I have become pathetically desperate for any sign of approval from editors. Even the slightest bit of hope sends me into an ephemeral bout of glee. Two words, “evident merit,” can get me gaga, as in my latest rejection from the New Yorker:
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Dear [Wonderful Owl Who Laughs],
We regret that we are unable to use the enclosed material, in spite of its evident merit. Thank you for giving us the opportunity to consider it.
Sincerely,
The Editors
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
If I can’t get an acceptance, at least I can use “evident merit” as an excuse to do a little jig--then trot back to the drawing board. Or in my case, the writing board.
Friday, October 9, 2009
Thursday, October 8, 2009
Wonder Bread Classic White
On the news today, Michelle Obama’s genealogy. Isn’t it wonderful that for the first time ever the national media establishment--radio, television, newspaper--is taking a couple of days to celebrate a First Lady’s heritage. And, hey, isn’t it grand that she turns out to have a white ancestor. Maybe she’s more like us than we thought.
Let's present the story with a gleeful tone, to make sure the world understands how pleased we are to find some Wonder Bread in the mix.
A great sequel would be to go through the genealogies of previous First Ladies and celebrate the ethnic variations in their family trees. Maybe Laura Bush has a black ancestor? Or maybe Hilary Clinton has Cherokee in her blood? While we’re at it, let’s look for gays and lesbians to trot out into the American limelight.
But (shhh!) what we really want to focus on is straight-lace Whiteness. Don't tell anyone.
Let's present the story with a gleeful tone, to make sure the world understands how pleased we are to find some Wonder Bread in the mix.
A great sequel would be to go through the genealogies of previous First Ladies and celebrate the ethnic variations in their family trees. Maybe Laura Bush has a black ancestor? Or maybe Hilary Clinton has Cherokee in her blood? While we’re at it, let’s look for gays and lesbians to trot out into the American limelight.
But (shhh!) what we really want to focus on is straight-lace Whiteness. Don't tell anyone.
Rejection Errata
Whoops! In regards to my last post, I was wrong to state that I have 350 acceptances. I actually have about 350 poems published, which translates into about 120 acceptances.
I've been writing for about eight years, so that means approximately 15 acceptances a year.
That's about right!
OWL
I've been writing for about eight years, so that means approximately 15 acceptances a year.
That's about right!
OWL
Wednesday, October 7, 2009
Rejection
I have at least 4,000 rejections to my name, probably much more. This is based on calculating from my acceptances, which number about 350. I’m sure that I get at least ten rejections for every acceptance. Hence the wonderful revelation that I’ve eaten a mountain of no thank you’s.
You might be thinking, “The poor guy’s been stung bad, what keeps him going?”
Well, there’s the occasional acceptance. It’s kind of like being in a Skinner Box. The rat knows that if it hits the bar enough, a food pellet will eventually come out.
Another purpose, perhaps overriding, is to revel in the authentic. Start with a blank page, fingers on keyboard, and you’re perched to go anywhere. Poetry is writing at its most distilled and intense.
Raw verse can turn your computer screen, or a simple sheet of paper, into a wormhole. You dare the gods to show their face.
There is also a spiritual hitch. Our world is fucked and I have a burning need to address this. Empathy is key to human survival, and the best poetry exudes it.
Perhaps the greatest enemy of a positive fate is that horrible tendency to be macho and hide from feelings. Although I say “macho,” I mean women too. Both women and men need to channel their anger in healing, expressive ways.
Of course, men have the added burden of developing a set of rudimentary skills, such as accepting their tears and just being able to listen and talk about their hearts.
Mostly listen!
Yeah, I’m stereotyping. But stereotypes have their place.
I mean, it really is the case that pigheaded male leadership has brought us to the brink of nuclear annihilation.
We need to have poems about war, and many other kinds of poems too. Poems that express what we are taught to hide. Poems infused with honesty, natural beauty, and sensuous magic.
What is a poem but a way of touching the mystical to exclaim, “I am not wasting my life!”
You might be thinking, “The poor guy’s been stung bad, what keeps him going?”
Well, there’s the occasional acceptance. It’s kind of like being in a Skinner Box. The rat knows that if it hits the bar enough, a food pellet will eventually come out.
Another purpose, perhaps overriding, is to revel in the authentic. Start with a blank page, fingers on keyboard, and you’re perched to go anywhere. Poetry is writing at its most distilled and intense.
Raw verse can turn your computer screen, or a simple sheet of paper, into a wormhole. You dare the gods to show their face.
There is also a spiritual hitch. Our world is fucked and I have a burning need to address this. Empathy is key to human survival, and the best poetry exudes it.
