Dreaming in Iambic Pentameter

On Friday my poetry group, the Quick & Dirty Poets, hosted a poetry reading, the second in our Hot ‘n Sticky Summer series, with featured reader Deborah LaVeglia.

Now, it’s not often that these things go off without a hitch, but I have to say that this one did. It was my turn to compere, and I was wearing the most adorable high heel shoes in the world, along with a low cut halter neck top which prompted my husband to coin a new word “sloet”–work it out for yourself…

The coffee shop had the perfect number of people in it: not so full it got overheated, but full enough to compliment the featured reader and provide an enthusiastic audience.

Deborah was wonderful. Her poems are warm, witty and very moving, and she immediately established a sound rapport with the audience. Four of the QNDs were present, and we all gave a good account of ourselves. R read mostly new poems, the last one of which was very innovative. K and D both read a couple of my favorites of theirs. I read a couple of recently accepted sonnets and three free verse poems, including “This Is The Son” for R.

We had four solid readers in the Open Mic, including Joe Weil, who sang one of his pieces a cappella in his beautiful Irish lilt.

And after that we went to the bar. It doesn’t get much better than that.

I intended to talk about my most recent personal submissions in the previous entry, but it got a little too long.

People often ask me why I edit The Barefoot Muse. I understand their bewilderment: as a free e-zine it brings in zero income; meanwhile there is a small financial cost involved in leasing the domain name/webspace, and a huge cost in terms of my own time, myself being the sole proprietor, editor, programmer etc on the job.

The reasons I began the journal are many and various. However one unexpected benefit of becoming an editor has been, I believe, that I have become a better submitter. I use the word ‘better’ in two senses. Firstly, it is made me more able to deal with rejection. I know that I do not always reject poems because they are worse crafted than another that I am accepting. It may be simply that I already have a petrarchan sonnet about lost love for this issue, or that the issue is too heavy on villanelles, or that I can’t see which poems I would put before or after this one to give a decent segue. Understanding that enables me, as a submitter, to say to myself, “Okay, none of that batch fitted. I’ll try again.” I do believe trying again is very important, and something that women poets, in particular, need to be more prepared to do. When I get a new submission from someone I have previously rejected, I think “Good on you!” and am actually more likely to look on the poems favorably as a result. This, too, helps my own attitude.

I have also become a more professional submitter. Particularly with email submissions, it is all too easy to simply dash off a few lines, paste in some poems and hit send. This would be why I get submissions with multiple spelling mistakes or grammatical errors, submissions where I am left ignorant of the would be contributors full name, even submissions where they have got my name wrong! These days I tend to draft my own email cover letters in Word, and use the spell check feature it possesses, before pasting them into my email program.

This was originally a much longer post but Wordpress went down and I can’t remember everything I wrote. I did include details of the submissions I’d prepared to send out during the previous three days. Interestingly, I’ve already heard back from the one email submission of those three. Mezzo Cammin were keen to take “Lullaby in Glose Form” and politely requested to look at some additional work as they like to publish 3-4 poems per contributor. Since then they have also agreed to take “Elegy for a Lost Countryside & a Distant Brother” and are still looking for another piece. I sent them a third batch of poems to look at just this evening. This to me is a perfect illustration of the exacting standards of the new generation of e-zines, not to mention how hard we unpaid editors work!

I am currently marking time somewhat on the MFA until my summer help arrives on Saturday. At present I only have six hours a week when I am not in charge of at least one child, not really sufficient to make much of a dint in the Collected Poems of Richard Wilbur (of whom more at a later date.)

As I rediscovered today, one child demands entertainment. On procuring a playdate for her, I was also reminded that the presence of two seven year olds, no matter how fundamentally well-behaved, is not conducive to construing the works of our contemporary masters.

What is it conducive to, however, is the submissions process, both sides of it in fact. I find the nature of this is very stop start anyway. When I’m reviewing submissions, unless they are VERY bad, I don’t like to reject them without at least two read throughs separated by a decent chunk of time. Preparing my own submissions is similarly an administrative chore with a number of easily divisible steps. Thus I can lend myself to interminable interruptions for snacks, drinks, bandaids, out of reach toys, dispute adjudications etc. and still accomplish a reasonable amount of work.

In the past two days, therefore, I have reviewed nine submissions for The Barefoot Muse. I rejected four out of hand, accepted one, shelved three for a second reading prior to probable rejection, and wrote a thoughtful quasi-acceptance to one worthy contributor explaining tactfully (I hope) that his sonnet sequence of 15(!) sonnets would be too much for the average e-zine reader and that I could take four of them, should he be able to bear the prospect of breaking it up.

With this experience fresh in my mind I would like to do something the inestimable Steven Schroeder, editor of The Eleventh Muse, has done on his Blog and write a list of the top ten dos and don’ts if you wish to get into the journal.

1. Look, it’s a formal/metrical e-zine. Don’t send me free verse. Don’t send me rhyming poetry with no meter. Don’t even send me one such in a batch of formal poems hoping I won’t notice. I will. I’m strange like that.
2. Scan your poems. Or read them out loud, or something. I shouldn’t have to point out your metrical irregularities to you in an otherwise striking poem.
3. If you’re sending me nature poems (not my personal taste at the best of times) please make sure there is a point other than how beautiful nature is. I get that. Really.
4. If you’re sending me religious poems (ditto) please don’t moralize, judge other religions or unbelievers and please try and understand the difference between a religious poem and an Episcopalian hymn.
5. Sonnets get old, especially sonnets about love, especially lost love. Honestly, Shakespeare sort of owns the territory.
6. Do send me interesting forms I may not have seen before, even if I have to look them up in Wikipedia to check if you got it right. (I accepted a Ghazal today.)
7. Do send me poems that counterpoint contemporary subjects with traditional structures. I get a kick out of that.
8. Don’t send a cover letter criticizing the way I laid out, managed or edited the existing issue. I try and rise above that sort of thing but I do it for love you know, and I’m only human.
9. Do send me light verse. I like to have at least one per issue. Life is far too serious and good light verse is honestly much harder to write than a sonnet about your lost love.
10. Don’t ever think that fulfilling the rules of the form is sufficient. ALL good poems contain imagery, put together in a way that evokes an emotional response in the reader. Overly abstract or navel-gazing poems are no more interesting in rhyme than free verse, even if your meter is flawless and your rhymes a triumph. That’s why formal verse is hard.

Right, I’m going to go and watch a CSI re-run before my brain explodes.