Choosy

That magazine published those poems because the editors liked them. The editors got other poems that I know I would have liked — and perhaps would have liked better than anything I saw in their magazine — and the editors chose against them.

2023 in publications

Mollyhouse
Evening Street Review
Otoliths
Pure Slush
Dark Winter
Cream Scene Carnival
The Quarter(ly)
Exacting Clam

Autobiography of a Book, a 220-page volume from AC Books, became available as a pre-order. Physical copies are expected in February. 

I found a publisher for a full-length poetry manuscript, but then things seemed to go off track. It may yet be possible to bring it back on track. We’ll see. 

I had a featured reading with Lyrics & Dirges here in Berkeley. I hit a handful of open mics. 

The list of publications is shorter than the average of the last few years. Did I send out fewer poems? That might be so. I spent quite a bit of energy rerouting rejected work. Looking at the list, the only poems accepted this year that hadn’t been previously rejected was the batch at Otoliths. It was Mark Young’s final issue so I sent him poems I’d just revised. It was a group that wouldn’t work for most, I thought. Too weird, maybe. There is another set from the same project; no bite so far. 

I got a friendly rejection from Poetry Magazine: “We won’t be publishing anything from this submission, but we really enjoyed reading and discussing it among the editorial team, especially ‘The Heart Again.’ We’d love to read more of your work and hope you will submit again soon.” At the bottom of the message they emphasized it: “P.S. We really enjoyed you work!”

After decades of sending Poetry poems — everybody who’s written a poem wants to see it in Poetry — this was the first time I received encouragement. The rejection came in October, 2023, the poems having been uploaded to Poetry’s submission manager in September of 2022. That’s a wait of thirteen months, right? 

I had a fresh batch of poems, so I sent those right away. Here is what came back: “We won’t be publishing anything from your submission, but we wish you the best of luck in publishing it elsewhere and appreciate you sending it our way.”

That is standard language, generalized, not cruel, but not really encouragement. No “enjoyed” — not once, let alone twice. The sort thing they’ve sent me from the beginning. Yet I only had to wait two months. That’s a record in recent history for me. Usually it’s a year or more. So maybe Poetry has different tiers? The when-we-get-around-to-it tier for all the unknown poets (my tier up to now), then a look-sooner-shows-promise tier? Or maybe they finally staffed up with enough first readers that rejection wait times have been pared down by 80%? Or … 

Anyway, it would be nice to have a poem in Poetry. The encouraging rejection may be as close as I get. As you’ve seen, I’m right back to the unencouraging. I sent again. We’ll see if I am back to a 13-month wait as well. 

Interesting that the poem singled out for praise — “The Heart Again” — was brand fresh in September 2022. I was so pleased by it I sent it immediately to Poetry. By the time Poetry rejected it, “The Heart Again” had been rejected by 27 other faster-deciding zines. It has since been rejected four more times. That’s true of all the other poems in that 5-poem batch. Back in my 20s I would not have been able to endure 30 rejections of one batch. It would have been too bruising — and too expensive! I would have given up on good poems because I couldn’t afford the postage and because I couldn’t handle the dislike. Here in my 50s what’s changed? The basic expenses are different — having a computer, which I couldn’t afford in my early writing years, having an internet connection, paying reading/entry fees. I rarely pay fees, though. I can’t quite justify them. The average reading fee these days is $3 — and these venues typically do not provide any compensation, not even a contributor’s copy (not that that’s a thing with online publication). “The Heart Again,” the poem Poetry almost wanted, would have cost me $90 in fees by now. I can afford more rejections these days, but $90?

There are likely better publication-seeking strategies than my rather random style, I admit that. But I’m a rather random person, and I’m not going to turn into somebody else. Besides, it’s hard enough justifying the whole thing. There’s no money in it. There’s very little compensation of any kind, including making a name for oneself. I continue to send out my poems to honor my poems. They are good poems. They deserve to be little stars in the universe of poems.  

rejecto-zines

In 2021 I started sending out the poems “To Try to Fall” and “I used to think you were beautiful.” By the time the nice editors at Dark Winter decided to take them up, 50 other venues had already declined the opportunity. In case you are curious:

2021

Thrush, Cimarron Review, Agni, The New Yorker

2022

Arcturus, Magma, As It Ought to Be, Comstock Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, Nashville Review, Chestnut Review, Glass Mountain, Gordon Square Review, Limp Wrist/Glitter Bomb Award, Black Fox Literary Review, Baltimore Review, Columbia Journal, New Welsh Review, Suburbia Journal, Dillydoun Review, Asheville Poetry Review, Scapegoat Review, Foglifter, Route 7 Review, Lavender Bones

