Monday, November 5, 2012

Guy Fawkes Day!

In England, this is a day for fireworks!

Here, we are still going through the submissions for the Fall/Winter issue.  We made a number of decisions back in August, and then we had to move offices just before classes started, which meant that a stack of your manuscripts, logged and ready to read,  went into boxes for longer than we'd intended.  Those boxes are now open, and Andrew Varnon, Joanna Novak and I are reviewing and discussing them over the next couple of weeks.

Sometimes we see fireworks.  This is brilliant!  we say, and there's no doubt at all that it will go into the magazine.

Hmmm, we say at other times, and then we each lobby for our favorites.

I hope you are our favorite.

Back in June

Poetry Journal Editors Panel

I realize now that before it actually happened, I should have blogged about The Riverwood Poetry Festival in Hartford (June 21st-24th, yes, sorry, you’ve missed it this year).  It looked really great: among the events, four Poets Laureate read one night (Dick Allen (CT); Walter Butts (NH); Lisa Starr (RI) and Sydney Lea (VT)), and Nick Flynn all by himself on another. 

And I was on a panel of poetry journal editors, trying to characterize our journals and what we looked for.  We each read two poems we had accepted and explained some of what we liked about those poems, and the audience asked questions—two in particular seemed to strike a nerve.

The first was, why does it seem you have to have an MFA to get published?

The second was, doesn’t anyone accept poems that rhyme anymore?   

We all had our answers.  Of course you don’t have to have an MFA to get published, and we (all the editors on that panel, but also we editors at Common Ground) don’t actually look at your credentials: we look at your writing.

However, people who’ve worked to get an MFA may have these advantages: they’ve had a period of intense concentration focused on making their writing shine; they’ve had experienced teachers giving them advice; they’ve run their poems through the gauntlet of their peers’ criticism, and then they’ve revised their poems some more.  (All praise to those who have gone through and survived!)

The MFA writers may have these disadvantages, though: their poems may sound “workshopped” and/or more like their mentors than like themselves; the work may have lost energy and innovation as it gained polish; the writer may have chosen to shy away from risky moves, for example, deciding to err on the side of intellectualism rather than passion, fearing that passion might be overly sentimental or naïve.

Or it might rhyme.  (That’s a joke!)

Personally, I don’t think rhyme should hijack the poem.  The poem is not about rhyming.  If rhyme has a point, if it adds rhythm and meaning to the poem’s content, then I’m fine with it.  But even then, I want the rhyme to be created from the best-chosen words; I want the rhyme to please and surprise just the way I want the rest of the poem to do.

If you want to look up the other journals whose editors were on the panel, here they are:

Caduceus: http://tfuscomedia.com (Tony Fusco)

Connecticut River Review: http://ct-poetry-society.org/publications.htm (Pat Mottola)

CT Review: www.easternct.edu/connecticutreview (Lisa Siedlarz)

Dogwood: www.dogwoodliterary.com (Sonya Huber)

Drunken Boat: http://www.drunkenboat.com (Ravi Shankar)


Tuesday, July 10, 2012

It’s at the Printers’!

At the Printers’!  I hope that sounds exciting, which it is, and not too much like the excuse for delay, “It’s in the mail.”

“In the mail,” that is, sent out to the contributors and subscribers, is the step after the step after next.

Let me tell you what happened:  we had the poetry contest winners, and we were finalizing the other acceptances, when my computer—the one which has the publishing program—was infected with a malicious virus.   The wonderful IT people basically re-built my computer.  The process took more than a week.

I may have lost some records (my apologies if I end up contacting you twice about the same thing), and I did lose the customized (blank) template for Common Ground Review, but I was able to use a version of the Fall/Winter issue as a template.

So we formatted the issue and the cover, and the printers are now sending us a sample proof. That really is in the mail; once we get it and can okay the order, the printers will get to work.       

In the meantime, we’re getting address labels ready and putting them on envelopes so we can send everything out as soon as possible, and I can actually say, “It’s in the mail!”

Thursday, March 8, 2012

Lorna Ritz's Spring/Summer Cover?

