Curious on Myspace: How do I get published

A poet I am friends with on Myspace sent me this message:

I'm curious if you might share some professional insight....?
I have work (poems and stories) that I would like to be published. I have my book, and a few pieces out there, but I feel like I'm an awful judge when it comes to selecting a venue for a specific piece of mine.
Your work is great, and you're published often. Can you shed some light on your publishing process? What's a good way to find a match for your work? Often I feel like I "get it right" only to discover I haven't.
I'm curious to have your input.

While I am somewhat flattered another poet asks my advice, and note she wisely thought to compliment my work I wonder what she is really asking. She may not know. I checked and this poet has one book out which is all I have.

And even if that weren't the case, she must know I have nothing new to say on the subject, a chestnut in the world of literary journals, writing, submission. I suspect her underlying question is a statement: Help. I'm discouraged.

Discouragement I can respond to, because I know it well. Sit back and prepare for the litany. I'm discouraged I still haven't been able to publish my short story collection, although ten or so of the stories are in literary journals, with one forthcoming. I'm discouraged I still haven't found a publisher for my novel or newer work.

I am discouraged that because of the preceding nonevents of nonpublication I couldn't get a teaching job. I am discouraged by my older sisters' ability to so sufficiently demoralize me when when I was younger I function oddly. I am discouraged the whole lot of us with me as the drum major believe the b.s. we are fed about how we should live and act (fed by media, which is whoever has the attention of the folks round the camp fire for the past 5,0000 or 15,000 or 16 billion years).

I am discouraged so much clever and even highly skillful work gets lauded when it is no more than clever and even (sometimes) highly skillful.

I read poetry to find the answer. I read to get closer to the meaning. I'm looser on fiction. I get discouraged when I read work that means nothing to me though I sometimes know it's wonderful and that my approval is not the sole criteria for merit.

What small success I do have I have because I ultimately didn't give up. After graduation school, and there is a direct correlation, my poetry was so clever and cynical (my M.F.A. is in fiction but I took some poetry classes) I was afraid I was taunting muses. I risked retribution, and love poetry too much for that. I knew what I was writing was wrong. A poet can only write what is close to her soul and mine was damaged.

Well, all souls are damaged, even Mother Teresa's, Paul Newman's, MLK's. Without damage there would be no clawing toward the light; art.

I stopped writing poetry. It wasn't simply my discouraging graduate school experience that made me cynical. I needed healing.

I worked on my soul. I repaired. Poetry came back.

And then I began submitting, on instinct, to this and that review. I did it a lot. I was given no favors. I have no connections. Simply, I would not let myself be discouraged.

And I enjoy the trip, the journey, the flow, the silliness. If I'm getting depressed, submitting can help me feel positive. It's my one-in-a-million chance lottery ticket. Why else do people buy those things but to buy hope. Depression can also mask a new poem awaiting birth. God loves a good depression.

We don't know who the one or two chosen poets will be, chosen to sing centuries from now. We just do it because singing in the present saves us. There's always Letters to a Young Poet, and I'm told Pater wrote similar. Love the flawed system, respect editors, know the system is fixed and against you, immoral and run by mere mortals, believe in whatever it is you need to believe in to submit your next packet of poems.

image from: http://www.eatonhand.com/hw/fibonacci1.jpg (a Fibonacci sequence)

Satisfaction in Ink: why I like being published in journals

Last night I took the 7 back from a poetry reading in Queens--a borough I rarely visit, though I rarely visit any borough other than Manhattan. My swift passage and descent into Grand Central Terminal's earthy core on this return home was not unaccompanied. I was with my friend Jane, a good poet who bills herself as a performance poet.

"So do you have any readings coming up?" she asked. Jane, whose financial circumstances are different from mine, flies to the west coast and abroad to give readings. She also runs a series in Manhattan (her entrepreneurial circumstances are different from mine too; she is an entrepreneur; I'm not, at least not so far).

The only readings I could come up with were at a memorial service this Saturday and a featured reading in March 2010. There will be a few readings I am part of, and at least one radio interview. My dance card is not as empty as a widow's bed. How empty is a widow's bed, anyway. It could well be a'bursting. But I don't exactly need a speakers bureau to broker my public appearances.

Our conversation got me thinking--and not defensively. Knowing I'm sensitive and umbragey I monitored myself so I could figure out what I really thought and wanted without my ego or fear of being considered less than getting in the way.

