Tuesday, February 14, 2023

“The City in the Cup” in Columbia Poetry Review

I just discovered that the 1998 issue of Columbia Poetry Review that includes my poem “The City in the Cup” has been scanned and posted online. 

Here’s a link.


If you’re curious what else got published that year, here’s a link to my LuvSet post.

Thursday, February 02, 2023

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.