I understand, I think, why my manuscript is not getting any traction with potential publishers, despite the fact that a lot of the poems in it have been published in very good literary magazines. For those of you who don't know, most books of poems are published through contests, where the entry fee pays for the publication (and perhaps partly for the distribution) of the book. So, I have been entering my manuscript in contests. I am fortunate that we have the financial resources to pay the fee and absorb the other costs. The manuscript contains about 65 poems and about 25 of them have been published in journals. So far, the manuscript has been summarily dismissed, never making it past the first cut, often being returned even before the deadline for submissions has closed.
The explanation for this distaste is outside of my knowledge, of course. I have no real idea of who is doing the thinking and what he or she is thinking when they take a look at my work and say, "ugh," or "nah". A possible explanation did occur to me, however, and I think it is worth kicking around a bit. I start with an analogy. I have an acquaintance. We haven't seen each other for years. She is extremely bright, a Harvard grad, and, more importantly, an extremely skilled painter. She did not go to art school, but she has spent her life painting. Her paintings are beautiful and skilled. They are representational. She doesn't belong to a school of painting, but, if I had to give her work a name, I would call it post-post-impressionist. If you just glanced at them, you would think that they are not unlike a lot of work that one might see at a craft fair or local art show. In fact, her work far surpasses the stuff where one would instinctively place it, but there it is. That's where she shows. She is not part of the New York or any other art scene. She is an "amateur". She paints beautiful, careful, representational, post-post-impressionist paintings. They are just extremely good.
That's the problem. Now, I don't claim that my work, especially my most recent work, which is what I am really talking about, is on par with this painter's work. Nonetheless, there is something in the analogy. My new work has departed, intentionally, from the kind of post-New York School, post-modern, surrealism, that used to be my trade, and has been making attempts to use very plain, subtly tuned, language, in what often appears to be a confessional mode, i.e. based on personal experience, in a narrative style. Not always, but there's a lot of that. Certainly, at first glance, someone might revolt from the easy rhythms, the use of internal and end rhyme, the first person singular, and dismiss the work as the work of an amateur. I do not, as far as I know, belong to a school. Although, I have an MFA from a good program, it is in fiction, not poetry. Although I read lots and lots of contemporary work in journals and anthologies, more often than not, I am appalled at the lack of musicality, the pretentiousness, and most importantly, the sophomoric thought that passes for profundity. I can see why, in contrast with this work, I seem like an amateur.
In my own defense, I want to say just a few words. One, I am an amateur, I suppose. And gladly. I am outside academia, which, I think, has given me the freedom to write in a way which does not conform to current expectations or taste. Two, given that freedom, I have decided not to hide behind my education and reading, but to try to create substantial work that is not meant to impress anyone, but to get done, what I conceive admittedly, is the work of a poem, that is, carry a "thought" that can only be expressed through the fusion of poetic art (music, diction) with imagination (metaphor, rhetoric). So, what my poems do is meant to look straightforward: I often use form, and I try mightily to let the poem do the work, not me. In other words, I try not to beat the reader over the head with what I call the argumentum of the poem, try not to beat the reader over the head with my erudition or my cleverness, but make something very hard look very easy. I don't want to be part of a movement or a school. I want to write poetry. In fact, I can't help but write poetry. I think there's a lot more than meets the eye in my poems, but easy dismissal may be the price I pay for the path I have chosen. If, at first glance, my work looks like the work of an amateur, I understand.
