I'm really bad at submitting poems. Most of the two dozen or so poems I've published appeared only because an editor, sometimes a friend or acquaintance, asked for submissions, sometimes of particular poems, and one was published because a friend of mine read it aloud to an editor. I've got a list of 54 poems (out of several hundred unpublished) marked as ready, and only 10 are in the mail. I sent them in June, the first unsolicited submissions I've made in years. My first two times at West Chester the leader of the workshop in which I was enrolled made specific suggestions for markets and offered to speak to the editors, and I did nothing. This time I had a partial excuse: when Christian Wiman made it abundantly clear he likes at least some of my work and singled out two poems in particular, those two were among the 10 already in the mail. But I didn't send anything else, either. I told myself it would be an imposition on our brief acquaintance if I didn't wait at least six months.
Now it's been six months, and I've got stamps, envelopes, poems, a printer, addresses, and a post office in easy walking distance. So what's up? It's not as if I'm shy or easily hurt, and I posted just recently about the "great conversation" I want to be part of, and how that depended on getting in the marketplace. Here's what I think it is: in poetry, as in music and job hunting and even dating, I'm extremely diffident about initiating contact. It's stupid and I know it. This blog is something of an attempt at an end run around the problem, and it's been partially successful. People reading here have asked me to submit work. But those 44 ready, unpublished, and unmailed poems tell me it hasn't been enough.
So by this time next week I intend to have all 44 in the mail. Wasn't there something about new postal rates that might affect the SASEs?
Tim Murphy has been leading in interesting discussion at Eratosphere on publishing poems, and there's a good back-and-forth at ScopLaw, too. Ivy Alvarez and Mary Agner (whose website I've finally realized has a new name, Pantoums and Persistence), among others, do a wonderful job of reminding me how lazy I am.
Addendum 2005/12/05: Let me tell you just how silly I was to believe a prompt submission to Poetry would be an imposition — one of the poems submitted to that workshop is in the November issue.
7:08:08 PM 
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