Have Words Will Travel

I was worried that when I finished my MFA, I would no longer have anyone to critique my work, and I imagined myself falling into a dark, cobwebby hole of unpublishable poems that I didn’t know how to fix.  Since then, some of my fellow student poets and I have made a pact to stick together and continue sharing and commenting on work, even though they all live in Washington and I’m here in New Jersey.  The Internet makes virtual critique groups easy.

My current issue, however, is that I have this manuscript that my virtual critique group have already seen and commented extensively on and, while their comments were helpful as always, they’ve seen many of the poems so many times and in so many drafts that it’s become hard to be objective.  I need a fresh pair of eyes to help me turn “thesis” into “publishable manuscript that will leave contest judges sockless all over the country.”  Luckily, such a person has come along.  A long-time reader of my other (anonymous, non-poetry) blog and I have been chatting via email for a few months and playing the odd game of Word Twist on Facebook.   She’s a poet, too, a few years ahead of me in her writing career, but (I think) we’re more or less peers.  We’ve both got manuscripts we want to publish, so she suggested we trade and comment.  I am ridiculously happy to have someone to swap with.  And if the quality of her comments is as high as the quality of the poems I’ve read so far in her manuscript, I’ll be in good shape.  (No pressure, though, LC.  Ha.)

Not only that, but yet another blog-reader poet friend has offered information on workshops that specifically address getting a manuscript into the best possible shape for publication.  I think I will look into that.  Has anyone ever been to one?  If so, I’d love to hear your impressions.

Meanwhile, today I bought my ticket to the Academy of American Poets’ 2008 Poets Forum in NYC.  This is one of the reasons I love living near New York.  I don’t know how I’m going to wait until November.

It seems that my little hiatus is over.  I woke up this morning raring to go, and the minute I got back from dropping my daughter at camp, I launched myself into preparing submissions.  I’ve been getting a lot of contest notifications, so I ended up preparing three contest submissions: one for single poems, one for a chapbook manuscript, and one for a full book-length manuscript.  I have several more to do.  The reading fees may kill me, though, which  I suppose is why so many poets object to the whole contest dealio.   Still, I’m encouraged by the Nimrod placement, and it seems like contests are the only way to get a book deal anymore, so as long as I have the lettuce, I’ll keep submitting.

The thing that is so hard to believe is that it took me two hours to prepare three submissions.  Obviously I need to streamline my process.

I reckon I’ll spend the afternoon doing some non-contest submissions, since I haven’t sent any since May, and then I’ve got poems to respond to for my fellow students.  It feels good to jump back in.

Apologies for the dearth of posting here.  The semester ended and Stuff happened in my life and I had to take a few weeks to deal and also recover from all the hard work, assignments, and the thesis.  I admit I spent a lot of time sitting around playing word games on my computer, too.  My brain needed the break.

Writing is back on my radar, though, because a chapbook contest I intend to enter has a fast-approaching deadline.  I spent most of the day yesterday ordering the manuscript, writing the cover letter, doing the formatting, and so on.  It’s all ready to go — so now I will procrastinate for another week before actually taking it to the post office to mail.  I really need to do some submitting, too.  I haven’t submitted a thing for two or three months and have lots of work to send out.  I dislike the administrative parts of submitting, but if I don’t submit I can’t get published, so I must force myself to set aside a couple of hours and just do it.

Also, my fellow poetry students have been exchanging new work for feedback, and not only do I need to respond to them, but it’s lighting a fire under my tush to write some new work of my own.  Which is exactly why we pledged to stick together even after graduation.  Otherwise, we’d all probably slip into a fugue state wherein we’d spend hours a day watching soap operas and generally doing everything but write.  We know our weaknesses.