Perhaps the greatest enemy of a positive fate is that horrible tendency to be macho and hide from feelings. Although I say “macho,” I mean women too. Both women and men need to channel their anger in healing, expressive ways.
Of course, men have the added burden of developing a set of rudimentary skills, such as accepting their tears and just being able to listen and talk about their hearts.
Mostly listen!
Yeah, I’m stereotyping. But stereotypes have their place.
I mean, it really is the case that pigheaded male leadership has brought us to the brink of nuclear annihilation.
We need to have poems about war, and many other kinds of poems too. Poems that express what we are taught to hide. Poems infused with honesty, natural beauty, and sensuous magic.
What is a poem but a way of touching the mystical to exclaim, “I am not wasting my life!”
Tuesday, October 6, 2009
Detention for Middle School Kids
In “The Politics of Spite,” Paul Krugman decries the Republican Party’s devolvement to a puerile mentality of lurid attacks, absurd smears, and elephantine blindness. Their current psychology renders them incapable of compromise, unreceptive to reason, and grossly negligent in their poise; for should not leaders serve our country rather than the low pangs of their throne lust?
And yet Republicans would rather cheer Obama’s ‘failure’ to secure the 2012 Olympics than lament the collective loss. They would rather promulgate lies about death panels than unleash themselves from their sordid tether to the moguls of the health industry. They would rather react like tyrannic 8th graders, or as Krugman puts it, display “the emotional maturity of a bratty 13-year-old,” than allow intelligent and cooperative dialogue to lead us out of misery brought on by eight years of W’s weasel-worthy war mongering and general incompetence.
Krugman is right to end by saying that any wise remedy for government deadlock must take into account this current immaturity. What he doesn’t tackle is the presence of a serious lurking risk: that the gimmie gimmie gimmie GOP will suffice as a breeding ground for fascism in all its anti-glory: ignorance, effigies, and tantruming scions of ultimate disgrace.
And yet Republicans would rather cheer Obama’s ‘failure’ to secure the 2012 Olympics than lament the collective loss. They would rather promulgate lies about death panels than unleash themselves from their sordid tether to the moguls of the health industry. They would rather react like tyrannic 8th graders, or as Krugman puts it, display “the emotional maturity of a bratty 13-year-old,” than allow intelligent and cooperative dialogue to lead us out of misery brought on by eight years of W’s weasel-worthy war mongering and general incompetence.
Krugman is right to end by saying that any wise remedy for government deadlock must take into account this current immaturity. What he doesn’t tackle is the presence of a serious lurking risk: that the gimmie gimmie gimmie GOP will suffice as a breeding ground for fascism in all its anti-glory: ignorance, effigies, and tantruming scions of ultimate disgrace.
Monday, October 5, 2009
Poem: After Dusk
Those who immerse in the dark must not neglect the light. The philosophy behind shadow medicine is to embrace a full spectrum of emotions. To be purged by honesty. To go down to be able to go up.
An owl who laughs must also be a hummingbird that shines.
Here is another of my poems recently published in Bolts of Silk:
After Dusk
mauve has gone down
the long roller coaster sprint
of a firefly’s throat.
we are offered a fabric
without spectrum or prism,
dark curtains
drawn on a lavish stage.
nothing left
except hints of lost embers.
glints and glows like magic tips
of an Etch a Sketch
that never paints.
we must do the work ourselves,
filling in the canvas,
guided only by a rare
meteor scar.
what we see, all our dreams,
merely a whimsy of stardust,
clouds of fleshed glitter
kicked up by the hobos in our heads.
that’s night’s secret,
as if we didn’t know—
we wear ourselves,
feel our own secrets,
when we button on the dark.
An owl who laughs must also be a hummingbird that shines.
Here is another of my poems recently published in Bolts of Silk:
After Dusk
mauve has gone down
the long roller coaster sprint
of a firefly’s throat.
we are offered a fabric
without spectrum or prism,
dark curtains
drawn on a lavish stage.
nothing left
except hints of lost embers.
glints and glows like magic tips
of an Etch a Sketch
that never paints.
we must do the work ourselves,
filling in the canvas,
guided only by a rare
meteor scar.
what we see, all our dreams,
merely a whimsy of stardust,
clouds of fleshed glitter
kicked up by the hobos in our heads.
that’s night’s secret,
as if we didn’t know—
we wear ourselves,
feel our own secrets,
when we button on the dark.
Sunday, October 4, 2009
Are You Lady Macbeth?
How do those that embrace justice deal with a climate that privileges deceit and corruption? In the words of Lady Macbeth:
But I remember now
I am in this earthly world,
Where to do harm
Is often laudable, to do good sometime
Accounted dangerous folly.
