Monthly Archives: October 2018

9 posts

The Siren Call of Submittable: Part 2

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sirens

Yesterday I wrote at length (for me) about ways Submittable has shifted the playing field for writers and literary magazines alike. Today: How Submittable fosters bad writer habits.

For literary magazines, Submittable giveth (to the bottom line, as magazines keep 62% of reading-fee proceeds) and it taketh away (the ability to staff readers who can keep up with the onslaught of submissions).

And for writers, Submittable giveth and taketh away, too. The “giveth” is convenience and record-keeping and making more markets financially-healthy to send to. The “taketh away”? Mounting costs (what writer keeps track?) from the aggregate hits these submissions make on our savings over time. And competition. Lots and lots of competition. Easy for you is easy for everybody. Eventually the odds begin to look like lottery ticket wins: steeper than steep.

But what I want to wax eloquent on today is Submitta-Mania (a disease caused by the ease of Submittable’s portals). Why are writers of all stripes ability-wise in this headlong rush to get published, ipso fasto. By yesterday, if possible?

There’s the easy answer: affirmation. Hidden in every writer (maybe even the established and famous ones) is a dark voice that says things like “Do I suck?” and “Was that acceptance the exception?” and “Am I capable of doing it again?”

Self-doubt, as we know, is one of the Four Riders of the Apocalypse.

But I attribute the rush to submit to social media as well. It’s the cocaine candy of our times.

Think about it: What makes people constantly check their phones? Why do people crave “likes” on Facebook? Why do egos on Twitter want way more followers than those they follow? Ego, ego, ego. The relentless need to trick yourself into the notion that you are somebody. Not only somebody, but somebody “big.” A player.

Oh, yeah. What fools these mortals be, and all that.

This leads me to the theory that writing for publication, and better yet for paying publication, is part of the drive to submit. Technology feeds short attention spans, which come not only in the form of what we’ll read and for how long, but in what we’ll revise and for how long. The result? We pony up the poetry and click submit, sometimes at $3 a hit, far sooner than we should.

Do you like me, pretty please? the submission wants to know. Ah, no, the first intern says while checking his phone mid-your poem. Thus your precious poetry fails to come within a statute mile of its target editor. And thus it returns like a bad penny in your inbox.

By now you know where this is going. Self-discipline is more important than ever. Writers are part of the problem when they ship poetry only written in the last 60 days to The New Yorker (response time: one year) and Tin House (one year and umpty-eight weeks).

Instead, think “we will sell no wine before its time.” Or, if you’re hosting Thanksgiving in a few weeks, this: Would you take the turkey out halfway through its roasting time and put it on a platter before your guests? (Yes, this makes a big turkey of your poem.)

How about this: Would you put on half your clothes before going out to work?

Does this work?: Would you paint half your house and look at that side only with admiration for a month or two?

The stuff we write is mischievous as hell. It is a shape shifter par excellence. It beguiles and flatters like an illusion in the desert. Trust it as far as you can throw it. And if it says “no” to further revision, you say “yes,” most likely after you’ve sent it to its room for a month or four. Seeing it again after 120 days will change everything. Everything.

And that, my friends, can’t help but be all for the better. Not only for your art and pride, but for your nickel-and-dimed bottom line.

What Submittable Has Done To Us

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A most interesting article appears in the Nov./Dec. issue of Poets & Writers. It’s called (and pay attention to the subtitle!) “Diving Into the Digital Slush Pile: How Online Submissions Are Changing Lit Mags (And Your Chances of Publication).”

Let’s take a time out before we dive in, shall we? Any writer submitting to lit mags already knows that this isn’t Kansas anymore. For one, most every writer north of Honduras knows that Submittable is addictive for both editors and writers. And if you live south of Saskatchewan, you’ve probably figured out that this thing called “a reading fee” is making itself comfortable like a guest staying past three days.

But what does it all mean? Two things, it appears. One, Submittable is hurting writers’ bottom line while helping magazines’. And two, the easier it gets for everyone (and their sister) to submit, the harder it gets to land an acceptance. In other words, change is not always a good thing.