         
The cat's name is Ruby.  She's in charge of brush maintenance.

What You Are Doing Right

We are reading submissions now, trying to select not just good poems, but poems that really take us forward, that would work together in an issue that will, we already know, be very eclectic.  It’s not as if we’ve asked for poems on a theme.  That’s a possibility to explore for later.

We publish two issues a year, but we get submissions year-round.  What’s great is when the exact right poems arrive just about when we are putting together the issue.  Then we can accept them instantly: we know how they’ll fit, and the poets get letters from us very quickly. 

But when good poems arrive just after we’ve published an issue and we aren’t sure what the next issue is going to look like, we tend to hold those poems until the next issue gels.  This means that when we find some of the poems will not work, and we have to reject them, the rejection has been so delayed that the person who submitted them must be wondering what on earth has happened—or else has forgotten about them completely.  We have not forgotten, though we may be looking frantically for those poems when an editor has taken them home to go through one final time, or when our office has been packed up and moved to another building, both of which just happened between December and January.  

What you are doing right, when you are doing it right, is just amazing to think about. 

First, you are sending your work out.  That takes organization (especially with the constant changes in postage) and courage, or possibly enthusiasm.  When I send work out, I am at that moment so pleased with what I have written that I cannot imagine anyone would reject it.  The next day, however, or even the second after it goes out, I am certain it is all horrible and will be returned as soon as someone has read it (after it has been sitting around for months waiting to be read).  I am impressed by your sheer bravery in putting poems (or fiction or non-fiction) in the mail.

Second, you are writing.  I don’t know where you find the time to write or the ideas—life is busy!—, but I am happy you have managed to do so.

When you send your work out, I recommend a few practical considerations: 1) use the Forever stamps; 2) make sure your SASE is fully addressed and included;  3) make sure your bio is included, with some means of contacting you if by any chance you are to move before the issue comes out.      

Finally, you keep writing.  You keep sending work out regardless of rejections and delays and rejections.  Because as you keep writing, and as you keep thinking about writing, you are getting better at doing it.  Eventually everything will all come together: the poem sent to the right place at the right time, the acceptance that lifts you until you are walking on air instead of ground.

Friday, February 3, 2012

The Occasional Poem

And lateness.  I want to talk about the poems in our new issue, the Fall/Winter 2011 Common Ground Review, but I’ll circle back to that.   As our local patron saint of poetry, Emily Dickinson, wrote, “tell all the truth, but tell it slant—/success in circuit lies.” 

Here is my circuitous path to our latest production: the process of selecting poems; getting them into a publishable format, along with the new masthead, table of contents, and contributors’ biographies; marking up our gorgeous cover with words and ISBN# in exactly the right places; putting them into PDFs to send to the printer; reviewing the proof copy; waiting for and then sending out the issue—it has been an amazing series of experiences, and at the end of it, I look at Lorna Ritz’s autumnal cover knowing there are really good poems inside and, to cap them off, Annie Dawid’s thought-provoking essay on poverty, basic needs and assumptions (all connected by teeth).  After all the work, the issue is here (more Winter than Fall, my apologies for the delay) and this is an Occasion. 

I happen to like occasional poems: they contain an urgency and an urge to write which that day (or moment, or reason) has called up in the author, despite—I am sure—the author’s need to do other things, like laundry; I like that a specific and personal occasion for writing emerges out of the day everyone shares. 

In this Fall/Winter issue (13.2), we have a number of wonderful occasional poems, some based on holidays (like Martha Christina’s “Memorial Day.  A Brief Remembrance,” Robert Cooperman’s “As My Brother Held His Son,” and Joyce Meyer’s eclectic “American Thanksgiving”—I wish we’d been able to get the issue out in time for everyone to read it at their Thanksgiving table.  Dudley Laufman’s occasional poem, “Ice Storm,” seemed prescient when our own Halloween blizzard knocked out our power for a week.  Richard Merelman, Christopher Nye and Jay Rubin use the occasions of journeys—in St. Petersburg (and we get a phone call from St. Petersburg in Dustin Junkert’s “Friend”), through Tuscany, and across California). And there are many more, all occasions for celebration.