Sturgeon's Law

I've found that a fun thing to do when I'm desperately trying to amuse myself is to take the portentous titles of contemporary poetry anthologies and replace the word "poets" in the titles with "piglets," "poetry" with "pigletry."

Best American Pigletry
Best New Piglets
The Morrow Anthology of Younger American Piglets
Legitimate Dangers: American Piglets of the New Century
American Pigletry: The Next Generation

And so on. It can also be applied to non-anthologies:

Piglet's Market 2007
Pigletry Daily
The Piglet's Guide to Pigletry
Can Pigletry Matter?

And you can replace the word "poems" with "piglets" as well.

Anyone interested in playing in a serious fantasy football league (money/prizes), please backchannel me or leave a comment.

I can't tell you how happy I am that Animaniacs finally came out on DVD. Yes, the Warner Brothers and their sister Dot have been the top of my Netflix queue for the past week. If you missed the show the first time around in the early 90s, check it out now. Great combination of childish slapstick cartoon and aimed-at-adults jokes.

"The frogurt is also cursed!"

Damn you, Blogger, where did my quick-edit button go? Why can't I edit a post with one click from my blog? Stupid Blogger.

Yes, I love the Simpsons. Yes, I spew out lines from the show even when the situation doesn't call for it, even when the situation has nothing to do with the line. Here are some of my favorites for that purpose. These aren't by any means a best-of. As always, if I slightly misquote these, sue me. This is how I say them. And yes, I'm weird.

1. "Cat in the furnace."--Homer assimilates and sums up Marge's instructions on how to take care of the house while she's gone
2. "OreGAHno . . . what the hell?"--Marge learns a new spice
3. "Knife goes in, guts come out."--Bart guts a magical fish that wanted to grant him wishes (The fish's "If you spare me, I will grant you three--AHHH" is also hilarious)
4. "It's in Revelations, people!"--news anchor Kent Brockman on anarchy, shortly before a Technical Difficulties graphic appears depicting him with a straitjacket and a cuckoo popping out of his head
5. "Aye, the hot pants."--The sea captain responds to a subordinate's question about his "precious cargo" (runner-up sea captain line: "Ar, that's Handsome Pete. He dances for nickels. . . . Pete! You've got customers!")
6. "It's naht a cahmedy."--Rainier Wolfcastle (the Arnold Schwarzenegger clone) explains his upcoming movie, called Help! My Son Is a Nerd! (Rainier/McBain is probably my favorite minor charater to quote--secondary favorite: "Upon clozer inspection, zese are lohfers," about his own shoes)
7. "Don't blame me. I voted for Kodos."--Homer in a Halloween episode after voting for the losing candidate among two identical despotic aliens.
8. "Yehhhhs . . . (tongue clicking noise) . . . toMORrow."--town drunk Barney, driven mad as a designated driver, promises to return Homer's car
9. "It's all over, people. We haven't got a prayer!"--Reverend Lovejoy sprints along the street shortly before a comet is set to hit Springfield (funniest in his weird accent)
10. "I love the sexy slither of a lady snake."--Guest voice Barry White
11. "It's a ghost car!"--Chief Wiggum after a fleeing car turns off its lights
12. "Hi, Super Nintendo Chalmers. I'm learnding!"--Ralph Wiggum to Superintendent Chalmers (Ralph is perhaps the most quoted minor Simpsons character, but it's understandable--also great: "He tells me to burn things," about a leprechaun he imagines)
13. "I am so smart! S-M-R-T! I mean S-M-A . . ."--Homer sings to himself as he burns his high school diploma (and the house around it)

Oh man. No Mr. Burns, no Principal Skinner, no Mayor Quimby, no Krusty the Clown. I needed a lot more than 13.

Here's a picture from my birthday party last month. These are my brother (second from left) and three of my best friends here in town. From left to right, a jack-of-all-trades (last working as a software developer, now getting an MBA from DU), a musician, a nonprofit director of communications, and a poet. Anyway, a good time was had by all.

I've been having a great run at poker the last week or so. I put $50 into my Full Contact Poker account at the beginning of last week. It's now $136. The only time I lost was when I played too tired, got impatient, and threw away a small tournament. Other than that, I'm just enjoying the good cards and good play while they last.

I wish I had the energy to pick out the poems I like from every journal I read, but no. Instead, I thought I'd occasionally read an anthology and pick out the poems I liked from that.

