Yesterday's meeting was excellent. Many thanks to Ed for his block on publication. The reading afterward was refreshing in that we just read without discussion. Then too it will be refreshing to get back to a little discussion at the next meeting.
Welcome
All that I have to offer is Ed's outline for yesterday's remarks. It's an excellent guide for going about the publishing process. It also emphasizes the work involved. It is not an easy job. My biggest challenge has always been a reluctance to step away from the writing to do the work of getting published. Oh the challenge of being an unknown great American writer.
News and Jabber
N.B. Follow the links below. They should be live. EG
Getting Published:
(Suggest a stable of twenty or more poems before launching into this.)
1. Identify the poems you want to publish. Proofread carefully. Are they literary? General interest? Genre?
2. Decide level of acceptable difficulty-elite, difficult, possible, easy.
3. Review the resources available to find publications. (Duotrope, Submittable, Submissions Grinder, Poets & Writers, etc.)
4. Identify the magazines/anthologies you want to send to.
5. CAREFULLY read the guidelines and follow them, even if they’re stupid.
6. Submit. If simultaneous submissions are allowed, submit the same poem to three or four publications. Nine out of ten subs (give or take) will be rejected. Don’t take it personally.
7. Keep a log of submissions-date, to, poem, outcome. Publications which accept a poem are more likely to accept the next one you send them.
8. If more than five or six rejections are received for a poem, consider revising it, it may be a stinker. Or you may be pitching it to the wrong markets.
9. If no success after dedicated effort, consider finding a heartless reader who will point out the flaws in your pearl. Revise and resubmit.
10. Success. Remember to thank the editor by name, and put your success out on social media. Poetry doesn’t pay, so don’t expect money.
Here is a link to an article/obituary of Nicanor Parra, Chilean poet who died on January 23, 2018 at the age of 103. He wrote what he called anti-poetry. This is stripped-down verse, somewhat in response to the broad lyricism of Pablo Neruda and other South American poets.
I Take Back Everything I’ve Said - Poem by Nicanor Parra
Before I go
I’m supposed to get a last wish:
Generous reader
burn this book
It’s not at all what I wanted to say
Though it was written in blood
It’s not what I wanted to say.
No lot could be sadder than mine
I was defeated by my own shadow:
My words took vengeance on me.
Forgive me, reader, good reader
If I cannot leave you
With a warm embrace, I leave you
With a forced and sad smile.
Maybe that’s all I am
But listen to my last word:
I take back everything I’ve said.
With the greatest bitterness in the world
I take back everything I’ve said.
— translated by Miller Williams
A.R. Ammons's complete works has just been released. He's a good man to look up every now and then. Here, in my first ever embedded video, is a discussion with him. It runs 25 minutes. The link immediately below is to a review of the book.
I said I will find what is lowly
and put the roots of my identity
down there:
each day I’ll wake up
and find the lowly nearby,
a handy focus and reminder,
a ready measure of my significance,
the voice by which I would be heard,
the wills, the kinds of selfishness
I could
freely adopt as my own:
but though I have looked everywhere,
I can find nothing
to give myself to:
everything is
magnificent with existence, is in
surfeit of glory:
nothing is diminished,
nothing has been diminished for me:
I said what is more lowly than the grass:
ah, underneath,
a ground-crust of dry-burnt moss:
I looked at it closely
and said this can be my habitat: but
nestling in I
found
below the brown exterior
green mechanisms beyond the intellect
awaiting resurrection in rain: so I got up
and ran saying there is nothing lowly in the universe:
I found a beggar:
he had stumps for legs: nobody was paying
him any attention: everybody went on by:
I nestled in and found his life:
there, love shook his body like a devastation:
I said
though I have looked everywhere
I can find nothing lowly
in the universe:
I whirled through transfigurations up and down,
transfigurations of size and shape and place:
at one sudden point came still,
stood in wonder:
moss, beggar, weed, tick, pine, self, magnificent
with being!
I did this early on and haven't stopped considering my drafts since. I have a number of things ongoing and did not expect this to take over. I found the assignment a trifle more interesting than I first imagined.
The Next Assignment
As we pull out of our various manifestations of SAD, an assignment that has some weight to it. In front of a mirror, write a self-portrait. Do not use a photograph or a recollection of how you think you look. Rather, be in front of a mirror as you write. Look and see. I include here two translations of Rilke's "Salf-Portrait" and another by Frank Bidart which is patterned on Rilke's. Consider this quotation from Rilke's "Advice to a Young Poet": "go into yourself and see how deep
the place is from which your life flows"
Self-Portrait
by Rainer Maria Rilke (EG note, age 31)
The bone-build of the eyebrows has a mule's
or Pole's noble and narrow steadfastness.
A scared blue child is peering through the eyes,
and there's a kind of weakness, not a fool's,
yet womanish -- the gaze of one who serves.
The mouth is just a mouth . . . untidy curves,
quite unpersuasive, yet it says its yes,
when forced to act. The forehead cannot frown
and likes the shade of dumbly looking down.
A still life, nature morte -- hardly a whole!
It has done nothing worked through or alive,
in spite of pain, in spite of comforting . . .
Out of this distant and disordered thing
something in earnest labors to unroll.
Self Portrait
The steadfastness of generations of nobility
shows in the curving lines that form the eyebrows.
And the blue eyes still show traces of childhood fears
and of humility here and there, not of a servant's,
yet of one who serves obediantly, and of a woman.
The mouth formed as a mouth, large and accurate,
not given to long phrases, but to express
persuasively what is right. The forehead without guile
and favoring the shadows of quiet downward gazing.
This, as a coherent whole, only casually observed;
never as yet tried in suffering or succeeding,
held together for an enduring fulfillment,
yet so as if for times to come, out of these scattered things,
something serious and lasting were being planned.
Translated by Albert Ernest Flemming
Rainer Maria Rilke
Self-Portrait, 1969 (EG note, age 30)
BY FRANK BIDART
He's still young—; thirty, but looks younger—
or does he? . . . In the eyes and cheeks, tonight,