2023

Mollyhouse, Southland Alibi, 805, Broadkill Review, Pidgeonholes, The Maine Review, Emerson Review, Roi Faineant, Bluestem, The Ignatian, New Orleans Review, Gigantic Sequins, Showcase, Miracle Monocle, Red Coyote, After Happy Hour Review, Jake, A-Minor, Labyrinth Anthologies, Lumina, Lunch Ticket, Rock Paper Poem, Meetinghouse, Trace Fossils, Slippery Elm

a few words inserted in the boilerplate rejection

Most literary magazines want to consider a batch of poems all sent together. Recently I sent poems to Grub Street, a lit mag that wanted five poems but they wanted each uploaded individually to their submission manager, each poem thus being considered apart from the others. One of the poems was rejected within the week, another shortly after, the third after a month. Two more lingered long enough for me to get hopeful. I got the rejections this morning, two months after I uploaded them for consideration. 

Rejections are friendlier these days than they used to be, on the whole, telling the poet the editors read zillions of poems, not to be discouraged, blah blah blah. I read the boilerplate rejections even though they always say the same things. One of this morning's rejections included a phrase not included in the other: "we found your style to be fun and engaging." The poem was overtly joky, so it was a rare instance of an editorial response that wasn't boilerplate. 

new year’s resolutions — so far

I just finished a letter I began a month ago. When I send a copy of Thousand out I include a handwritten letter. My writing is pretty legible, if sometimes ambiguous. A friend recently read “month” when I’d written “mouth.” I suppose I could count up how many copies of Thousand I’ve sent out. These are not paid orders. I am sending out books to people I like/admire. 

I’ve gotten out a few this year. Not a lot. Not much response. I don’t blame anybody for not writing back. I can be a good correspondent, or a bad one. Everybody’s busy. And what does one say? So far I’ve always asked before sending, so the Thousand should never be a surprise. 

I continue to send out work — to submit, goes the lingo. The process hasn’t been rip-roaring this year. But looking back over LoveSettlement posts I see twelve publications. Not nothing! 

The sense of discouragement sets in with the book length manuscripts. 

Autobiography of a Book has now been out to 18 publishers. Eight rejected it. The other ten have yet to respond. At the writing of my new year’s resolutions post Book had only been rejected three times. I have a goal of sending Book to 100 places. Are there 100 places to send it? If Book gets its 100th rejection, I will reevaluate. Maybe at that point I will just post it on the blog or upload a file to a print on demand service.

When I have energy to market a manuscript I default toward Autobiography of a Book, thus the full-length poetry manuscript is neglected. That one is currently titled Nobody You Know. It is out to one publisher. 

#keepyournumbersup … There are 30 places still considering work I’ve sent out since the beginning of July (to pick a recent date). That number includes poems, chapters from Book, and the two book manuscripts. Pretty good. It means I am not neglecting the process. 

The question with which I ended the new year’s resolution post, “I wonder how many readers a published poem gets?,” got a data point in April. 

new year’s resolutions

I wrote the following in response to another blogger’s call for writerly resolutions:

In 2019 I got a first book published (prose or prose poetry). It was pub'd by a tiny press without resources for any kind of marketing. But it’s a handsome book and the publisher is a sweetheart. Figuring out how to get it out into the world has been, well, a hobby ever since. 

I like performing so I was going to open mics in our very active SF Bay Area literary scene -- I sold a few copies, I traded for other people’s books (I like trades!) -- but then the pandemic came along. The boxes have been gathering dust. So I've started doing something I always wanted to do -- I'm sending free copies to people I like and admire. I've only sent a few out this way so far. I include a handwritten letter. I am shy about sending to people I don't know personally. But I'm poised to do so. So I will be doing that in 2021.

There were years there when rejection was so hurtful I did few submissions. In 2017 I put together a poetry manuscript, motivated by a contest. Though the nucleus of the manuscript is published poems, many of my favorites were unpublished. So, while waiting to hear back from the contest judges, I started sending out the unpublished poems. The manuscript didn’t win the contest, but most of the poems have been published now in ezines. I will send the manuscript to other presses/contests in 2021. 

I have another prose manuscript, and I've been able to place excerpts in a few literary venues. I have gathered almost 150 rejections for excerpts. The full manuscript has been rejected only three times. I will put more energy into getting the manuscript out in 2021. 