Still, as the article attests, when you factor in all the costs of snail mail (postage, materials, and that vanishing commodity called time), reading fees might be a deal. Why, then, a dozen submissions later, does one feel like George Washington after his doctor has bled him (again)?

Holdout magazines like Alaska Quarterly Magazine and Antioch Review (editors of both interviewed here) are feeling the heat, too. AQR‘s Ronald Spatz admits that he might be missing cutting-edge (read: “young, up-and-coming”) writers by sticking with snail mail. So he did an experiment. He played Submittable’s game for a month in Sept. of 2017.

What happened? “In that time [Spatz] expected to receive three hundred to four hundred manuscripts over the digital transom. Instead he received 1,190—on top of the paper submissions that were still arriving via postal mail.”

This is where holy meets Toledo, folks.

The whole experiment might have led Spatz to change AQR‘s policy for good and go all-in for digital, but he resisted for a wonderful reason: “He believes it’s unethical to invite the deluge of manuscripts he would get online until he has enough staff to read all of them in a timely manner.”

Which can only mean that some lit mags are soldiering on under impossible conditions: too many manuscripts, too few readers, too long a response time. Why would they do such a thing? In the language of that plutocracy we call “U.S.A.”: m-o-n-e-y.

Submittable charges magazines an annual subscription fee, then takes a cut of the proceeds when writers pony up for a hearing. Let’s stick with the AQR example: “Those administrative fees can add up to a small but attractive revenue stream for perennially cash-strapped literary magazines. At AQR, Spatz paid $757 for the journal’s annual Submittable subscription and retained $1.86 of each $3 payment from writers using the system, with the remainder going back to Submittable. With 1,190 submissions, the revenue from fees more than paid for the journal’s Submittable subscription in just the one month submissions were open. Had AQR kept the online portal open for a full year, Spatz says, ‘we would be getting lots of revenue, which we need, but the thing is, that would be unethical [because the journal doesn’t have the staff to handle the added submissions].'”

Meanwhile, John Fogarty, editor of the Antioch Review, has other solutions to the never-rest Everest Submittable creates. He’s considering a policy of directly soliciting work from a small group of established writers Antioch has already worked with. “The volume is so large that it is almost impossible to manage at this point,” he says.

If you as a writer think the penny ante-financial drain of regular submission fees is rough, consider the fees charged for increasingly-popular contests. $25, $30, $35. While these might not be salad days for lit mags, there is a discernible uptick in their bottom lines, as they can now use writers’ money to pay off judges and readers of the hopeful writers’ wares.

The conclusion seems to be clear: In its innocent way, Submittable might be hurting your chances of publication. After all, convenience equals congestion equals competition at previously unprecedented levels.

Solutions? You can continue to patronize those magazines that shun reading fees, for one. Or, as the article suggests, you can take a chill pill. Read the magazines you submit to first. Narrow down the periodicals you’d like to be a part of and submit to them and them alone. Stop carpet-bombing!

What’s more, the article wonders, what’s this rush to publication all about anyway? Many writers are rushing works to markets before they’re even ready, just adding to the problem. Wait! Get feedback from fellow writers! Let it cook for a year! Then submit to a small group of magazines—ones you personally love.

If that sounds an awful lot like self-discipline, something people are not very good at, you’re right. Still, it’s advice worth trying. We are in a brave new world here, one where more and more writers are paying more and more money for someone to tell them their writing sucks.

Or, in some cases, one where more and more writers are paying for some front-line intern to skim and reject their work because, well, said intern has such a mountainous pile to scale that he or she is not going to bother giving every single piece a fair reading. Rather, it’s check the box. Caught up. Done. Next?

If that sounds unfair, you need only be reminded that digital life, like life itself, is unfair. As for literary magazines, they want to be fair and they’re doing their best, but injustices will happen. It’s all collateral damage, after all. At a $1.86-a-pop profit, Submittable’s way is here to stay, and everyone has to adjust appropriately.

