Sturgeon's Law

Here's my response to Steve's Fifteen Minute Poem Challenge. This is what happens when I automatic-write. :-)

Easy Assembly

Note: just be the one to fix it
in a perfect way. Open self package,
action already undertaken to read
herein. Parts warning: you may
be missing! On clean trable,
scatter pieces as like ocean wave
unto shells. Spread resolutely
glorious glue upon right angle
of first wood crossback, not
to be sticking one’s skin. Apply
select component in most fitting
manner with joint interlocking
and unyielding. Beware broken limb
where lurk splinter demon! Press on
all part until body stand complete,
remaining items can recycled
or disposaled. Put product to work
living everyday easy for people.
Okay, you are success!

I just realized that Franz Wright is Wowbagger the Infinitely Prolonged.

In the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy series, Wowbagger was an immortal being who couldn't handle his immortality and decided his mission was to travel the universe until he had personally insulted every creature in it.

Hey, at least I didn't compare Mr. Wright's poetry to a Vogon's.

"Oh freddled gruntbuggly thy micturations are to me
As plurdled gabbleblotchits on a lurgid bee."

So, an interesting story from late last week. I had submitted a poem to a benefit anthology for low-wage workers put out by the Southwest Center for Economic Integrity. They called on Thursday or so and said they really liked the poem, but they wanted me to remove a small segment. The poem itself is a short vignette about getting hurt working in a video store, and the part they wanted removed suggests an attraction by the narrator for a 17-old-girl.

Now, a few things here: I'm sure you all know that something occuring in a poem doesn't indicate the writer endorses it or even that it's true, and I hope most people will agree that a guy in his early twenties feeling attracted to a 17-year-old is not exactly the apocalypse, and it's actually fairly important to the poem, being the immediate reason the narrator gets distracted and hurts himself. Nonetheless, I let them remove it. Here are some reasons:

• The anthology is a good cause.
• For their purposes, it is at least arguable that removing that segment improves the poem, as it casts low-wage workers in a better light and hews closer to the theme of "It sure does suck to work for minimum wage."
  
• I can restore the segment for journal publication and my own manuscript.
• They're paying me $100. Yes, I'm a whore, but that's 20 times what I've ever been paid for a poem before.

I'm sure there are situations where I would kick and scream and call it censorship, but in this case it didn't really seem like that big a deal to me, just a little cause for amusement over what a prudish society we're in.

Hiking in a Baseball Bat at Robert Sean Leonard's Farm in Winnipeg

Over my head, I see the steel butterfly,
Asleep on the hot pink trunk,
Blowing like a webcam in green shadow.
Down the kitty behind the tight house,
The cowbells eat one another
Into the bottles of the afternoon.
To my northwest,
In a field of medicine between seven pines,
The droppings of last year's dates
Blaze up into bristly stones.
I lean back, as the evening hops and comes on.
A marmot hawk floats along, looking for home.
I have wasted my buyer's guides.

--by James Wright, Steven D. Schroeder, and K. Sumner

Uh, before I start, I should note for anyone foolish enough to rely on my blog for accurate event information that Jane Hilberry's event tomorrow is at the Fine Arts Center.

Okay, here's the game. I've taken a well-known short poem and made a Madlib of it. First person to respond either by comment or by e-mail at steve(at)steveschroeder(dot)info gets the first post of the new poem by the end of the weekend or Monday. I'll try to accommodate anyone else who responds, depending on how many there are. Feel free to meme this idea. :-)

And if you can guess the poem based on the words I ask for, you DEFINITELY get a prize. Please do not guess the poem in comments.

Please supply the following.
Intransitive verb, ing:
Noun:
Full name:
Place:
Metal:
Color:
Noun:
Adjective:
Noun:
Transitive verb, present tense plural:
Plural noun:
Direction:
Noun:
Number:
Plural noun:
Adjective:
Intransitive verb, present tense singular:
Animal:
Preposition:
Noun (plural or singular):

Looking forward to it . . .