Then there are all the poems that fill up notebooks. Since 2017 I have been regularly sending out work and rejection no longer feels so crushing. Acceptances happen now and then. Dreams of literary fame continue to haunt my chinks and crannies, of course, because I'm a dreamer. I sent out two poetry submissions before writing this comment. I got one rejection this morning. In my three-person writing group we use: #keepyournumbersup ... So when I'm feeling discouraged I remind myself to put out some of those good poems to places that haven't yet had the opportunity to read them. Every editor is a reader. If I've sent a poem to 20 places, it's been read 20 times, right? I wonder how many readers a published poem gets?

Autobiography of a Book

The project I’m working hardest on finding a place for in the world is Autobiography of a Book.

Autobiography of a Book is the story of a book willing itself into existence. Every word Book presents brings it closer to its dream, its dream, that is, of being what it claims to be, a real, honest-to-goodness book. 

Book came to me as a voice and demanded I type as it spoke. I usually scoff at people who claim their writing is dictated by the muse, so I find it funny to be saying something like that myself. But Book is a character, in both senses of the word, and I was ready to listen and to work. Whatever it said, I was happy to go along. 

I did wonder during the process if Book would achieve a respectable book length. At almost 44,000 words, I think it did. Short for a novel these days. But then, is it a novel? I struggle with how to characterize Book. There's nothing fictional in it. Everything Book says happened because Book is all language and anything Book says is undeniably Book, even if impossible. Does Book have human arms and legs? Yes, when Book finds it convenient to imagine so; when imagination is defeated, Book borrows the reader’s hand, the reader’s heart. 

Book is written as prose, but it does read a bit like poetry. It must be prose poetry! 

Also unlike a novel (perhaps like a life?), Book does not have a plot. Book has ideas, actions. Book has thoughts and more thoughts and tries to work them out. Book’s parts often read as essays. Perhaps that’s the way Book would be most properly classified — as a collection of personal essays, the personal essays of someone whose person is no more (somehow more?) than those essays.

Because the essays usually read as separate propositions I am submitting them in small batches to literary magazines and ezines and trying to convince editors that the excerpts can stand alone. I usually send out three pieces at a time. Although I think Book is best understood in more than one dose, I do occasionally send to sites that will only allow one piece at a time. 

Except for a live reading series, most of the places that have chosen Book excerpts have so far published all I sent them. I expected more picking and choosing. The editors seem to treat the submission as one unit. As I said, each piece of Book will try out a particular proposition. Yet the pieces don’t always come to the same conclusions. Book changes its mind, attempts to reinvent itself, gets confused, forges forth, raves, whines, whispers, wants not to be too seriously — because Book wants to live a full life.  

These online journals have included Book excerpts:

Inverse Journal

Caveat Lector

Hawai’i Pacific Review

E-ratio

Witty Partition (formerly The Wall)

Otoliths

The Collidescope

Ginosko Literary Journal 

A Door Is A Jar

Second Chance Lit

GAS: Poetry, Art & Music

Mercurius

Unlikely Stories

Cerasus 

Over the Transom

The curated reading series Quiet Lightning also included an excerpt that was previously published in Hawai’i Pacific Review.

fresh.ink has reprinted the chapters that originally appeared at Hawai’i Pacific Review

**

How many places have rejected at least one piece of Book? More than 100 ...

I have submissions out to more. I expect more rejections (got another as I prepped this post). Yet I know Book is good, interesting, weird, funny, sad. I know somebody else will decide it fits with what they want. I owe it to Book to find that editor.

When Book is read that is when Book really lives. That is the true life of Autobiography of a Book — a reader making it part of theirs. 

Whether an editor accepts or rejects, is delighted or bored, confused or enthralled, so long as they have been a reader, they have given Book life. 

Book thanks them, as it thanks every reader, for its life. 

**

I have been collecting possible epigraphs for Book. I’m hardly the first to engage with a book as a living creature.  

[blog post updated 10/29/22]

14 months

The poems I posted about yesterday started doing the rounds in December, 2017. I sent them to a few different places right away. Then I turned my attention to sending out other poems and doing other things. 

Publishers responded over the course of the next several months. Poems that were part of this series but which had gone out in other batches began to place. Few responses to this particular batch of five. In fact, four of the publishers to which I sent this batch in December, 2017 had not responded as of yesterday when I wrote to withdraw the poems from consideration. Publishers stop publishing, submissions get overlooked. 

Middle of 2018 I made a new push to get this batch before editors, every couple months sending it to another place. Rejections came in. I like the poems. I like them as much as others in the series that were taken up quickly. So I kept them going out.

Finally, an acceptance! An ezine took one. Yay! Dutifully, I wrote fifteen places I’d sent the poems to over the course of 14 months, fifteen places that had not yet responded, in order to tell them one of the poems had been spoken for, and asking  them to continue to consider the other four. Shortly thereafter I got a rejection, prompted, perhaps, by the notification. Then I got an email from Reuben Woolley of The Curly Mind, an email including a link to a post on the ezine that featured the four poems. 

