Less generally
Two months later, a no from Spinning Jenny. Excitement! No way to explain why I'm perfectly pleased to get rejection notices in the mail. It's like I can't really believe I submitted any poems, or that anyone might have read and considered them. But they have! And then I am excited to get them back, fix them up, try again. Again! It's not precisely optimism, but it's certainly relentless.
What I sent and what next:
Thebes - An unraveling, simultaneity, disintegration, helplessness but not despair. Undoing of things and lack of awareness. I think it needs more measured verse to hold up the content. More even lines? More even feet? (Any measured feet, really.) And more immediacy, feeling, or else the loss & disconnectedness will be overwhelming.
The Unresolved Problem - Eh. This is dumb, melodramatic, overwrought. It needs to be pared down or else thinned out and made longer. Pfleh. I know kind of what I was trying to do, but it is way far away from being ok. It's too... weird story appropriated and then suddenly wrenched into being about me, or us. I'm all about the appropriation, really, but I didn't do it right here. I would like to see it either simpler, or with more story worked in, more acknowledgement of the strangeness and sadness and loss in it. And then the parallel done more subtly and throughout, instead of whacked on at the end there. Then if I can manage that, more thought about form.
Negative Space - I sort of forgot about these, they're interesting. Maybe teased out into a longer, more sprawling jungle poem? With more attention paid to placement on the page, blackness and blankness, spacing. Also rhythm and breaks in it. Could go all over, with more work.
Distantly the Horse - I was very invested in this one for awhile. I still want to do something with it, but it needs evening out. Make the ending less sudden, more stretched out, less obvious. Put more of myself into the idea of the internal landscape. Why is it my terrain? What made me make it? Where did the horse come from? Thread the concern for motion preserved in earlier, the idea of nothing pin-down-able except movement between things. The relation, same as the relationship between signs and things and everything... the shifting the only thing maintained.
Plannen:
Stuff out to two places now, wait to hear.
Revise above and more poems and send out to elsewheres.
CLMP coming in the next few weeks, more ideas for publications in there.
Apply in the fall to another 92nd Street Y workshop.
Always more revising and writing and sending out.
What I sent and what next:
Thebes - An unraveling, simultaneity, disintegration, helplessness but not despair. Undoing of things and lack of awareness. I think it needs more measured verse to hold up the content. More even lines? More even feet? (Any measured feet, really.) And more immediacy, feeling, or else the loss & disconnectedness will be overwhelming.
The Unresolved Problem - Eh. This is dumb, melodramatic, overwrought. It needs to be pared down or else thinned out and made longer. Pfleh. I know kind of what I was trying to do, but it is way far away from being ok. It's too... weird story appropriated and then suddenly wrenched into being about me, or us. I'm all about the appropriation, really, but I didn't do it right here. I would like to see it either simpler, or with more story worked in, more acknowledgement of the strangeness and sadness and loss in it. And then the parallel done more subtly and throughout, instead of whacked on at the end there. Then if I can manage that, more thought about form.
Negative Space - I sort of forgot about these, they're interesting. Maybe teased out into a longer, more sprawling jungle poem? With more attention paid to placement on the page, blackness and blankness, spacing. Also rhythm and breaks in it. Could go all over, with more work.
Distantly the Horse - I was very invested in this one for awhile. I still want to do something with it, but it needs evening out. Make the ending less sudden, more stretched out, less obvious. Put more of myself into the idea of the internal landscape. Why is it my terrain? What made me make it? Where did the horse come from? Thread the concern for motion preserved in earlier, the idea of nothing pin-down-able except movement between things. The relation, same as the relationship between signs and things and everything... the shifting the only thing maintained.
Plannen:
Stuff out to two places now, wait to hear.
Revise above and more poems and send out to elsewheres.
CLMP coming in the next few weeks, more ideas for publications in there.
Apply in the fall to another 92nd Street Y workshop.
Always more revising and writing and sending out.
posted by stower at 11:52 AM
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