Where Grapefruit Hold Sway

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Where else but in poetry can a grapefruit hold court, however briefly, over your attention.? In Christian Wiman’s He Held Radical Light, the author brings the point home well enough thanks to a poem by the late Craig Arnold. The poem raises a grapefruit—yes, a grapefruit—to art form.

Reading the neat little details in this poem should inspire you to raise your own humble wonder (be it citrus or any other object, man- or God-made) to a higher understanding. All you need do is spend some time with it. Look at it more closely. Listen a spell. And see this as being very much like that.

Yeah. That’s it. Simple.

If you hadn’t heard of Arnold before, it’s because he has but two works of poetry to his credit. His book Shells was selected winner of the 1998 Yale Series of Younger Poets competition by some poet or other named. W.S. Merwin. And Wiman thinks Arnold’s sophomore effort, Made Flesh, published a whopping 10 years later.

Let’s join him for a breakfast of literal and figurative delight, shall we?

Meditation on a Grapefruit

by Craig Arnold

To wake when all is possible

before the agitations of the day

have gripped you

To come to the kitchen

and peel a little basketball

for breakfast

To tear the husk

like cotton padding a cloud of oil

misting out of its pinprick pores

clean and sharp as pepper

To ease

each pale pink section out of its case

so carefully without breaking

a single pearly cell

To slide each piece

into a cold blue china bowl

the juice pooling until the whole

fruit is divided from its skin

and only then to eat

so sweet

a discipline

precisely pointless a devout

involvement of the hands and senses

a pause a little emptiness

each year harder to live within

each year harder to live without

"Meditation on a Grapefruit" Craig Arnold

The Power of a Moment: What Snakes Can Teach Us

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According to Christian Wiman, “the hunger that gives rise to art must be greater than what art can satisfy.” That alone says it all for me: Art as the itch that can never entirely be scratched.

But Wiman keeps going: “The hunger must be other than what art can satisfy. The poem is means, not end. When art becomes the latter, it eventually acquires an autonomous hunger of its own, and ‘it does not wish you well.'”

By way of example, he offers a “simple” (if such exists) poem by A. E. Stallings that reminds me of Emily Dickinson’s narrow fellow in the grass:

Momentary
by A. E. Stallings

I never glimpse her but she goes
Who had been basking in the sun,
Her links of chain mail one by one
Aglint with pewter, bronze and rose.

I never see her lying coiled
Atop the garden step, or under
A dark leaf, unless I blunder
And by some motion she is foiled.

Too late I notice as she passes
Zither of chromatic scale—
I only ever see her tail
Quicksilver into tall grasses.

I know her only by her flowing,
By her glamour disappearing
Into shadow as I’m nearing—
I only recognize her going.

This narrow fellow has rhyme that a 70s Swedish pop band could love: ABBA, etc. It also is a neat exercise in description. But what I like best is how it could work as a description for a person, too—one with her defenses (“links of chain mail”) always up, one who is beautiful (“aglint with pewter, bronze, and rose”), one who is transient (“Too late I notice as she passes”) and fleeting (“By her glamour disappearing / Into shadow as I’m nearing”).

Indeed, for some people, the beauty and the attraction lie in never getting to know them very well. Their appeal lies as much in mystery as beauty. If snakes were as obvious and common as worm-seeking robins tilting an eye on the lawn, I dare say poets would not write rhapsodic about the rare moment they are seen, exiting stage left.

As a final note, a tip of the hat to snakes’ wisdom. To run when man approaches is not a bad policy to follow in life. I feel the urge to flee myself, each time I read the newspaper.

"Momentary" A. E. Stallings

One Poetry Editor’s Epiphany

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Christian Wiman, former editor of Poetry magazine and a poet himself, has been there and back. Not just the highs and lows that come with the life of a poet who gets hosannas one second (via acceptances) and brickbats the next (via rejections), but the more soul-searching variety—the one that comes with cancer, bone marrow transplants, and an arduous journey back.

