This One May Take a While
Dear Horace Greeley,
The world has changed. If you go west to find yourself, you might as well keep going as western expansion moved past our own Midwest, onward to turquoise dappled islands in a different ocean, then towards exotic lands where the bustle of millions of people makes you dizzy.
I have tried to capture this in verse, the inverse of the universe, and still come up empty but you will hopefully appreciate my long drawn out sentences though alas, my medium is poetry.
Maybe that is the problem since all the rejection “slips” say I am too verbose and that I should edit myself down to less than a page, match my stanzas better and all reviewers said I should lose the ee cummings ploy which is my calling card. The suggestion brought me to tears.
I won’t do it, though I now capitalize Jesus and Des Moines.
My punctuation is good. I avoid it all together.
Anything I deem as too grand and all imagery, I delete but emotions stay on. The best advice I received was to use multiple adverbs with brevity. I have done so. Another admonition is that I over edit meaning; I overthink.
I met a teacher who is the best writer and have taken on-line courses with her. I mean we meet to engage in meaningful dialogue over a wireless. I missed an hour with her once because I had the wrong time. A mistake I try not to make when submitting. I hinted that I would very much like to work with her but she seemed to dissuade me or more accurately did not respond to my hinted at query.
I plan to ask her directly in the very near future.
If you have any advice for me I would gratefully appreciate hearing back from you.
I often pass the old oak tree with a plaque that honors you in front of an award winning high school that bears your name. The original tree of course was cut down long ago like scathing reviews I received the first fifty times I sent out poetry.
I have been told that making a personal connection pertaining to the submission is a nice gesture, assures a reading, may open a door or none of the above.
Still Seeking Publication
Dear Seeking,
Goodness, you’ve given me quite a rich vein to mine. It appears that the heart of your query is this: Why can’t I get my work published? Let’s take your letter, which we are printing in its entirety, as an example and go through some of the points raised.
1. “alas, my medium is poetry”
You should never be ashamed of your tastes or talents – you should only be ashamed of not taking every opportunity to improve them.
2. “all the rejection ‘slips’ say I am too verbose and should edit myself down to one page, match my stanzas better”
This particular criticism says less about your poetry and more about a mismatch between the kind of verse you write and the kind of markets to whom you submit. When one’s submission strategy is “throw everything at the wall and see what sticks,” what one ends up with is a mess on the floor and some unhappy editors who want to know why their wall (or their inbox) is now splattered with work they cannot publish. You can find submission tips in “How Do I Know Where to Submit?”
3. “all reviewers said I should lose the ee cummings ploy which is my calling card”
First, a brief statement about punctuation and capitalization: In the English language, capitalization and punctuation have evolved to give clarity to the written word. It shows us which things should be grouped together; which things are not things, but people or places; which things require special emphasis or attention. Ignoring punctuation and capitalization can introduce confusion into your writing.
Second, if one or two people tell you something about your writing, you can chalk that up to personal preference. However, if “everyone” tells you the same thing, perhaps it is time to re-evaluate whether that aspect of your writing works for you in the way you think it does.
Having said that, there is a more important truth that you need to embrace. Whether your writing is good or bad, whether the person evaluating it is right or wrong in their appraisal of its virtues, the truth is that the editors of the markets to whom you submit your poetry get to say what is published in their pages. If you want a particular publication to accept your work, you have to accept that any work submitted to them needs to meet their criteria, however arbitrary or wrong-headed you believe those criteria to be. Kevin Young, poetry editor for New Yorker Magazine, doesn’t care about anyone else’s opinion of his taste in poetry. He cares about finding poems that fit his idea of good poetry for the pages of the New Yorker.
4. “Anything I deem as too grand and all imagery, I delete but emotions stay on.”
This raises the question of how you’re communicating these emotions. One could argue that poetry exists largely in images and grand gestures. I understand taking out anything “too grand,” as there are poets like Emily Dickinson whose poetry is both understated and powerful, but when you remove imagery in a poem, what is left? How do you communicate emotion without imagery in a way that can still be said to be poetic? I readily admit that I am not a poet, but I will say that my personal preference in poetry favors lyrical imagery very heavily.
5. “I met a teacher….very near future.”
Here is a problem. Your question is 379 words, and of those, these 90 words do not have a direct bearing on your query, or if they do, I cannot fathom it. You must ensure that every word you commit to the page serves the ends of the piece you are writing. In novels, you can have digressions, asides, and footnotes that do nothing more than add humor or atmosphere. In short stories, every word and phrase must further the plot or explain the characters in some meaningful way. Poetry is a different beast altogether. In poetry, each word, space, and line break has to not just further the poem’s message, but often work on multiple levels, whether they be rhyming, carrying multiple simultaneous meanings, or creating a visually pleasing structure. Poetry that doesn’t have a discernable message, or whose theme is overwhelmed by passages that don’t support it is an extremely hard sell. I’m not saying impossible, but I will say that I don’t know of any publications that accept it.
6. “I have been told that making a personal connection pertaining to the submission is a nice gesture, assures a reading, may open a door or none of the above.”
This is another thing that may or may not be true. It depends on several things. First, if your poem doesn’t meet the submission criteria for a given publication, no amount of personal connection will overcome that. Second, it can only work at publications that place weight on the cover letter. At Zoetic Press, it’s common for us to only read the cover letter after we’ve made up our minds (because the cover letter should contain the submitter’s bio and payment info), so no matter how charming a submitter may be, we probably won’t know about it until we’ve decided whether their writing passes muster.
I hope this has been helpful. I fully acknowledge that the answers given represent one particular viewpoint, and Kevin Young in particular is welcome to take me to task if I have misrepresented him.
Your humble servant,
Horace Greeley