The Life of the Poet

For those who may have read my last post, among them might have been one or two lit mag publishers. They may well have spent last night turning in their sleep over old nightmares of being inundated by scrawled felttip-on-napkin haikus, koans scribbled on Post-It notes with crayon and free verse handblocked onto a toilet roll with a golf pencil.

Creative, possibly. Submissible*, probably not. You must follow publishers' submission guidelines when sending them your work -- and that usually means (at a minimum) typed on good old 8 1/2 by 11. (Or, if you want to save trees -- that's what cloud computing's for!)

Doing so will not "kill" your poem -- that I can almost guarantee (depends on your typing skill, for one thing), any more than a band burning a CD "kills" its recorded music. What I was talking about yesterday was keeping your poem alive for you.

Gone are the days when we had to memorize all our work. Whatever may have been lost in mnemonic ability by "reducing" our poems to writing (a term that's still heard in court sometimes), we gained by not having to depend exclusively on a chain of memorizers to perpetuate them. Fair enough.

But making our own fair copies could help bridge some of that memory-reason-skill gap we sometimes experience from an overabundance of technology. (Sometimes it's just too easy!)

I remember a poem (I wish I could remember by whom) I read in a national magazine a good 20-25 years ago. It dealt with how to make a poem, and it was a dramatic monologue of some ancient bard who had to pluck a goose quill for a pen, milk a snake for some ink and skin (sorry, ladies!) a sheep for parchment. That's how he "made" a poem.

While we don't have to do that any more, it's probably a good thing to remember to put our fair copies on fairly nice paper and use fairly nice pens. (You don't have to spend a lot anymore to get "fair" materials.)

Remember, our fair copies are for us. "What for," you ask? Who knows? They may help keep the poet in us alive.

*submittable? admissible? duh ... .