I say this by way of explanation. Wiman’s new collection of essays are about poetry, yes, but they are also about art as faith (and faith as art). Thus, the subtitle in his new book He Held Radical Light: The Art of Faith, The Faith of Art. Thus the reason Wiman walked away from one of the most prestigious editorships for other callings: art, love, faith coming in the form of writing, marriage, and Yale Divinity School (how’s that for a career shift of a higher order?).

The mix of art and faith, so seldom seen together in these troubled times (unless you’re in a museum or Florence, say), makes for a bracing read. And Wiman does not go wild with add-in poems by way of example—either his own or others’—instead choosing to fine tune his own prose voice by choosing support more selectively: the poets and the poems who have spoken to him on a transcendent level.

Who are these poets? They are A. R. Ammons (circular, as he appears at both beginning and end), Donald Hall, Mary Oliver, Craig Arnold, Susan Howe, Denise Levertov, Jack Gilbert, Wallace Stevens, and Mark Strand (among others). Of this lot, I’d yet to meet Ammons and Arnold, but all that’s changed now, which is the beauty of reading books—they create a new you under the currency of change.

First, though, Wiman tackles himself, namely his youthful confidence that a poem could be written that would outlast him forever (meaning: enter the annals of eternity). He no longer believes this. Even Shakespeare will face a time when there are no eyes to feast on his lovely pentameters, Wimar reminds us.

A quote I liked: “Poetry itself—like life, like love, like any spiritual hunger—thrives on longings that can never be fulfilled, and dies when the poet thinks they have been.”

In addition to the poetry and the philosophy, there’s a rich vein of memoir running through this little book. Wiman recalls, for instance, reading poems sent to Poetry in Herculean 8-hour shifts. He writes, “An editor…especially one responsible for a monthly magazine, and especially one whose literary predispositions are, let us say, snarlish, quickly discovers that if complete critical approval is the only criterion for inclusion, then either he or the magazine is going under. I became a different kind of reader.

“I started out as a poet believing that greatness will out, as it were, that fate will find and save the masterpieces from oblivion no matter what. A decade of standing in that aforementioned storm, as well as making my way through the collected works of just about every American poet of note for the Ruth Lilly Prize for lifetime achievement, has convinced me otherwise. Chance and power play a large part, and I feel sure that some genuinely great things fall through the cracks—forever.”

Wow. Your suspicions (and mine) affirmed! And even though you may be kidding yourself, you can’t help but believe that some of your stuff is some of that stuff. You know, the sterling silver being rejected as flatware. Through cracks the size of the Grand Canyon. In a cold, cruel poetry world where Chance and Power share the throne with an iron fist like Ferdinand and Isabella.

Starting tomorrow, I’ll share a few of my favorite poems among Wiman’s favorite poems. And continue writing for the cracks. Until then….

Insights From a Man Booker Judge

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booker

October 16th. You know what that means. It’s Man Booker Day, the day five judges will meet at a secret location in a not-so-secret city called London to pluck a winner from the shortlist (it should take eight hours or so).

What’s in it for the authors? Most excellent sales, for one thing. Not that being on the shortlist hurts sales any, but being on the shortest list of all is downright painless. Man Booker’s been an up-and-comer, after all, among literary prizes. A win is a ka-ching, not to mention an ego booster rocket.

The shortlisted six-pack of novels, detailed here, come from a list that originally spanned 171 books long. The five judges had all of seven months to plow through those books’ pages, but you’ll be happy to know that some of the books (the amount varied by judge) were left unfinished. As crime writer Val McDermid—one of the 2018 judges—put it, “To be honest, there’s some when you’re not very far into it and you think, ‘This is not going to win the Booker Prize’.”

McDermid was interviewed for The New York Times about her experience as a Man Booker judge, and as a writer who reads reading about a writer who reads for the Booker, I especially appreciated the following insight about the experience:

“It has provoked a restlessness in me. I am thinking about how I can push my own writing in different directions and not do the same things again and again and again. If you’re a writer, everything you read gives you pause: You’re always looking for something you can steal or something you want to avoid. This has really taken me outside the usual tramlines of what I read.

