Learning to submit
Well, here it is, the end of August and I haven’t yet kept my promise of at least one posting this month. I have my reasons, sloth among them, but the main one is my wife and I were in the US on a family visit. But we’re back and I want to keep my promise. And the mail waiting for me gave me something to write about.
When we got home there was a little note from Marilyn Johnson. She is one of the editors of Pearl, a literary magazine published in Long Beach, California. They wanted to use one of the poems I had sent them a few months ago in an upcoming issue. She needed to know if it was still available or had it been accepted or published by someone else since I had sent it to them. I sent an email letting her know the poem was theirs and I was happy it had found a home. So I’ve got my first pending publication for 2010. A nice little welcome home gift.
But Pearl and I have history and I want to talk about that in a roundabout way. About twenty-five years ago, I began writing poems again after many years of writing almost nothing. Most of them were pretty terrible and I knew it, but once in a while, one would click. This was enough to keep me at it. But aside from entering a writing contest run by a local community college, I didn’t try to get anything published. Then, about twenty years ago, I moved to Long Beach to study music and Music Therapy at the Cal-State campus there. At the urging of a friend, I began attending a poetry-writing workshop led by Richard Garcia at the Long Beach Museum of Art.
This was a wonderful experience, although it didn’t always feel that way. The group met once a week, mostly on Saturday afternoons. Garcia, now in South Carolina, is a talented, widely published poet and a gifted, hard-working teacher. The group was a cantankerous mob of egomaniacs who squabbled and snarled and carried on, and occasionally produced some remarkably good work.
After I had been working with this group for awhile, writing and revising poems and taking them back to the group for further kicking-around, I began to think I should do something with the poems which seemed to be pretty good. They weren’t doing much sitting a folder at home. At about the same time I read somewhere that the mark of a professional writer was a hundred rejections. I loved the irony of the statement and it gave me a perversely achievable goal. I could do that, I thought to myself, I could be a professional writer. I could get a hundred rejections.
And so I started to send out poems. I set a goal of at least one submission a month. I sent them to the “big” little magazines like Prairie Schooner and The American Poetry Review. I also sent them out to the “little” little magazines and the “tiny” little magazines. Often these brave little efforts were (and are) no more than a few photocopied pages folded double and stapled. But they are where people can start publishing careers. I learned about the various magazines from publications like Poetry Flash, a San Francisco Bay area journal, and Poet’s Market, published by Writer’s Digest Books.
The “big” little magazines were unimpressed with my work and I began to rack up my rejections. (An aside: For the most part, they remain unimpressed.) But to my surprise and excitement, some of the smaller venues began to accept and publish my poems. In a sense, these little successes were a setback—after all, my goal was a hundred rejections. But I could live with it. And I started to keep track of my acceptances and publications.
Some months into this project I had a problem. The end of the month was coming up and I still hadn’t sent anything out. And I didn’t know where to send. I had poems out to most the places I thought I had a chance. Or at least a chance of a fair read before the “Thank you for showing us this work. Unfortunately…” note went into the return envelope and mail.
For some reason, Pearl came to mind. I knew the magazine, had read it, and had an outsider’s surly attitude about it. It was the local version of The Establishment.
Pearl started in Long Beach in the 1970s, went dark, and was revived in 1987. It had become the local powerhouse, publishing Charles Bukowski, who also contributed drawings, Billy Collins, Dorianne Laux, Frank X. Gaspar, Denise Duhamel, Gerald Locklin (one of the funniest writers alive), and any number of “real” writers and poets. It was Big League. I wasn’t. And they seemed to publish a lot of their buddies. I wasn’t one of those, either. So it appeared that this was a perfect place to to go for my next rejection. But I didn’t want to. I was afraid.
Now, I hadn’t been afraid to be rejected by the majors far away. I mean, so what if they don’t like me in Philadelphia? I don’t know anybody in Philadelphia. But this was different. This was local. I probably wasn’t going to meet anyone from the Swanee Review in the supermarket. But I had a fear of being known as a loser in my own neighborhood. I didn’t want to put myself at risk.
But my twisted ambition, the desire for one hundred rejections, got the better of me. I made up a packet of poems. Knowing Pearl wasn’t going to like anything I sent, and since it was a free-verse magazine, I included a formal poem. I knew they wouldn’t like this quiet little love meditation since their content tended towards social commentary and they favored an in-your-face style. Rejection was guaranteed.
So I was stunned a few weeks later when I got a little note saying how much the editors liked “From A Doorway at Angel’s Gate,” my little formal love poem, and could they use it in an upcoming issue of Pearl, please? Recovering quickly, I wrote back, Yes they could and that I’d be very happy to see my poem in Pearl.
And I was. And I continue to be. Over the years they’ve published seven of my poems. I send them a packet of poems every two years or so and they usually accept one. Although I have since met the editors, I’m not one of their buddies or part of the “in-crowd.” I am simply someone who writes poems they tend to like.
One of the odd things about submitting, even to a magazine which has used my work before, is I never know what editors are going to like. I hate to admit this, but I’ve even been so presumptuous in cover letters to suggest which poems might be especially good in their magazine. Never has an editor agreed with me. I’ve grown up and quit doing this. These days I simply offer my goods. The editors choose or choose to pass.
I reached my goal of a hundred rejections long ago. Now the goal is a hundred publications and I’m almost there. But Monday is the end of the month and I haven’t made a submission yet. It’s time to get busy and get a packet together.
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