Poetry Market
Okay, I've scribbled some pretty good poems
(Who am I kidding? They're brilliant!), so I
decided to fire them out. Thus I secured post
haste a copy of Poetry Market, igniting, then,
an exhaustive search for journals qualified to
reproduce my creative gems. Here's what
happened (I only report the facts). First up:
an editor shunning elite-sounding free verse
with obscure meanings and petty-sounding formal
verse with obvious meanings. Whew, I was okay
there. I'm not deep enough to be obscure, although
"elite-sounding free verse" sounded really sexy
and I wondered where I could find some.
What else? Nothing pretentious, didactic,
or overly sentimental. I guess I won't send him
the one about the dog who limped eighty miles
through hail and fire to fetch little Jimmy's mum
and dad to bring them back to the well he'd fallen in.
(I broke my leg for this dumb kid?) What's next?
Does not want light verse, doggerel, or greeting
card style poetry. Hell, there goes the one marking
the anniversary of my folks' spectacularly ugly divorce
(so, perchance, that's why you bought thy heavy,
black pistols). Forward! Also, nothing racist,
sexist, pornographic, or blasphemous. I was okay
until the blasphemous, goddamnit! Turning the page:
Poetry does not express emotion; it evokes emotion.
Oh, that just pisses me off! I was going to e-mail
the one releasing my existential rage: ripped apart
thy cosmos in red night blues, hate all things with love,
but now I'm stuck with the thing. Jesus! All right,
what's this? We want anti-literature and its literature,
style of the non-style, poems without poems, non-words
and non-sentence poems. Huh? I'm just a guy from Cleveland,
man. Defrost the universe, turn the key, blast furnace dance.
Onward! No bag ladies, loves-that-never-were, please!
I get the love angle thing but "no bag ladies?"
Do they not want work about bag ladies or poems
written by bag ladies? Because I'm trying to remember
the last great bag lady poet and I just can't come up
with anything. What's this? Wants poetry with themes
related to pipes and pipe smoking. What planet is this?
A poem about a pipe? Certainly. In trundled hope
a happy pipe hip-hopped into yon smoking ambulance.
Continuing. Wants poems dealing with bizarre:
fantasy, death, morbidity, etc. Etc.? Slashed to pieces,
bits of body crawled into bloody, blazing woods.
Next!
Contributors should keep in mind there are mentally
ill people who submit work to this journal.
Eureka!
