn’t seem probable anyhow but in the hours after the wedding-goers are swallowed up, I revise the poem and the revision is really, really good– it’s the poem I would have wanted to read at their wedding in the first place.

Unrelated:

• OK, so Scrabulous for Facebook is gone, but you can still play and get notifications by e-mail.  Daniel Wallace told me this.  I am so on… none of the Facebook alternatives has brought me quite as much joy as Scrabulous.  I just really like that interface.
• Speaking of which, Ladybug and I appear to be headed to a board game night tonight.  She does love board games, my wife.
• To anyone who doesn’t understand Twitter, let me just say this: when you’re writing a poem a day, Twitter is the best thing in the world, because you have all of that information, all organized chaotically, all of the thoughts complete and at the same time incomplete.  Could you ask for a better way to launch a meditation?

Further unrelated:

A couple of days ago, I linked to a 43 Folders post about Frank O’Hara and a series about making the time you need to be creative.  Merlin Mann hasn’t stopped thinking about carving out this space in his life (well, he’s on to attention in general, but what do you need attention for, if not to do the important things, and aren’t the important things almost always creative?), and he said something recently that I adored and wanted to rebroadcast:

Here’s the thing. It’s like being able to see The Matrix; once you realize the control you can choose to exercise regarding your attention, you’ll start to see all the unnecessary waste that everybody else thinks is unavoidable, natural, and even healthy (“I NEVER shut off my BlackBerry!”). See? Now, you are the weird one. Weirdo.

Yes, yes, yes, this puts into words a feeling I have been having very strongly in my life.  I’m by no means a zen master of my own attention, but I have been working as hard as I can to get there because it’s necessary for me to continue the creative life that I want to have.  I have been at the point where I have wondered if I lack empathy because I simply cannot imagine why other people aren’t working just as hard to control their own inputs and experience the rediscovery of purpose that accompanies.

• I have seen a couple pictures of Katy “I Kissed a Girl” Perry and I think she looks way too much like Zooey Deschanel.  I liked the idea of “I Kissed a Girl” a lot better when Jill Sobule did it.  Oh, wait, I didn’t really care then, either.  Kiss whoever you damn well please.
• Ladybug and I were watching Mad Men on DVD and we both felt the urge to drink more.  I had whiskey and she had something with Kahlua.  If we’d had cigarettes in the house, we would have smoked them, and damn, I hate cigarettes.
• Bull City Press has a brand new look on the web!  Our incredible intern, Jordan Wingate, redesigned the whole thing and it looks light years better than the old site.  Plus, you can now buy the newest issues of Inch… Jordan is not just our intern, he’s also a reader for the fiction you see in Inch.
• I am getting my contact list organized so I can be a better correspondent.  Or, at least, I hope to be a better correspondent.  So, if you have moved and you think you might one day like mail from me or from my press, send me your new address.
• Inch #8 is for sale now!  Did I tell you that?  You can buy a single issue, but you know, we like it better if you subscribe for a year.  It’s only four bucks plus a dollar for shipping.  Seriously, you can’t even go out to eat for five bucks.  Unless you go to Taco Bell, at which point your body is paying such a price for the food that you probably should have spent your money on a subscription to this little magazine!

43 Folders has been doing a series on making time to make things, and followed up today with a post about Frank O’Hara’s Lunch Poems.  Productivity blog + poetry?  I think I may have just had a geek nirvana moment.

Kenneth Burke called literature equipment for living, and O’Hara never put his away. He was always making. Sometimes poems, sometimes friends.

He has a slim book of work called Lunch Poems, and you might think of that as his primary mode of composition. While out walking from the museum to get lunch, he’d do a poem. Maybe he’d type it up and stick it in a drawer later.

I think that may be an oversimplification of O’Hara’s process, but who can say for sure?  What is certain is that O’Hara had a true gift for capturing the beauty of the colloquial and trivial, and it’s no coincidence that he was a poet who remained immersed in the world of work, firmly rooted in the everyday experience and not some artistic or romantic ideal, remaining engaged not to promote his work but to create it.

I’m setting up next month’s edition of The Grind, in which an intrepid group of poets produces a poem a day for a month and sends it to everyone else in the group.  It’s harrowing, it’s rigorous, it borders on insane, but since the initial group (Matthew Olzmann, Ruba Ahmed, Zena Cardman) did it back in October, it’s become a tradition– it has run continuously since then with a rotating cast of characters.

I traded e-mails with a friend who is finishing up 31 in 31 for July, and has found what many of us have, and what keeps me coming back: the process is liberating, despite all its constraints.  Here’s what I said to her in a moment of clarity:

Well, congratulations on 31 in 31!  It’s no small feat, which you’ve obviously intuited not only from the work itself but from the attrition rate within the group. It’s a worthy and commendable thing that you have carved out the time for your craft, however unpolished those drafts are… And, of course, revision rocks and is the best reason to be a poet.  Think of all the raw work you can now revise.  When this process works, it really works… When you go back to these in a couple months, you will see connections and obsessions that will frighten you and enchant you.  The desperation involved in producing something daily is really instructive.

Most people choose to try it in February, since February only has 28 days, or in April, because it’s NaPoWriMo.  But we’ll go whenever.  If you want in on August, let me know before tomorrow night and I’ll include you in the introductory e-mail.  But remember: the only unforgivable sins are missing a day or dropping out.

MFA/MFYOU

When will the annoying to-MFA-or-not-to-MFA prattle end?  Everyone in a MFA program is awful and MFA programs just take your money, you don’t need an MFA to be a writer, only real experience and heart can make you a writer and no amount of MFA will give you that, people with MFAs have a stranglehold on every conceivable publishing avenue, there is a secret syndicate of MFAs who were responsible for the Bay of Pigs and seek to destroy everyone who’s ever put pen to a piece of paper that wasn’t an application to an MFA program, blah blah blah.

Still, the idea behind this new online journal is kind of cute– the editors are a married couple, one enrolled in an MFA program and one working full time.  And to their credit, they don’t seem to skew in one direction of the MFA-or-no nonsense: they want top-quality writing from both ends of the spectrum.  It’s out there, so it just depends on where they solicit and how they market for submissions.  However, take a look at this statement from the website:

So what’s the difference between these two separate paths? What do you gain from an MFA program and what do you gain from doing it on your own? That’s what we hope to find out, and document, on this website.

If they’re successful in finding good writing from both populations, I don’t think that they’ll be able to.