Publications and Acceptances
 

Yesterday was a good day, with four poems accepted by Commonweal and the Capital Journal. Quadrant arrived with three poems and Able Muse with two. Most gratifying though, was a glorious essay on Mortal Stakes/Faint Thunder, by Jennifer Reeser in Able Muse. Thank you Jenny, and thank you, Alex.

Twelve more acceptances, this time a sequence called The Holy Time which I wrote, one poem a day during Holy Week and the Octave of Easter, while in residence at the Church of the Little Flower in Fort Lauderdale. I have really wanted to publish these twelve together rather than piece them out, and I couldn't be more pleased that Dappled Things will print them at Easter.

Tremendous, congratulations!

Thanks, Bill. I enjoyed the excerpts from your ninth century tale over at Met I early this morning. I forgot to mention I've got more work recently accepted at Angle and at Able Muse.

Roll on mighty Tim!

David R.

Thanks, Tim. And more congratulations!

Thanks, fellows. I sent a new prosimetrum, seven pages of prose and poetry recounting Feeney's last year in the field, and Chucky's first fumbling retrieves, to our Bill Thompson. There are two major poems, which I shall have to withdraw from Gray's, where they are on the growing wait list they have for me. Three smaller ones. Gray's are really stuck on publishing five poems per year, and of course they have to make room for John Beaton, whom I referred to them, dumb Tim. But Bill has sent it downstairs to his poetry editor, and I hope it will see the light of day. I love working with Bill, and I encourage all to send work and subscribe to Alabama Literary Review.

You really are rolling, Tim! Congrats for all of this.

Charlotte

Janet Kenny has just sent a pretty glorious and substantial review of my three books from late 2011 to Quadrant. I am deeply in her debt.

It takes so long for reviews to come out, particularly in print, but I'm gratified that it is finally happening.

Yesterday Gray's accepted a dual elegy in trimeter for Steve Syrdal's dog Betty and my Feeney. And Paul Lake took Foxhome for First Things.

Interpreter's House in Britain just took, Crazy Kid Stuff, a big unrhymed hendecasyllabic poem.

Good place, Tim. Good editor (i.e. poet and friend of mine).

Thanks, John. Simon Curtis is a fine poet and editor, and I've known him for many years. He has four short, devotional poems of mine coming out in his next issue.

Oh, that's quite a list. Perhaps it will inspire me to submit; I tend to be just a little bit lazy about these tasks. Maybe it's time to make a 2013 resolution... Congratulations!

Yes, I'm of the Marly ilk too... Find it terribly hard to submit. I agonize for hours!

Tim, I'm curious, how often do you submit--every week? Or? You publish SO much!

Of course, you're wonderful poet too, so you probably get heaps of acceptances, right?

Charlotte

Marly and Charlotte, I've said this before. I get very far behind in submissions because I write so much. I get very far behind in editing my own work, Rhina is not tough enough on me. But about twice a year I send out a blast of poems, thirty, maybe forty. And yes, almost all of them are published.

Of course, I'm not in Dick Wilbur's league. Twenty-five years ago I could have papered an outhouse with rejection notices and ripped them from the wall to useful purpose. I asked him how many rejection notices he got, and he said, "I've never had one." Then he said, "Actually, the Disappearing Alphabet was rejected by the New Yorker which forwarded it to the Atlantic Monthly, which published it."

Lick the stamps. Send the poems.

I hit the jackpot. Last year our Catharine Brosman published Multum in Parvo, a collection of twelve epigrams, in Chronicles. I sent thirty epigrammatic poems to Greg Williamson, poetry editor of Sewanee Theological Review, and he took twenty-six of them. Multum in Parvo II.

Glad to hear about all the good news, Tim. Congrats!

Tim, setting aside for the moment (or taking for granted) the worthiness of your poetry, all this friend of mine, my hunting buddy, known him for years, etcetera, tacked onto your notices of publication might lead others to believe that it is who you know, the old boy's network, who your mentor is that determines whether one is published or not.

That might well further discourage those who are already wavering on the question: to submit or not to submit.

Do you ever test new ground or just stick to sending to your friends and boon companions?

That Wilbur anecdote! Of course, it says something about the strength and beauty of his work. But surely it also says something of interest about coming up as a poet in a certain place and time, with a certain sort of Northeastern education and teaching career--having that wonderful world where poetry mattered to many people, knowing Frost and Stevens and so on. I've read interviews where he talked about the poets of his generation, particularly Bishop and Lowell, and about Frost and Stevens, but don't know so much about the other elements.

Janice, of course I have to find new venues. Because so many of my trusted editors fold their tents. Every new venue is a cold call, although I admit it's often a cold call from a young editor who knows my work.

The day is long gone when Dickie Wilbur could be grabbed by Harcourt and The New Yorker at age 26 and never have to look elsewhere. Ask Quincy Lehr, Nick Friedman, Jehanne Dubrow, Jenny Reeser, or Aaron Poochigian how hard it is to get started.

And Marly, it's not like I'm some New England aristocrat who grew up with Frost and Stevens. Farming in North Dakota is not the best platform for launching books of poetry. But many kind souls, many of them New Englanders, have taken me under their wings, and I try to do what I can for the youngsters I encounter here and elsewhere.

And now I'll gloat: 51 acceptances in fourteen days. Time to write a new poem!

Marly, when you read the correspondence of Bishop and Lowell, you will find that they had no great opinion of the young Wilbur's poetry. I believe everybody starts from nowhere and makes it on his own.

Good point, Gail. Dick was a farm boy from New Jersey who lapped his seniors in the art.

Nine more today. The Spirit smiles on my enterprise.