Today, just in time for the selection of the Best New Poets 2006 anthology, I have the results from the Best New Poets 2005 anthology. In a big picture sense, I'll just say that it's definitely better than the typical Best American Poetry, not that that's saying much. What follows are the poems I liked, with the ones I definitely would have accepted had they been sent to The Eleventh Muse marked in italics (some of the others I'd probably have accepted too). Poets I have either accepted for the Muse in the past or whom I know as more than just a name (and who are thus exempt from the previous question) will be marked in bold.

"Reincarnation," Ellen Wehle
"Lepidopteraphile," Gary Joseph Cohen
"One Crow, a Killing," Temple Cone
"Bozo Sapphics," Cody Walker
"In the Details," Laurie Stoll
"Another Poem about Memphis Rocking," Beth Bachmann
"To a Young Woman in a Hospital Bed," Brian Brodeur
"Little Red Riding Hood Missed the Bus," Kristin Abraham
"Personals," Joanna Pearson
"Mom Poem," Diane Kirsten Martin
"Too Steep to Climb," Andrew Kozma
"The Fly," Paula Bohince
"When the Rider is Truth," Carrie Jerrell
"Ceremony," Damon McLaughlin
"Honor Amongst Thieves," Michael Meinhardt
"On Poetics," Steve Mueske
"After Miscarriage," Sandra Beasley
"The Fresco Worker Appears Suddenly in the Picture," Matthew Hittinger
"Self-Portrait as Angler's Damselfly," Cecily Parks
"Scissors," Clay Matthews
"Distal," Carol Ann Davis
"The Moon Speaks of Alzheimer's," Hailey Leithauser

So that's 22 of 50 I like enough to recommend--a very nice ratio, I think. Only 4 of 46 eligible that I definitely would have liked to publish, but that's not bad, and several of the others likely would have been in, though it would have taken more thought. More about this anthology if I come up with it.

The spark for this one came out of Harvey Hix's Poetry West workshop a couple months ago. He mentioned the Tinbergen experiment with goose-shapes and hawk-shapes on baby chickens, and something in that clicked with another poem I was grinding into the ground (the only parts of which remaining are the cuneiform bit and the knife-to-rifle progression idea). After a lot of throwing things at walls, here's the result.

So if you are in the market for an mp3 player, let me recommend against a SanDisk (which, in my tired state, I just typed as SanDick). The player I bought from them in October crapped out earlier this month, and the response I first got from support with detailed temporary fix instructions, plus the note that that particular line of players had been discontinued, indicated to me it was a common problem.

The temporary fix was very temporary, and I wasn't really interested in running through 11 steps every time I wanted to turn the player on, so I asked for a warranty replacement. The authorization/return process was easy enough, but then they received the player over a week ago, noted they'd received it, and didn't bother to ship a new one or tell me when they would. In the course of trying to find out when a new one would ship, I discovered that (A) they have no support e-mail address on their entire site (!!!), at least for US clients, and (B) it's extremely difficult to make inquiries about a product once it's considered "closed," as my returned player was. I finally badgered them enough that they managed to ship the damn thing out today and inform me they had.

By contrast, when my iPod Shuffle (bad purchasing decision that now belongs to my brother) died, Apple support was very responsive, gave me easy instructions for return, and had my replacement to me virtually at the same time as I sent mine back.

I've also bought a Creative Labs mp3 player, so the SanDisk replacement will be my backup player. Man, I need a player at all times for my workouts.

I got my contributor copy (plus subscriber copy) of The American Poetry Journal yesterday, and it looks excellent so far. It dawned on me that I haven't done a good job of acknowledging the excellent contributor copies I've received so far (and the one I'm really looking forward to), so here are some links:

Rhymes for Adults
The Dark Horse
Bat City Review
Copper Nickel

and the upcoming and highly anticipated

The National Poetry Review

I'm not including e-zines in that, and there are probably a couple print journals I've forgotten, for which I should be properly chastised. More posting to come soon.

Lovely review for The Eleventh Muse on NewPages.

I'm back from St. Louis. I had a great time, with a ton of eating and activities and eating packed into the four full days and one half day I was there. I took the Budweiser brewery tour, went to Six Flags, learned a little bit more about the geography and the two MFA-enabled college campuses there in case I get in this fall, and showed a strong willingness to leave my camera behind for most of it. Still, I do have a few pictures that I'll post when I have a little time. Right now I have to get back into the flow of work, do some resume orders and critiques, go grocery shopping, and find out when the hell my replacement mp3 player will be arriving. Thanks for the present, Shawn. It was excellent, and I surely needed the vacation time.