Words you should be really careful about using in your poems:

clerestory
palimpsest
tesserae
lacuna
arc

Words I should be really careful about using in my poems:

breathing
current
smoke
arc

So the many of you who follow this online poetry stuff know that Foetry has been outed. Kevin Walzer has a summary of the action and a commentary in the post I linked to and the one before it. I agree with much of what Kevin has to say.

While I disagree with the way Foetry went about things, I think the fundamental idea of exposing the unethical connections responsible for some poetry contest selections is one that needs to continue in some other form. Foetry did post too many unsubstantiated rumors and did let things get too personal (the same could be said of the "other side" too), but the conversations it sparked on ethics in the poetry world have been invaluable, and it also exposed some rather definite misconduct.

Much of the response to the outing of Foetry so far has been reasonable discourse from a variety of perspectives, but there's also been enough venom directed at the now-exposed Foetry administrator and his poet wife that I can understand why he wanted to remain anonymous, even if he didn't conduct himself as well as he should have while anonymous. I feel bad for those who are unable to take the high road on whatever side they're on.

I hope people won't take Foetry shutting down to be a sign that we can stop discussing the issues it raised. Having no significant other right now to worry about hurting, I'm happy to continue to discuss the issues in an open and (I hope) productive manner.

And lest you misunderstand what I think, Jim Behrle's foetry dot com comics have been very amusing to me as well.

Although the true pleasure of poetry for me is in the reading and writing, I also want to share it with as many people as possible (life goal: every English-speaking person on the planet), so I also find many aspects of the publication and promotion of poetry very interesting. Today I'm going to discuss submissions to journals.

It's not so much that I take great pleasure in the slog that is sending out poems for journal publication, but that the process of reading new journals to discover places that would fit my work can be a rewarding experience, and simply tracking my submission results, response times, and so on in a database taps into the mathematical side of me, which doesn't get enough exercise these days. (I was really good at math in high school, and actually started as a computer science major in college.)

Right now I have submissions out at about 25 journals. That's nearly two years worth of poems (minus the already-published and the drafts that are still waiting to become good), and much of it is simultaneous submissions. I'm not Suarezing or Lyfshinning (pick your favorite) either in terms of number of poems I crank out or number of places I send each poem. The journals where I have work submitted range in prominence from Shenandoah all the way to a new literary magazine at Western State College in Gunnison that, as far as I know, doesn't have a name yet (unless they really are going to call it WSCLM).

My favorite submission resources, more or less in order:

• My print journal subscriptions. See the resources page of Sturgeon's Law.
  
• My library of journal website bookmarks, categorized in a number of ways--I've become leery about submitting anyplace that has no web presence or reliable e-mail contact. At some point, maybe I'll get into the categories I use.
  
• Jeffery Bahr's great site, especially the Submission Response Time Database and the Approximate Print Journal Ranking System.
  
• Poetry Daily and Verse Daily (it's instructive to see which poems I like come from which journals).
  
• The Writer's Directory, though I understand it's not being updated anymore.
  
• And finally, as a last resort, Poet's Market and Dust Books' Directory of Poetry Publishers.

At some point in the future, I'll post thoughts on what makes for a good submission (gained from both my editing and submitting), and some of my best and worst experiences with various journals. In the meantime, I look forward to maybe seeing more commentary on the submission process, its pleasures and frustrations. Despite what I understand to be some opposition to discussing it, I'm quite happy when it comes up.

Given the timing, you'd think this might be about AWP, but no.

I've been invited to join a panel discussion at the May Poetry West meeting on "What Makes a Good Poem?" Also on the panel will be four people with more poetry experience than I have. I think my presence is due to my editorship of The Eleventh Muse and my "youthful perspective," artificially jaded as it is. Certainly not due to my verbal eloquence or po-biz accomplishments.

Anyway, I really don't know what I'm going to say about what makes a good poem. I mean, there's the utterly useless and solipsistic ("A good poem is one I like"), and then the slightly more pertinent but still badly vague. Something like "A good poem uses charged language to move you in an unexpected way. A great poem never lapses from the charged language or otherwise throws the reader out of the poem." After that, I guess you're into book-length dissertations.

What do other people say in answer to a question like this, which surely comes up often for poets?