Mr Woolley had not just accepted the poems, he had right away posted them. I like it when that happens! 

So, just a week after I’d written to notify editors that one poem was no longer available, I wrote to them again to tell them that none were. 

Fourteen months from first submission until I could close the book on the batch. Nothing unusual in this. No records set or disturbing stories. It felt a little weird to have this batch circle and circle while other poems in the series settled. Is there anything to learn? I think it just confirms what I already know. The randomness. 

Sometimes the poem will find the editor who loves it on its first foray. Other times it will take many a trek past editors near and far. And, yes, there are still some poems I started sending out in 2017 that haven’t yet found anyone (besides me) who loves them. 

eight of nine

Since the post at the end of January I have received notification from all of ONE of the NINE magazines to which I sent work. That's just shy of eight weeks so far for eight of them. Huh. Based on the old days when I was sending work out regularly I expected to have heard from, oh, three or even five by now.

The single response was the sad but popular "these don't meet our needs."

One should not really count the days like this. The goal of the professional is to keep work circulating, to put poems out there without fretting over the fate of any particular batch. You hear when you hear, or you make up a cut-off date and figure any batch that's been out past that date is effectively rejected and you move on.

So I'm not a professional? Yeah, no.

Sending out work for me is emotionally fraught and it's not easy to face that kind of inner turmoil. The world is the world, of course, and goes on about its business without taking an individual's feelings into account. No editor should be worrying about my feelings; they should be doing what they do as best they can, putting in an interesting order work they think of value.

I won't make any money out of this. That's not what's going to happen, not even if I suddenly start getting a zillion acceptances. And the people who make magazines are barely getting by so they can't afford to pay contributors anything, except rarely. It's not about the money.

What is it about? Being part of the conversation? If current literature is a conversation, both with readers and with other writers, then, yes, I want my voice a thread in the weave. I read my contemporaries and it seems to me my work is not out of place. Even if it were, or when it is, I would still want to be noticed. That's ego, isn't it? Yes. But if you think what you say is worthless, you hold your tongue.

the envelope of love

I just walked nine batches of poems over to the post office. Last time I did a serious mailing only a handful of literary magazines were reading email submissions and they were snarky about it. Today I found in my research most have ceased reading work received in physical form. The old self-addressed stamped envelope is looking endangered.

Yay!

Online submissions are easier and cheaper for writers. I look forward to sending more work out that way.

I created a physical mailing because that’s the way you were taken seriously. Up to now. And because I wanted to take the process seriously. It’s been ages since I really committed to sending work out. Assembling the whole package — addressing the envelopes, the SASE, the stamps, the cover letter — it’s dispiriting. Especially, of course, when the hope and eagerness is bitten away at by the fat SASE of rejection. The times I have sent out work in the few last years I asked in my cover letter that the manuscript be recycled and NOT returned. The pages were often not something that could be sent out again anyway, what with editors’ pencilings or the puncture marks of staples or just the wear of handling. And if the submission came back pristine, that was its own kind of discouragement. Better the slim envelope of rejection than the fat.

Here’s hoping for the svelte envelope of love.

really, truly

My last post - May of this year - reproduced the last rejection I received. I had sent a batch of poems to the magazine 6 X 6, published by Ugly Ducking Presse in Brooklyn.

Yesterday that batch of poems got rejected again. This is what the editors said this time:

Thank you for your recent submission. We truly enjoyed reading your work. Unfortunately, we didn’t find it to be a good fit for 6 X 6. We wish you the best with your future writing.

I included a SASE, but asked them to recycle the manuscript rather than return it. I’m guessing whoever was in charge of throwing stuff out either forgot to or was reluctant to. When it came time to review poems for a new issue my poems were still lying around and got included in the considerations. Since there was no SASE the editors spent their own money on a stamp and envelope to send me the bad news. Nice of them, eh?

In the first rejection they “really enjoyed … some truly amazing moments.” This rejection they “truly enjoyed [the] reading.” Considering the silence that’s the usual response even to published work, I got a pretty good deal. Two letters claiming to have gotten pleasure from my poems.

“I think you’re a really great guy, but I’m just not that into you.”

A few months ago I sent poems to 6 X 6, a poetry magazine published by Ugly Duckling Presse in Brooklyn. Today came this:

Thank you so much for your submission! We really enjoyed your work - it had some truly amazing moments; however, we did not find it a good fit for 6 X 6. We wish you all the best - happy writing!