For a long time I thought that, while e-mail/electronic submission was clearly better for the writer, it wasn't better for the journal. However, I've done a total 180 turnaround on that front since The Eleventh Muse took the plunge and started accepting e-mail submissions as of late last year.

Pros of e-mail submission for the journal:

• Easier to catalog and track submissions.
• Easier to pass submissions to multiple readers.
• Easier to screen and reply fast with rejections for the ones that obviously aren't right.
• When you accept a poem, you already have the electronic file to put into your manuscript and don't have to either transcribe a printed piece or ask for the file.
• Gives you an automatic 2+ day head start in response time versus paper/SASE submissions, and more likely a week head start.
  
• Cuts down on kooks. (Seriously--hard to send a handwritten submission or a loose set of different-sized pages, including business cards and photocopied clip-art, via e-mail.)
• You can charge $1 per submission, make a little revenue, and people are still paying less than they do for postage, envelopes, paper, and printing to make paper submissions.

Cons of e-mail submission for the journal:

• It will increase volume at least somewhat. (More of a concern for bigger journals, as I understand Kenyon Review got swamped when it first went to e-submissions. This can probably be offset by the small charge mentioned above--Meridian and some other journals are doing this already, with Ploughshares soon to follow, I think.)
• People are a little more sloppy/hasty with e-submissions. I'd say I get more typos in electronic submissions than I did in paper submissions. I've also gotten "corrections" e-mails a few times, which is as sure a way as I can think of to get yourself an auto rejection.
• Spam will be a problem if you use an e-mail address rather than an electronic submission form.
  
• Poems with notable formatting can be problematic, especially if you don't want file attachments.
  
• Bad poets think a swift response via e-mail is a reason to send more the same day or strike up a weird conversation or insult you. Yes, I've had all of the above happen to me. You can structure your standard rejection to avoid all but the most egregious and rare of those, however.

I seriously hope more journals move away from the obsolete (or at least obsolescent) snail mail model in the next few years. If anyone has any additional pros or cons, please feel free to add them in comments.

---

Since bad submission experience stories always strike a nerve, I thought I'd follow up with one more that's probably my worst experience so far (and I realized actually took even longer than Modern Haiku, though I don't know exactly how much because I didn't note the exact date).

So back in October 2004, I sent a set of poems to Maize. I never heard from them despite multiple queries, withdrawing a poem, etc. I figured the submission was lost and just gave up on it. Then, earlier this year (I'm guessing March or April), I received a rejection from them, which noted that the magazine was folding (not sure why they held my poems for a year and a half to make that decision), but that (get this) their contest was still open, and why didn't I send work for that? Disgusting.

For my birthday last month, my best friend paid for my plane ticket to St. Louis so I could go visit him this month, which we've been talking about for some time. Therefore, I'll be gone this coming week from Wednesday to Monday. Yay!

I just set a new record for longest response time: I received a rejection from Modern Haiku after 447 days. If I may adopt Jon Stewart's voice for a moment, I'd appreciate it if Modern Haiku meets me over at camera 2.

Modern Haiku, why you gotta be this way? I send you seven haiku, and you take over a year to figure out you don't want those three-line mini-poems? Really? And you don't even mention that it took you 15 months to answer? Act like it's no thing at all? And you don't take e-mail queries and now your website's vanished? Grow the fuck up!

• I'm back from the trip up into the mountains, which was a good time. I discovered, among other things, that I'm being stalked by a moth. I'll post pictures and probably a longer account later.
• Work on the publication database is progressing. The number of journals has been static, but that's because we were adding more fields and have been retrofitting the existing entries. I'm really happy with how this project is going. Thanks to Rich for all his ace programming.
• It is most excellent when you cold-contact a poet you really admire to send work for your journal, and it turns out that poet knows (!) and thinks highly of (!!) your little zine.
• I was proud of myself a couple weeks ago for running a seven-minute mile and a 12-minute mile-and-a-half. After my weekend sloth and gluttony, it's going to be a while before I hit those numbers again. But, speaking of that, it's time to hit the gym.
  
• Happy 4th of July, everyone!