slush-piles and derreire-mistletoe

Tis the season for rejections. The weather outside is frightful. Jack Frost is nipping at my nose--which is creepy and rude. And everyday my snail mail box or its electronic great-great-great-great grandbaby are stuffed with rejections from literary journals like so much undeliverable North Pole correspondence.

Why so cruel in these joyous times? Academic calenders. Time-crunched MFA candidates with their own stories and poems coming back like just-thrown message-bottles not heartily-heaved enough into the azure horizon. (FYI, aspirants, the adjective "azure" is frowned upon by the MFA establishment as having run its poetic course from gorgeous to cliche: an acceptable usage, however, is ironically (not literary irony, per se, more like hipster irony--eg. check out this wicked fedora, I scored it off a homeless dude in exchange for my Droid . . . oh, crap, wait . . . BRB) as I have used it above.)

Having done a stint in literary arts editing, I am familiar with the routine. Submissions are handled as follows:

[a] Immediate rejection after a quick scan for words like "azure" and "ironically"

[b] Eventual rejection after a round-robin gauntlet-slap from assistant editors who confirm the genre editor's initial misgivings, a concurrence typically correlated to the underling's abnegation of self-reliance vis a vis the overlord's presumed omniscience.

[c] Immediate acceptance after a quick scan for phrases like "in the fetid aftergrime of human sex . . . " and "more than that, no, more than anything, Catriona hoped for the moonbird to land and splash in the bath of her plain blue eyes."

[d] Eventual acceptance after a round-robin chin-stroke-pensive-nod-fest from assistant editors who confirm the genre editor's initial intrigue--see above explanation of concurrence.

[e] Belated rejection/ acceptance after languishing for 5 months in a slushpile of equally unstunning pieces--neither so malodorous as to warrant an unceremonious disposal forthwith (Aspirants, do not send you're only copy of unstunning work) nor so transcendent as to warrant a personal phone call to the author, ASAP, before s/he receives an offer from a more immanently prestigious institution. (Aspirants, delusion is a valuable trait--always include your phone number in your cover page.) After those 5 months, i.e. The Epoch of Ignominious Oblivion, the editor-in-chief informs h/is/ers genre editors that the journal is too skimpy in its present state and will need to be stuffed from the slush-pile as a petite filet mignon is plated beside a steaming pile of smashed-cheesy-starch to make the meal seem more substantial. Another round of assisted reading proceeds, this time with more exaggerated moans at the truly insipid and more hysterical laughter at the inadvertently humorous, until, at long last and with final-exams impending, the staff settles begrudgingly on the remainder. For the deigned-upon--an exuberant email overstating the journal's honor of publishing your work. For the failure-to-the-last--a prefabricated post-card overstating the journal's distress at having to pass on your worthy piece and/ or pieces of prose and/ or poetry . . . Sincerely, Current Editor.

So yes, tis the season. I'm like Santa . . . publishing entities line up to sit on my lap and tell me what they do not want for Christmas: my worthy piece/ and or pieces.
And they tug on my very real beard and scamper off into the jollity of the teeming mall and I call for the next in line and daydream of hanging mistletoe above my ass for the behoof of all and for all a goodnight.

Happy Holidays, my friends. Thanks for following along in 2011. Next week, I'll post a Christmas poem. And after that and after that . . . who knows.

in advance of tomorrow

[Scene] Jonathan on a tee box with Father and a just-met-playing-partner waiting for the fairway to clear. A glorious day in early spring. Greenness on the mend. Birds, breeze, basking—the works.

Just-met-playing partner: “So, Marvin, what do you do?”

Father: “I’m in banking.”

(Jonathan turns away, practices swing, been down this road before.)

JMPP: “Oh, OK. Marketing, mortgages . . . ?”

Father: “Senior management.”

JMPP: “Oh, OK, wow. Hard times, am I right?”

Father: “Understatement.” (smiles, takes practice swing)

Jonathan: (anxiously, subject-changingly, to the group ahead, but not loud enough for them to hear) “Come on guys, drop a ball, take a stroke, this ain’t the Master’s.”

JMPP: “So, Jonathan . . .”

(Jonathan winces)

JMPP: “What is it you do?”

(Silence, stammer at best)

Father: “He’s a writer.” (proud-ish, resigned-ish)

JMPP: “Oh yeah, great. What do you write?”

Jonathan: (wishing he was dead) “Oh, lots of things . . . stories and . . . (silence, stammer at best)

(JMPP nods, smiles, as if to say ‘yes? what else?’)

(Jonathan prays for death.)

JMPP: “Anything I might know?”

Jonathan: “Extreeeeeeemely unlikely.”

