I think I'll just babble for a while. That works more often than you might think.

I sent off eleven more submissions yesterday, bringing the grand total to twenty-five. Maybe thirty; I probably still have subs floating around out there somewhere. The eleven I sent out yesterday, I'll call Batch C. The fourteen I sent out at the beginning of the month I'll call Batch B. And previous floating submissions can be Batch A.

Overlap could be a problem. I may have simultaneously submitted poems without noticing or notifying anyone. (And I most likely did.) Then again, that only becomes a problem if two magazines decide to publish the same poem. I'll burn that bridge when I'm standing in the middle of it.

This is how I created Batch C: I printed out the master list of poems and crossed out the ones that were submitted as part of Batch B. I realized I had enough poems left to make some more submissions, and I rated the poems I think are magnificent, the ones I think are passable, and the random "what the hell" poems. (There are plenty of poems that don't fit into any of these categories, and I like to call them, in honor of Irish people everywhere, shite.)

(You may remember I always include one "what the hell" poem that is weird or old or substandard-but-I-still-like-it or whatever. I've been published twenty times or so, and you'd be surprised how often the "what the hell" poem is the chosen one. I know I'm surprised. Maybe I don't know my own work very well, or maybe I should take risks more. Hmm.)

I didn't look up any magazines at all, I just took one great poem, three good poems and one "what the hell" poem and made ten batches of five poems each. Then I looked up magazines that seemed to fit my general style and sent one batch to each magazine.

This took a long fucking time. Again, you'd be surprised. Printing out all the poems, typing cover letters, addressing envelopes and SASEs, putting on stamps, blah blah blah. My goal in life is to be able to hire someone to do this for me.

While I was matching batches to magazines, I found one magazine that specializes in suicide poems, so I pulled out some old stuff and sent it. (Yeah, it's probably a crap magazine. At that point, I didn't care. I was in the groove, man.) That's the only submission that I tailored to a specific literary magazine.

I filed everything away in the "submissions" folder of my file cabinet and now comes the fun part: waiting to hear back. I do love the feeling of having so many of my poems floating out there in the world. I love the sense of possibility.

I'm also still waiting for my copy of the Journal of Modern American Writing, which I think is the name of the magazine that accepted one of my poems recently. I love when a magazine appears in my mailbox with one of my poems in it. Then I read the magazine and I'm all proud and then I put it on the shelf next to my other publications.

(It's a wee shelf. I'm working on it.)

I am getting frustrated by the comments I get in workshop. Half the time, I get comments like, "You're working too hard at 'ending' this poem, trying to tie things up in a bow." The other half of the time I get, "This sounds like it's not finished. I need more!"

So which is it? Do I need to lop off endings or write more of them? I'm starting to suspect that people are not going to be satisfied with any endings to poems I write, ever. It's driving me mad. I'm starting to doubt all my poem endings. And critique.

Of course at times, I have a very "fuck you" attitude to criticism. Not in an antagonistic way, although I can see where the use of the phrase "fuck you" might give you that impression. But what I mean to say is, I don't take it personally. You don't get very far as a writer without knowing how to use criticism. You have to be equally willing to use it and dismiss it. It's a tricky line.

Buddy and I were having an interesting conversation at the bar the other night. He was saying that critique on an individual poem is fairly useless. Changing a word or a phrase or a line isn't going to make much of a difference. He said the only criticism he ever wants to give is "You shouldn't have written this poem; go write another one."

For instance, you can look at anybody's poem, even those by your favorite poet, and find a line break or a word that you might consider "weak." But either you like the poem anyway, or you think they should go write another one. There's no such thing as perfection. There's only yes and no. It either makes the top of your head come off, or it doesn't.

I find this philosophy kind of freeing, and it reflects something that on one level, I already believe. If I get enough negative criticism of a poem, to me it adds up to "You shouldn't have written this poem. Go write another one." I might try and salvage a line, but that seriously never works out. The poem is dead, and so are its appendages.

On the other hand, if I write a poem I really like, I am more immune to criticism. It's more, "Well, maybe this line would be better if it was different, but I like this poem anyway." I might tweak a line here or there, delete some things, but I never do any huge revision.

And all this time, I've been thinking there's something vaguely wrong with me because I can't do sweeping revision on my work. I've been feeling like I haven't learned how to properly "craft" a poem, how to "revise," and whatnot.

But really, I think Buddy is onto something. If you have to work that hard to make it a poem, then you've lost it. You're no longer working on impulse, you're working on intellect, and intellect is the enemy of poetry.

Learning craft is a great thing-- I mean the intellectual study of craft is great. Like learning about sound from Ezra Pound last semester. But you don't apply it to your poetry like a blueprint, you internalize it. The poem still comes out of instinct, but your instincts have shifted.

I've been expecting graduate school to magically change my way of thinking so I don't rely completely on impulse. But all my best writing comes from pure impulse. I've known that for years. God. Even at the beginning of this entry, when I said I was going to babble, and all this stuff came out so easily. You see? I already know how to trust my instincts.

Oh my god, I feel like Dorothy, finding what she was looking for in her own backyard. I haven't been doing anything wrong after all.

I've been doing everything right.

"at the Cassie
Cassiecabana
where the bird looks just like a banana..."