Hubristication
Jul. 25th, 2007 11:52 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rinueYesterday, I sent off some submissions to Poetry, as I do from time to time (although this involves year- or month-long thinking about submitting periods). I always feel pretty stupid for doing this, because I'm really just sending fan letters: hey look! I like poems too! I have a rambunctious sense of humor mixed with a critical appreciation for the human condition, much like I imagine you editors do! I don't even want to be published, really; I just want them to like me.
The reason this is stupid is that I'm submitting to a magazine out of some attempt to connect to human beings I admire, in much the same way I comment on livejournals, because I have a personal relationship with Poetry and when I read it, it is only me there, and Ciro, and maybe Chad. It's kind of attainable and cuddly and is a good size for carrying around and I like the line art on the cover. Incidentally, it is also the best funded and maybe best respected poetry magazine in the country, and perhaps the world, with the largest circulation and one of the highest payrates. It launched the Imagist and Objectivist movements, can be thought to have discovered Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams, and was the original publisher of "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock." It receives 90,000 submissions a year, of which it prints 300.
On the one hand, I think, all right, one-in-300 odds, all right, I was accepted to colleges and do very well on standardized tests although being the 99th percentile still wouldn't be enough - I'd have to be 99.7 or so - and some members of that 90,000 are John Updike, Billy Collins, and Albert Goldbarth. This is like conversations I've had about work where at some point, we both simultaneously recall that the other speaker produced The Last Emperor or won the most recent Best Documentary Oscar, whereas I spilled chocolate milk on myself at lunch.
I am never going to be cool, not even if I find the right sunglasses.
The reason this is stupid is that I'm submitting to a magazine out of some attempt to connect to human beings I admire, in much the same way I comment on livejournals, because I have a personal relationship with Poetry and when I read it, it is only me there, and Ciro, and maybe Chad. It's kind of attainable and cuddly and is a good size for carrying around and I like the line art on the cover. Incidentally, it is also the best funded and maybe best respected poetry magazine in the country, and perhaps the world, with the largest circulation and one of the highest payrates. It launched the Imagist and Objectivist movements, can be thought to have discovered Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams, and was the original publisher of "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock." It receives 90,000 submissions a year, of which it prints 300.
On the one hand, I think, all right, one-in-300 odds, all right, I was accepted to colleges and do very well on standardized tests although being the 99th percentile still wouldn't be enough - I'd have to be 99.7 or so - and some members of that 90,000 are John Updike, Billy Collins, and Albert Goldbarth. This is like conversations I've had about work where at some point, we both simultaneously recall that the other speaker produced The Last Emperor or won the most recent Best Documentary Oscar, whereas I spilled chocolate milk on myself at lunch.
I am never going to be cool, not even if I find the right sunglasses.