“One other thing I’d say is that if you’re a writer, you’re someone who very quickly becomes a critical reader. It’s not as easy to find unmitigated pleasure in a book. It’s rare I find a book so absorbing I don’t ever think about technique while reading it. That happens about half-a-dozen times a year.”

So true about getting in writing ruts, isn’t it? We hate to admit as much, but sometimes such confessions lead to the tabula rasa a writer needs to get someplace.

Ditto the bit about learning what to “steal” and what to avoid. Reading is the fuel of every writing machine (or, to humanize it, the water of every writing being). You learn by others’ successes and mistakes, and it all trickles down into that messy but colorful pastiche that comprises your own writing canvas.

So read like a Booker judge, why don’t you. Paradoxically, all that reading will generate bursts of unforeseen (and improbably fresh) writing.

Nota bene: If you’re interested in reading the complete interview of McDermid, you can jump through this looking glass. Meanwhile, enjoy tonight’s Booker Award party. These days, there’s a party for everything, seems….

Riddle Me This

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riddle

Good news: Poetry continues to work its way back into everyday media. Or every weekend media, anyway, as evidenced by the New York Times Magazine, a Sunday insert that includes a poem selected by Rita Dove each week.

Yesterday, the magazine included an Elizabeth Spires poem. I’m going to hold back on the title to see if you can guess what it’s about. Game? Good. Here we go:

A shirt I was born in.
I wear it. Or it wears me.
White, of course.

A loose fit.
Growing as I grow
but slowly going dull.

It must be washed
once, twice, three times,
then hung to dry.

There, can you see it?
Hanging high
on the hill.

Waving its arms
in the wind. Beckoning.
Sun shining through.

I don’t know about you, but as I read it yesterday, I thought it sounded like a poem for children. One of those puzzle poems. One of those here-are-the-clues, now-see-if-you-can-guess-what-I-am deals. Sold at Personifications R Us. Aisle 6. Bottom shelf (where wee ones can see riddles rolling among the dust bunnies). Where teachers buy poems without titles and put students on the hunt.

If you haven’t guessed already, it’s about your immortal (thinking the best here) soul and carries the title “Picture of a Soul.”

Nice, but nicer still is the quote Dove alludes to in the short introduction. It’s a Wallace Stevens bit I’d never heard before: “the poet is the priest of the invisible.”

I wonder if someone has stolen that for a book title yet. Or is it too cheeky? Priest of the Invisible: Poems. I’ll check with Dewey, then Decimal, and get back to you.

Until then, Happy Indigenous Peoples Day!

