I used to prepare and send as many as sixteen submissions a month. But after a few years worth of rejection slips, save for the acceptance of two or three poems in chapbook journals, I now rarely submit my work. If I saw poetry of some quality getting published, I might strive to improve upon it and continue submitting. But most published poetry could have been written by pretty much anyone. There’s nothing to set it apart. And the few poems that stand out above these aren’t much above. Still, for my own sake, I strive to improve my craft. This is what a student, a devotee, a child, a creature of poetry must do.
My guess is you have to know the editors personally, or at least know someone they know, to get your poetry published. And if not this, then at the very least I imagine you must have to overtly buy into whatever politics and agendas they’re selling—and your submissions must demonstrate as much. Whatever the case, the quality of work doesn’t seem matter, so long as it fits snugly within a predetermined socio-political paradigm.
Knowing this, I still go my own way. Either I go my own way, alone and unknown, yet scaling heights of beauty and insight, or I trample along through the plains as just another brown hump in the stampede.
The Poet Obscure
He may not have the gift of high allusion,
quotes and references to texts obscure
recorded with compulsory profusion.
Perhaps he’d rather find a natural scheme
where words and metaphors come more sincerely,
requiring no exegetic scrawl.
He may not use strong images so nearly
as often as the modernists demand
is vital for a poem to be clearly
more than just a monologue of mind,
for he’ll make use of other strong devices
that let him deftly transmit all he means.
He may not ramble on of sacrifices
he’s made throughout the years, and what he feels
the world should know of all his strengths and vices.
He might instead decide he’d rather fold
his tales and meditations in the hearses
of dead and dying tenors to the fields.
He may not give his all enjambing verses
haphazardly across each random page,
every line chopped as he disperses
strong opinion, malcontent and pain,
for he may see the line bearing notions
beyond the norms imposed by donnish pride.
He may not feel romanced by Greek devotions
nor feel inclined to scatter Roman lore
throughout the lexicon of his emotions.
A broader range of histories may lure
his thought to ponder cultural connections
rooted in the loam of distant lives.
He may not share the common predilections
of using poetry as but a means
to push his politics in all directions
and further what agendas rule his mind,
for he may have no motive but to travel
through landscapes green with self-development.
He may not heed the rap of fashion’s gavel
and follow every statute set by fad,
accepting precedents as laid in gravel.
He might be more inclined to stray afar
from sooty highways, trampled by convention,
on subtle paths that lead to mystic finds.
He may not raise his hackles at the mention
of making use of meter, maybe rhyme,
filled with indignation, rage and tension
to think on prosody, semantic rules,
for he may sense mysterious potential
swelling deep beneath that censured realm,
waiting to be seen as quintessential
to evolutions ever influential.
This is my third terza rima. I’ve used disyllabic rhyme for one weave of the scheme, and end-line alliteration for the other. Each line is a pentameter. Seems to work.
