Friday, November 13, 2015

Final in His Brutal, His Total, Rejection of It All


Beloved L, former professor, dear friend, mainstay of the late, desperately missed Thursday Night Pints, one of only two people in my lifetime who tell me they genuinely like what I do in tablets and the only person over the years to encourage me to seek to get it published by a non-vanity press, has through loving emotional blackmail coerced me to submit 25 of these to a press accepting submissions for a 2016 Spring chapbook. I haven't submitted anything for publication since before I met Earthgirl. I have an old small cigar box of rejection notices from the late 70s, early 80s, I'm curious what my reaction will be to the one upcoming. The above and below were two of the 25 submitted. You've seen and forgotten them here.

Serendipitously re: top poem, last night someone tweeted Watching an old movie about a gorilla who was turned into a human lady and she turns back into a gorilla when she gets horny and I replied, I think her brother did the same when he had a crush on 99, quite possibly as obscure a Get Smart allusion as I'm capable. See? SEE? My ambition knows no bounds.






  • I'll let you know if I get a form rejection or a personal rejection.
  • Alignment - related to this post, of sorts, though more.
  • Night visitors.
  • All your past lives flashing before your eyes.....
  • L also encourages me to write about my poetry here, as in, why, etc, but don't worry - she hasn't yet emotionally blackmailed me into that yet, and I will resist.
  • Because while I don't have a system - systems are bullshit, yo - and I don't have theories - theories aren't bullshit but they are biased and unreliable - I do have rules, which I love to worry to the exclusion sometimes of anything else and which change by the minute as I need them too. In my poetry too.
  • Into the whirlpool, where matter vanishes.
  • 35.
  • Thomas Pynchon's ancestor wrote the first book banned and burned in America?
  • Bill Knott's rejection slips.
  • This an addendum to bullet below - the musician in the below youtube always makes me think of the musician in the youtube below the not-my poem.
  • My friend's daughter's new portrait of her father put this song in my head!








SELF-PORTRAIT

Robert Creeley

He wants to be
a brutal old man,
an aggressive old man,
as dull, as brutal
as the emptiness around him,

He doesn’t want compromise,   
nor to be ever nice
to anyone. Just mean,
and final in his brutal,
his total, rejection of it all.

He tried the sweet,   
the gentle, the “oh,
let’s hold hands together”
and it was awful,
dull, brutally inconsequential.

Now he’ll stand on
his own dwindling legs.   
His arms, his skin,   
shrink daily. And
he loves, but hates equally.




4 comments:

  1. If the emotional blackmail doesn't lead to emotional letdown, no net harm, it sounds as if L is ace. Even when one is inured to such rejection, it is hard to keep the bitter at bay. I want to wish you luck, to say that I'd purchase that chapbook and genuinely enjoy your contribution, but am wary of feeding the beast. On the other hand, if you were to create your own, I'd still pay moolah for it.

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    1. Thanks for the Kind words. You make three.

      L is the best.

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  2. You have a sale here, as well. Got my pitch for my book past both an agent and an editor last weekend (legit houses both). Full mss being evaluated even as we speak—"very promising" I'm told. I can't stand it. I'm scared. This is the farthest it's gone. Like 3rd base. If I'm thrown out at home I'll be crushed. Worse than form rejection or I don't understand what you're trying to do—because I had the opportunity to meet and explain to both.

    Rejection sucks. I mean really. As does trading fucking Andrelton Simmons.

    All that to say, takes courage to do what you did. Good luck.

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    Replies
    1. Thanks for the Kind.

      Yeah, I remembered you were in process after I posted this morning. Good luck. You're much more invested, if in time alone already put in and contacts already made, than I am.

      L has been urging me to submit this all along - and typed out stuff too (which I still don't want to; those aren't nearly as valued by me as the tablets - sorry for this sentence: I enjoy not know what I'm going to write, how it will turn out, enjoy the risks of possibly fucking up on the very last sentence the first and last draft writing of these). It would be nice to see someone want to print them - I am fairly sure unto almost certain they won't so my disappointment won't be any more than o well - but it'll be nice to not have a stick for L to lovingly beat me with. Or at least this stick.

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