And I realized I love being in literary journals. I adore the thought that one or two or three poems of mine are at a party with one, two, three or more poems of from ten to fifty poets, are bound and on a bookshelf, are in someone's hands and working their way to that very special someone's imagination. Or that my poems are online, a venue more available than grocery stores and laundromats in L.A.—and they are open later than in New York.

My life in poetry felt difficult, unsatisfying, half-lived before I had a book published, but now that The Future Is Happy is out there, I am still quite excited about the thrill of individual poems being accepted and displayed. Displayed because poems are now online and available, therefore, 24/7 to billions of readers, at least theoretically.

Submitting poems to journals requires bookkeeping--I keep two sets of records, one in a black leather book my niece gave me a few years ago, and one in a table on Word. It's tedious being things straight and remembering to notify editor H when editor Q has selected poems sent to both. Assembling the packages of five or so poems requires thought and time. It takes time to submit my work; odds are that 5-7% of my submissions will be accepted. I found those percentages in an article.

I like the game, however. I write to be read. I won't deny the spark of pride when I get Bingo--my poems (or stories) are selected and presented. Yes, I absolutely love to read in public. I'm a strong reader, not always perfectly confident, but I present well. Or well enough. What's all this about? Poetry. It's not just line breaks, my friends. Sure, Rilke published early but by the end, when he was producing his better work, circulated his poems among friends and ignored the public. I love Rilke. Probably more than I love Whitman who gave his poems to anyone who would accept them. Like God, I am who I am. A poet. Oh hear me read. Oh read me.

About poetry: I don't believe in free will

A poem of mine was recently accepted by a review. These things happen. These things are what poets who are foolish as I am think life is made of. (It's not. Life is made of 360 degrees plus a galaxy with swirling planets and burning patient stars. Life is made of Steamboat Willie plus infancy. Life is made of palms on skin plus revolution of every sort.)

The poetry co-editor suggested I send an additional batch of poems -- as many as possible -- so editors could select an additional poem. Feverish me sent off twenty or thirty more poems. I hadn't even figured out page breaks on OpenOffice.org.

The review accepted one more poem. Fine. I have a poem accepted therefore I exist. Fine.

But when I later took another look at the "additional" poems I excitedly sent off - my resubmission was shortly after my book was published, so everything I sent was relatively new - I realized I'd sent incomplete and sometimes awkward work. I knew, not for the first time, that given my battles with focus and clear thinking, the incredible effort it takes to whittle away enough of the stuff around me, to gently befriend my "self" with all its confusion, resentments and fantasies, the "self" that's taken so many years to produce Sarah Sarai's first book, that, practically speaking, I can only be sure of five or six poems at a time.

Why am I writing this? To learn something about myself. To possibly learn to contradict what I believe about myself. To get it out. See, as far as I'm concerned, my book is a miracle. I now know there'll be other books - one novel is ready, the two novellas are almost ready, the next poetry collection is being formed. They are standing on the shoulders of giants of literature, but also on my confused inner linebacker.)

I don't believe in free will. All these years of giving free its due, of being fair, of being judicious about my role in things, I realize I no longer believe in it, in free will, the ability to utter a saucy "no!' to distraction and get the job done.

Why? Because exercising my will is too difficult to be considered a routine choice or path. I try. It's easy to be willful. That's a knee jerk, a promise of danger, a reflex, a chance to say or do something that will bring me shame, a chance to repeat stupid patterns which I learned or which I created. Why don't I believe in free will? Because I have this sense my every action is predestined by my physiology, my body's chemistry, my brain's receptors and neurons. To exercise free will, I have to yoke a double team of reluctant oxen to my chest, and pull.

That isn't free, that's punishment. Granted, the reward for that punishing motion in a sane direction is serenity and sanity, but if that is free will, then free will as debated by philosophers is far more difficult than suggested. (Granted my knowledge of philosophy after Hobbes is a bit light.)

I know I am a complainer; maybe the above is a complant and I'm too close or arrogant or (oh please no please no please no) self-pitying to accept that the slew of thirty-something poets with good work out there are like Helios able to work with their team of oxen and horses every day, able to make the sun shine every day. I feel better if I allow the sun, Helios-led or simply inevitable, shine on my life. Am I a self-absorbed poet? Sometimes, sure. But sometimes I'm absorbed with the $100,000,000 Bloomberg has spent on his 2009 mayoral run. Or with putting Cheney and Bush aren't in stocks for commiting heinous acts of savegery. Or with why racism is stronger than ever in the face of its inevitable demise.

I believe in free and I believe in will. That's a start. Without writing poetry I wouldn't be able to celebrate either.