I see her image at every turn, between the grinding-stones

[sovay]

1. Yesterday I went out in the pouring rain to visit the Boston Olive Oil Company with sairaali and ratatosk. It turns out that I don't like flavored olive oils very much, but flavored vinegars are the best thing. Especially balsamic vinegars made with figs, or honey, or lavender, or pomegranates and quinces. I sent a text message to derspatchel: "I have drunk about a cup of different vinegars. Astringent but fun." I did not take any home for myself, but I got presents for both of my parents and made mental notes about salads. After we got back, Ratatosk fished for Hestia and Autolycus with a cat toy he had made himself from a lath, string, and paper. He had great success. Some beautiful cresting leaps were observed, especially from Autolycus. Saira provided moral support (and extra hands) while I assembled a Medusa-branched lamp with differently colored plastic shades because our previous pole lamp had pretty much burnt out. Our living room is now much brighter than it has been, with occasional confusing shadows. The cat toy rests beside the television and both cats periodically investigate it, batting at the paper in a hinting sort of way. It's just so much more fun with a person at the other end.

2. Three striking poems I just read in the same issue of Poetry:

Solmaz Sharif, "Persian Letters"
Dunya Mikhail, "My Grandmother's Grave"
Danez Smith, "Dinosaurs in the Hood"

I really do not dislike mainstream poetry at all. It just needs to be the right mainstream.

3. Speaking of poets, I hope very much that this ghost in the frame really is Isaac Rosenberg. nineweaving pointed out that the story sounds like the start of a novel: the retired detective, a lifelong reader of poetry, catches a glimpse of a familiar face in a flicker of century-old film and begins to unravel a mystery . . . Probably this is why I have borrowed my mother's older, broken-backed copy of Josephine Tey's The Daughter of Time (1951), with a 1969 postcard of Richard III still stuck between pages 74 and 75. (Grey-eyed Richard, with the genes for fair hair. If the portrait is accurate, it darkened as he grew out of childhood—so now I imagine him a tow-headed kid, like my husband in thirty-year-old photographs.) But mostly I hope it is true for the poet's sake: to see him alive, even so long after the fact. Rosenberg died on April Fool's Day in 1918. He was twenty-seven. He wrote a never-produced play with Lilith in it. It is not true that film is a better immortality than paintings or poems, but it's not a bad cenotaph.

Comments

[sovay]

However, I will note that such publications as Poetry almost never publish our ilk, i.e. the spec-po crowd (so many to whom I've spoken have just stopped trying to submit to mainstream literary venues altogether, and that's largely been true of me for the past few years, too) and that is the thing about mainstream poetry culture that makes me cross.

No dispute: I see poems all the time in mainstream markets that could have been comfortably published in speculative ones, but I don't know a lot of poets who cross over (either way) and I would like there to be more. I still send work to Poetry, just in case.

[ajodasso.livejournal.com]

Last week, I sent my first submission in almost two full years to them. I used to submit every few months like clockwork; that started in about 2005, but the repeated and resounding rejections got to be a bit too much. I've realized in the years since that no poet I know personally has ever been published there, however, and I know a lot of extremely fine poets. There are other markets I tried quite consistently in that time frame, too, that I just stopped trying with as well: jubilat, Agni, Boston Review, Ploughshares, etc. I have not yet figured out what causes this lack of crossover between those who get published in mainstream markets and those of us who get published in speculative markets, but it's been the #1 constant thorn in my side since I started submitting work and getting published ca. 2004-2005. Part of me suspects it has more to do with academic nepotism than anything else, but then another part of me turns around and says, no, look at the deep academic ties and experience many members of the spec-po crowd have. And then I'm back at square one again and I have a headache.

[sovay]

Part of me suspects it has more to do with academic nepotism than anything else, but then another part of me turns around and says, no, look at the deep academic ties and experience many members of the spec-po crowd have. And then I'm back at square one again and I have a headache.

I'm willing to believe it's partially a matter of different academic ties. I'm trying to think of any speculative poets I know that came out of writing programs rather than other branches of academia and I'm not coming up with any; which may be partly my ignorance, but also proves the point that it's not the dominant mode of the community. I never studied creative writing in college or graduate school. There didn't seem to be any reason to: I was selling stories and poems by my sophomore year, not trying to find my voice. I'm willing to entertain the possibility that I would have been channeled into an entirely different set of professional circles if I had, however, which may or may not have precluded publication with speculative markets, but certainly wouldn't have overlapped.

Ditto the clockwork, by the way; I was sending work to mainstream markets as soon as I was sending work anywhere. The Pedestal was the closest that succeeded. Eventually I chalked it up to a deep, deep divide in tastes and approaches, like playing a punk song at a jazz club, but then I read something in The New Yorker that could have been published in Strange Horizons or Stone Telling and I wonder again.