Providence, Post Office, Publish, Perish

Thanks to the crowd at Blue State Coffee for a nice show last night. Witty hosting by Tony Brown and Ryk McIntyre. It was also good seeing Megan Thoma, Mike McGee, and David Perez read again. If you want to laugh your butt off, Megan's featuring later this month. I'll put up info when I have the exact date. If you want somebody else roaming the lines between slam and academia (in this case an MFA), check out David Perez tonight at the Cantab or Friday in Manchester.

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I'm about to send out a lot of stuff.

I've been bad in the last year about submitting work. I've been concentrating so much of my energy on producing that I've forgotten about the whole publish/perish dichotomy, which is especially important since I'm going on the job market this year. I look around at some of the MFA grads with whom I'll be competing and know that I'm competitive as far as total publication records go. I'm no Seth Abramson, in all the named journals (and probably never will be), but I've got a few decent journals under my belt and three chapbooks through real publishers. diluvium will of course be the big shot this time around, and I'm sending it to the major first-book contests: Yale Younger Series, Whitman, Bakeless, etc. But I'm also pulling out the individual poems that have until now been serving as fodder for the ocean in diluvium and sending them out to journals. I've gotten positive responses on them from some poets I greatly respect (and who would both know good stuff when they saw it and not BS me about whether or not what I'd just shown them was so). We'll see how the readers react. As usual, my big problem will be choosing work. That is:

I'm one of the few poets I know who doesn't quite have a shtick. Whether it's performance or written work, I write a wide range of material. On the one hand, it's great when you see it all together. These sets that I've performed at Worcester, the Cantab, and Providence have been like one-man variety shows in a sense. I've written before about The Icarus Sketches / The Icarus Series and how it forms a spectrum of Icarus poetry. But when I just have to choose 3-5 poems to send off to a journal, I get a bit lost. Do I choose the ones that have similar themes? Similar styles? Do I try to show off range and therefore pick three very different poems? Grouping by style is usually the safest bet, as the journals I've seen tend to choose this way. And yet it chafes me. That's another reason I haven't submitted much lately - it hurts to break pieces apart instead of letting them build up into a greater effect. It also hurts to say several things that are all very close to each other (though I suspect my "very" might be "somewhat" for others).

If you've read any of my stuff in the past year and have suggestions of places I can submit to, let me know. In the meantime, I'll be going through back issues, looking for similarities in style, and sometimes comparing to Jeffery Bahr's Publication Ranking list. I prefer to submit to places that I think look good, which is not to say I'm being shallow, but that I particularly like journals that have a coherent aesthetic that extends even to the production of said journal. I have to admit that some of my submissions this time around, however, will be based on the reputation of the journal, deserved or not.

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Lastly, I'll likely be blogging a bit more this month. Ironic, given that I'm starting an adjunct professorship at the University of New England as well as continuing work on my dissertation. If I'm going to have less time, I might as well have drastically less time.