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Last year about
this time my wife and I upped and moved from Minnesota to Michigan. The move
involved selling our home in St. Paul, transporting all our worldly goods
across country, finding new employment, buying a new house and gradually settling
down in a leafy backwater of Lansing where we could be nearer to our family. It
was a maneuver that called for nerves of steel, courage, belief that everything
would turn out right, and nerves of steel… I was fortunate enough to receive
translation contracts (I work as a freelance translator of French and Italian
books into English) one after another for about five months. That helped pay
the bills and was enjoyable to do, but also drastically curtailed my writing
activity.
So what I ended
up doing during odd moments in a busy schedule was penning a few poems. I tried
out various different forms and styles, of both rhymed and unrhymed verse, and
after a while I ended up with quite a few of them. So I gradually combined them
into a book-length collection which I will probably publish early next year
when it is finished. The book is called Songs
of Hunger, a name that I stole from a title in an ancient copy of Poetry
Magazine from 1915 – the one in which T.S. Eliot’s “The Lovesong of J. Alfred
Prufrock” first appeared. I liked the sound of this title, since it captured
something of the essence of what I was trying to get across in the poems.
Anyway, before
I went ahead and published the book, I wanted to see whether I could get any of
the poems accepted by a poetry magazine or journal, so I started sending some
of them off to various different publications. Nowadays you can submit work
online using an system like “Submittable.” That saves on postage, but it also
makes it easier for a magazine to wade through the thousands of submissions
they get and reject work out of hand if they want to without every having to
open an envelope or unfold a dog-eared manuscript. Of course, there are still a
number of stalwart publishers who stick with snail mail. Most of these are
relatively polite when they reject your work, saying something like “Thanks for
submitting. This doesn’t quite fit our needs at the moment. Good luck
submitting elsewhere.” The online systems do send you an email when your work
has been rejected and also change the status of your submission from “in
progress” to a rather dispiriting “declined.” As you can probably tell, I
mostly got rejections.
I also
submitted some poems to a few poetry contests. To my surprise, I received
notification last month that one of my poems had won 2nd prize in
the “Paul Laurence Dunbar/Maya Angelou Poetry Contest” run by the Detroit
Writers Guild. This came as something of a relief, because I was beginning to
think I was on the wrong track altogether. In fact if you read any of the
poetry published in the biggest selling poetry magazines, a lot of it at first
glance seems to be a case of the Emperor’s New Clothes: much of it is what is
generally called “difficult” and can be well-nigh incomprehensible to the
average human – all of which can leave you with the impression that poets only
write for other poets. I have nothing against difficult poetry, after all a
poem can be all the more rewarding for the reader if they have to work at it a
little. But surely one of the main aims of poetry is to communicate. If the
reader has to work too hard to understand the poem, he or she will simply give
up and wander off to read the sports section of the local newspaper. But that
is a topic for another post.
If I hear
anything back from any of the other submissions, rest assured you will be the
first to know.