(JMPP proceeds to relay anecdote about this one time he was playing golf in Florida, must have been, I don’t know ten years ago, and he asked a fellow the same question . . . had the fellow written anything he might know, and the fellow said, “I don’t know, ever heard of Along Came a Spider?)

Jonathan and Father: (duly impressed): “Oooohhhh . . .”

(Father and JMPP drive tee-shots down the screws, center-cut; Jonathan shanks one into the wilderness. Laughs at himself. Seethes.)

[End scene]

Tomorrow is the first day of National Poetry Month. Don’t check your calendars, it’s fairly esoteric as compared with, say, Black History Month or Women’s History Month; nor is it as awesome as other commemorations with which it shares the month of April—i.e. Pets Are Wonderful Month, National Soyfoods Month, Fresh Florida Tomato Month. In fact, were I not a member of the Academy of American Poets (to be read: financial contributor to the promotion of famouser people), I imagine this particular awareness would be largely un-raised in the awareness sector of my consciousness. Be that as it mayn’t . . .

Esoteric or not, at least, for a month, I can be proud of what I do. As in:

Jonathan: “I write poetry, good sir, poesy if you please. What’s that? Like Dr. Seuss? No, sir, not like Dr. Seuss. Like Shakespeeyah, good, sah. Now prithee, get gone, thou contumelious knave.”

But there’s a pressing question here, (more than half) seriously, why am I hushed or forced to stammer when someone wants to know what I write? It’s bad enough not to have written about the comings and goings of a spider or whatever that book is about (and I guess it’s not that), but the kicker is that I spend most of my time writing purrtrey . . . WHAT’S THAT, YOU SAY? . . . purrertry. . . COME AGAIN, YOU WRITE WHAT? . . . POETRY! Ok? I write poetry. Yes, sure like Dr. Seuss. Exactly like Dr. Seuss. (With a noose. Give me a boost. Now let me loose.)

Fortunately I have friends and family (somewhere along the proud/ resigned continuum) who know that I write poetry. Some even like my work, even ask for more, even comment knowingly on its merits and short-comings. But within the world at large, I operate somewhere along the freak/ fruitcake continuum. Hence, my reluctance to avow my poetry, admit my poetness. Because within the world at large, poetry has gone the way of phones with cords and pre-post-modernism, of customer-service and fresh air. Unless you are, say, Billy Collins or Maya Angelou, or, if nothing else, someone who can point to their otherwise obscure name in the New Yorker, well . . . welcome aboard the freak/ fruitcake continuum.

I know I need to get better. I need to get over myself, my shame, my silence and stammering.

Tomorrow is the first day of National Poetry Month. Whereas, I acknowledge that pets are wonderful, I have none of my own. As for soyfoods and fresh, Florida tomatoes—I am indifferent but credulous of their appreciable qualities. So tomorrow, be aware—I am a poet. Poetry still has a pulse, it still has breath; and April is its upturned wrist, its cold, befogged mirror.

world wide laughter

Dear Ether and Friends,

The new issue of The Able Muse is online. My poem "Boy at Play" is accompanied by an audio recording. I hope you like.

I pray the site has a crow firewall. Nothing's worse than World Wide Laughter.

Regards,

Johnny the Lackluster Poet (Most of his friends know him as me.)

add this to the next

The following poem is where the line "Elsewhere crows are laughing" came from. I wrote it at the Sewanee Writers' Conference last summer. Of my more recent poems (those written in the last couple of years) this is easily one of my most abstract. Though grounded in almost exclusively concrete language, the poem's purpose remains vague. For that reason, I don't expect this piece to make it much further than this blog, publication-wise. Of course, that's true of most of my poems, so you never know. The market does tend toward nonsense. Nonetheless, I like it for its stream-of-consciousness pace--the pace by which we normally travel, especially the speed of our thoughts and the associations that come most quickly.

Sewanee from Humphreys Hall

Elsewhere crows are laughing,

Giving each other hell, but the two

That I am watching keep their cool

And peck the earth.

A rocking chair is fine

On a fine day like this.

But mine won’t rock.

It only sits.

My two crows share a space

I’d otherwise think

Was too close for their comforts.

Bat-berserk , those elsewhere crows

Rout each other out of trees,

Only to relinquish moments later.

Such a fine day for July.

Eighty degrees tops and a breeze

That rustles up an October sense.

I think of brunswick stew.

In July. It’s a lie,

I know, but take what you can get.

Come next week, August,

At the latest, I’ll think of now

Like a story I made up

And confused for real

But came to terms with in the end.

Remembering the fiction, the headache

Of setting the scene.

Blocking the dialogue between me

And my crows that have flown.

To the graveyard, of all things.

But make nothing of that.

Or of the septuagenarian reading the names out loud,

The dates—

Her hand is in the elbow of his light jacket.

Or of the church bells donging four.