Act IV, Scene 2
Maybe after billions of decent folks—whether innocent children, naïve idealists, meek samaritans, virtuous teachers, or courageous advocates—are brutally silenced, justice will have a chance to reign.
And yet, you might ask, Is it possible for humans to give up hatred, fanaticism, and bigotry?
OWL replies: If males can be made to accept women as equals, the human mind is malleable enough for grace.
Will they?
But I remember now
I am in this earthly world,
Where to do harm
Is often laudable, to do good sometime
Accounted dangerous folly.
Act IV, Scene 2
Maybe after billions of decent folks—whether innocent children, naïve idealists, meek samaritans, virtuous teachers, or courageous advocates—are brutally silenced, justice will have a chance to reign.
And yet, you might ask, Is it possible for humans to give up hatred, fanaticism, and bigotry?
OWL replies: If males can be made to accept women as equals, the human mind is malleable enough for grace.
Will they?
Saturday, October 3, 2009
Friday, October 2, 2009
A Landscape of Fear
Olivia Judson writes in praise of predators that establish a “landscape of fear.” (New York Times, 9/29/09, “Where Tasty Morsels Fear To Tread”)
Well and good it might be for wolves to help willows by hunting the elks that munch them; or for spiders to plunder the population of grasshoppers down; but there is a serious danger that little Neros of all flavors, including politicians, pundits, sensationalists and advertising marketers, might misconstrue or misuse Judson’s article.
We get such insidious insinuations on the Nature Channel all the time: The animal world is cruelly competitive; so expect human society to be too. It translates into a wonderful plug for corporate capitalism: It’s okay and natural that one company ruthlessly devours another, that employees are callously fired, that profit rapes the environment, and in general that feverish competition sets the benchmark for proper behavior, not justice, civility, kindness or (gasp) conscience.
The horrible perversion comes easily to mind: Judson’s article in hand, brandished like some Holy Grail, a blustery ideologue proclaims in a spew of spittle, “Humans are better off in a landscape of fear!”
And so through sophistry and callous expropriation, a scientific thesis leads us closer to living in hell. A landscape of fear.
The antidote for such demagoguery is reason. It is a fallacy to leap from animal behavior to what is right for humans. For example, “Male lions sometimes kill cubs, so it is okay for human males to kill children.”
You CAN’T blindly craft ethics from the wilds. If you do, you commit a failure of inference. This failure is so common and egregious that it has a special name: the naturalistic fallacy.
Judson’s ostentatious article invites demagogues to commit the naturalistic fallacy.
If you open your mind, you can see through the dark.
OWL
Well and good it might be for wolves to help willows by hunting the elks that munch them; or for spiders to plunder the population of grasshoppers down; but there is a serious danger that little Neros of all flavors, including politicians, pundits, sensationalists and advertising marketers, might misconstrue or misuse Judson’s article.
We get such insidious insinuations on the Nature Channel all the time: The animal world is cruelly competitive; so expect human society to be too. It translates into a wonderful plug for corporate capitalism: It’s okay and natural that one company ruthlessly devours another, that employees are callously fired, that profit rapes the environment, and in general that feverish competition sets the benchmark for proper behavior, not justice, civility, kindness or (gasp) conscience.
The horrible perversion comes easily to mind: Judson’s article in hand, brandished like some Holy Grail, a blustery ideologue proclaims in a spew of spittle, “Humans are better off in a landscape of fear!”
And so through sophistry and callous expropriation, a scientific thesis leads us closer to living in hell. A landscape of fear.
The antidote for such demagoguery is reason. It is a fallacy to leap from animal behavior to what is right for humans. For example, “Male lions sometimes kill cubs, so it is okay for human males to kill children.”
You CAN’T blindly craft ethics from the wilds. If you do, you commit a failure of inference. This failure is so common and egregious that it has a special name: the naturalistic fallacy.
Judson’s ostentatious article invites demagogues to commit the naturalistic fallacy.
If you open your mind, you can see through the dark.
OWL
Thursday, October 1, 2009
Acceptance From Chaffey Review
My poem "L.A. Impressions" was just accepted by Chaffey Review. And so let me break out of my dour norm for a moment to give a big, WOOT!
Despite my spiritual obsession with poetry--five drafts a week and ceaseless edits--I'd probably give it up if it werent' for the rare, "We are delighted ..."
And I'm sure the Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce would be pleased with "L.A. Impressions," and use it as a banner to attract tourists and industry.
Yeah, pleased.
*Dark Laugh*
Despite my spiritual obsession with poetry--five drafts a week and ceaseless edits--I'd probably give it up if it werent' for the rare, "We are delighted ..."
And I'm sure the Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce would be pleased with "L.A. Impressions," and use it as a banner to attract tourists and industry.
Yeah, pleased.
*Dark Laugh*
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