Writing the Perfect Beast #11
You join me as I fight to reinstate a routine...
I have decided to talk honestly about the business of how I write poetry. There are people who teach how to create poetry, how to format it, how to submit and how publishing in general works. I am not seeing that many people doing work on what you need to do with your brain and mental attitudes to make that stick, grow and then evolve. This is me, flailing along in Real Time. HI THERE.
Being sick is not good for either consistency or organisation. However, today, after nearly two weeks of limping through the most horrendous cold, basil has become matcha on the SnotMeter900, and we are finally getting back to what passes as normal. This is your reminder that a Tidy Poet’s Office demonstrates the existence of the Poet’s Increasingly Organised Mind, and it’s time to work out November’s subs.
Everyone out there can tell you how to write poetry. A few will tell you how you submit stuff. Very few people however talk about how to organise your increasingly stressed and frustrated at failure brain in a sustainable and caring way. I will be one of them, and today I ask you to go find some shit to submit your work to. Before you do, however, here are some VERY important caveats:
BEFORE YOU EVEN CONSIDER SUBMITTING POETRY, DO THESE 3 THINGS:
Have you actually Read the Room first?
I am awful at this, like S Tier Dumb when it comes to realising how NOT relevant my work is in an increasing number of people’s beautifully curated magazines and online journals. I am so square, even the nicely-sanded and slightly-rounded holes that could be considered square at distance are never getting my work forced into them. Never has that been more apparent in the last six months of consistent rejection.
Most of that this year has stemmed from refusing to buy the magazine I want to feature in, coz I know there’ll be no work like mine in it, or going overkill on a sub or a set of books that I’ll read once and never, ever pick up again. The real lightbulb moment was an offhand comment from someone else who told me I sounded like a poet that, honestly, I don’t want to sound like.
Before sending work, make sure it is a good fit for the destination publication.
I have NO IDEA what you are talking about.
I bought some poetry a while back and tried to read it when I was sick, and nothing made any sense. It was just words, and spaces, and nothing coalesced. I looked at it again yesterday, feeling a lot better. It all works, there’s narrative and progression and clever wordplay but… I am simply not connecting with any of it. None of it creates interest or excitement within me, or encourages me to read more.
To be as kind as possible here: if you gave your work to someone else and asked them to summarise what you’d written, could they do that easily? Complex ideas in your head may not make sense to anyone else without a measure of editing. You might be well-served to get other people to read it first. The point is simple. If an editor has no idea what you are talking about, your submission chances drop.
You can still create clarity around abstract concepts and ideas.
No Poet is an Island, despite what John Donne says…
It has taken me a great deal of time to find a sense of workable self-awareness. It is also apparent that this is only possible to maintain by refusing to do certain things, or by intentionally tailoring my output to reflect a journey that only I am capable of narrating. That means increasingly accepting that writing about particular experiences will not grant the closure I wish or hope for in the majority of cases.
Using poetry to help crystallise the emotional cadences of situations has undoubtedly been life changing. However, the real alterations that need to be made won’t come when a bunch of other people complement my poetry. They only come from my reactions to what the work throws up. Some stories do not need to be shared, only acknowledged, and only you will really know which ones these are.
Sometimes, you don’t need to submit work for validation.
I have a plan of action where emotion is being abstracted into other spaces, and being sculpted into differing forms. It’s really apparent how talking to certain poets right now is not going to help me. The answers, like it or not, are inside myself, and that is where we are going to look for them in November. If you’re interested, I have a WordPress site where all this will be discussed.
The real truths however aren’t being spoken in public or shared on social media. It is time to do the work and put in the miles and find a way forward for myself that does not rely on being successful to be happy. It doesn’t matter how well things go. What truly matters that your work is an authentic reflection of the reality you embrace, and right now mine is not.
That’s the biggest admission of the month, up front.
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