February’s a brink month, isn’t it? Spring is officially coming, and we will have a few days between now and then that remind us of that. C’mon, spring!
So far this winter (winter, gross!) I have submitted to 40 literary journals and contests.
Yesterday alone, I submitted to four.
Is Word Raccoon, my writing pal, happy with this? No. She wants all the poems everywhere all at once. She asks me if I even know what month this is? It’s love month, which means the world is especially in need of poetry. Her poetry, specifically, she says.
Egotistical (cookie) monster.
She wants to decorate cookies with poems.
She wants to write them on fortune cookie slips and tuck them inside as many of the treats as she can.
She wants to tag every wall with a spray painted poem. (I’m not going to let her!)
That’s why she has me. I try to confine her to the page and revise, revise, revise to get her to calm the eff down. I want to say I’m doing okay at that Herculean task, but I’m not at all convinced that I am.
This week she is saying thank you, no thank you (a polite phrase we learned in Buenos Aires instead of just no thanks) to my meddling, to anything but poetry.
She’s still sorting poems like she’s going through her toy chest and tossing things over her shoulder in vague piles: you, here, you, there.
Right now she’s just shuttling them to the right chapbook/book or leaving them to percolate or, sometimes, telling them they’re not a poem at all but an undigested bit of beef. (I think she’s used that particular Dickensian bit before, but she doesn’t care. She will use it as many times as she pleases, she says.)
You know she will.
She sorted the poems. Didn’t revise yet.
She sloppily lined her lips with red and identified another likely collection that is called, for classification purposes only, “Small Town Punk Rock.” As you can imagine, it’s all the smart-assed poems: WR, pulling on her boots and fingerless gloves.
Without these categories, I’d get whiplash looking at her work. She sent out a packet of some of the more fun poems last night. She immediately approves of any poems with Cheetos or birbs in them.
She’s impossible.
Impossibly fun, she adds.
Send caffeine. And chocolate. We have a lot more poems to wade through. And maybe she will even deign to revise a few?
dremadrudge.com 