Took a mini hiatus--thoughts on submissions, post hooplah

Just a small one. Seems after all the hullabaloo, I ran out of things to say.

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Currently in the throes of putting together small manuscript packets to send out to journals. What I'm finding is I'm running out of stuff that holds my confidence. I suppose this is natural--a lot of the stuff that has my confidence is either picked up, out, or in limbo somewhere.

So here I am, sitting with a whole lot of work that I feel needs work, or work that feels reliant on other pieces. I'll still send them out, but I need to be careful about how they go out to face the world.

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Suffice it to say, I'm less confident about sending out work that isn't already in a pre-conceptualized manuscript form. It's just easier for me to construct packets of poems when I already know the relationship that occurs between poems. These newer pieces are new new. I barely know who they are.

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My oddness, when it comes to submissions, also stems from my concept of a poetry book. I read poetry books cover to cover. I'm not a page flipper. I don't go after single poems, I read the whole collection. So I'd like my submissions to also provide some kind of cohesion in terms of concept. When an editor gets my stuff, I want them to think, "Ah, now here's an obsession. Here's an idea." I also compose in this way. I write strings of poems as opposed to single poems.

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So here I am with a new season of submissions, and I know I've got lots of poems as individual entities, but they seem strange things to me, in light of the work that I've been doing over the past two years. Here's hoping I get to know them better.

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Current Spin:



J. Tillman. The drummer of the Fleet Foxes who has a forthcoming album.