Random Thoughts for October: Scary Times

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These days, there is nothing United about the States of America. No surprise, given ours is a god of irony.
It is dangerous reading the newspapers, indeed. If you believe in freedom of the press (the First and Foremost Amendment), you put your money where your mouth is and subscribe to a newspaper or two. Then, for the sake of your health, you try not to read it.
Innocent until proven guilty. I’ll grant Judge Kavanaugh that. Repeat after me: It’s an important precept.
That said, the question of sexual assault aside, putting rabid partisans on the Supreme Court makes it anything-but. Supreme, I mean. First the presidency, then the Congress, and now the highest court in the land. The Baron de Montesquieu and his lovely separation of powers (complete with checks and balances) is rolling in his grave as, above ground, it all goes unchecked and unbalanced. Just. Like. That.
If you look up “hypocrisy” in the dictionary, you’ll likely see a picture of that lizard, Mitch McConnell, the man who led the dereliction of duties to advise and consent when President Obama sent Merrick Garland’s name to the Senate for SCOTUS.
Oh, those foolhardy Founding Fathers! They never guessed that they would have to include a time line for Senators doing their jobs. They just assumed they’d do it.
Think again, Madison.
Merriam-Webster’s word-of-the-day today is “gloaming” (twilight, dusk). Great word. Just don’t use it in a poem, where it’s greatness, like Britain’s, has been established.
What a delight, having to wait for an interlibrary loan of a new poetry book. Elbowing over the big boys on the wait list? Ada Limón’s The Carrying.
Is there a better poster child for the wealth of minority voices enjoying success in poetry than Danez Smith’s battle cry in the wilderness of America, Don’t Call Us Dead?
I am no fan of Halloween, so sue me. Little kids at the door, proud parents watching as they say, “Trick or treat!”? All well and good. But 14-year-olds grubbing for sugar? God spare us. And deliver us November 1st sooner rather than later.
Susan Collins of Maine is not a swing vote is not an independent voice is not a senator of interest. She is merely another rank-and-file Trump Party vote, knee and jerk.
All hail Lisa Murkowski who Alaska, who nailed it: “…in my view [Judge Brett Kavanaugh] is not the right man for the court at this time.” Not a party hack, but a conscience considering each case as it comes up — just as you’d like to see on the court.
Maybe Ms. Murkowski should be the one donning robes, then?
The proverbial “they” say it might flirt with 80 degrees Fahrenheit in New England this coming week. “O hushed October morning mild,” as Robert Frost would say (and did, in his poem “October”).
These are salad days for many poetry journals. Don’t credit chicory or chives, however. Credit reading fees, more and more the salad dressing of choice in the impoverished world of poetry.
(“Impoverished” referring to the poets, not the poetry journals, of course.)
More from the God of Irony: People pay $13 a month (even months where they don’t shop) to amazon.com for “free shipping.” P. T. and Barnum would be proud.
What’s more, if you try to get 2-day free shipping for a food item on amazon, you have a surprise coming: shipping. Unless you join “Prime Pantry” for another $13 a month.
Oh, that clever Jeff Bezos. Small wonder he invokes the envy (and petty hatred) of the Electoral College President!
I finally did it: I purchased a big collection of Philip Larkin’s poetry. The good, the bad, and the ugly.
Just started Richard Powers’ The Overstory, a tree-hugger’s book if ever there was one. Hope I’m not barking up the wrong tree.
Being a fan of both the Boston Red Sox and Ben Franklin’s, I earlied-to-bed while the bedding was good last night, Sox up on the Yankees 5-0. Turns out, I saved a few fingernails. The final score: 5-4. Just like an upcoming Supreme Court I know.
Happy October, people. If you’re in a spot where leaves turn instead of Senators, enjoy the colors!

Fridays Are for Funerals

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Transcribing Swedish? I’m just glad I can create an umlaut. Only 6 a.m. and that alone feels like a day’s work.

Dear Diary: Today I typed an umlaut. And went to a funeral where dead men make like gypsies reading minds. Tarots from the beyond. Or is it the mind’s heightened awareness when tuned to the frequency of death (aluminum foil coiled ’round a rabbit ear)?

Man-made music, knowing its place, plays here in a Key of Better-Not-Said, leaving the field to birds. The same hungry field with its open mouth, ready for bodies and umlauts and anything else you might feed it.

The earth. Does its hunger know any bounds? Rhetorical. And yet it is so patient. Seemingly indifferent. I can’t read it: kindly or quietly creepy?

In stanza two, I wonder about Tomas Tranströmer’s friend: “My friend’s voice lingered / in the minutes’ farthest side.” Was his friend a speaker graveside? Or the voice within, the mind reader from stanza one?

Of course, of course.

Today being Friday, you will no doubt drive home from work like T-Squared at the end of this poem: a summer day’s brilliance (despite its being fall — or spring, in the Southern hemisphere), rain, stillness. All shepherded by the moon.

Of course.

From July ’90
by Tomas Tranströmer

It was a funeral
and I sensed the dead man
was reading my thoughts
better than I could.

The organ kept quiet, birds sang.
The hole out in the blazing sun.
My friend’s voice lingered
in the minutes’ farthest side.

I drove home seen through
by the summer day’s brilliance
by rain and stillness
seen through by the moon.