¡Bemsha SWING!

3 jun 2005

Another thought on publication and rejection (I have a lot of poems out there circulating right now and I had a weird dream about it last night.): it might take a few batches of poems to get the editor to warm up to your "voice." If you really feel you are right for a journal, but the editor has not warmed up to you, try again. Don't overdo it though. I'd recommend a journal where you think you might be read by the same one or three people every time, as opposed to one that uses screening by MFA students.

This does not apply to the poet who doesn't even know his or her work is truly crappy, and submits over and over again.

6 comentarios:

Anthony Robinson dijo...: Jonathan,

I think this is very very very true, both as an editor and as a poet.

I've had success publishing in magazines with one or two editors to whom I'd maybe submitted half a dozen times. Most of the time, I'd received a nice rejection, or some sort of encouragement, so I continued to submit until finally the editor found something he or she liked. This has happened with many journals over the years and it's always gratifying to teach someone to read your work over the months or years. Or maybe I'm being too generous with myself.

But, as an editor, I can vouch that this is often the case. Persistent poets (and those with talent as well) often end up in the pages of the Northwest Review, for example. Of course, there are the truly crappy persistent poets who get a lot of rejection slips but who are not deterred.; 8:47 p. m.
Jonathan dijo...: I used to help edit a journal as a student and Lyn Lifshin (spelling?) would just literally wear us down. You had to eventually take some of her poems. She had just the right combination of persistence and competence.; 9:02 p. m.
shanna dijo...: ah ha--so that's how she does it! :) (& thanks for adding me.); 4:53 a. m.
Steven D. Schroeder dijo...: Yes, Lifshin does that to everyone. She actually hasn't submitted to my journal since I took over, but we had published her previously, and we got a submission from her when I was a reader.

I agree about the strategy, but don't don't don't overdo it if the editor isn't encouraging you. I actually told one person to stop submitting last year. I'd get a new submission a week after I sent a rejection on the old.; 9:52 p. m.
Anthony Robinson dijo...: Sometimes we get Lifshin submissions two or three days apart...; 4:15 p. m.
Jonathan dijo...: --

You mean she's still doing this?! She must have submitted and pubished thousands of poems. I wouldn't recommend the saturation bombing approach.; 5:32 p. m.

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Blurbs & Reviews

"Jonathan Mayhew’s new work belongs to a certain class of surprising books: those so obviously necessary once they appear that it apparently required a stroke of genius to come up with the idea for them."

--Daniel Katz

"Jonathan Mayhew's Lorca is less the distinctive Spanish poet, whose murder in 1936 marked the beginning of the Civil War, than he is an American invention. From the 1940s to the end of the century, our poets have invoked Lorca-in translation, of course-as a Romantic, exotic, radical, and, in many cases, gay icon-the poet of mystery and the duende. The Lorca myth, Mayhew argues persuasively, has enriched American lyric, but it has also been an obstacle to a more adequately grounded understanding of Spanish poetry in the 20th century. Apocryphal Lorca is revisionist criticism at its most acute."

-Marjorie Perloff

"Enhanced by copious notes and an excellent bibliography, this book offers a perceptive, intriguing assessment of the Garcia Lorca created by the postwar generation of American poets." (Choice )

"Mayhew is a critic who is at the top of his game; he combines a breadth of knowlege of the field with acute analysis."

--John C. Wilcox, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

"Let me just cut through all the usual, boring book review preliminaries and say the following thing: Jonathan Mayhew has, in Apocryphal Lorca, written an amazing book. "

--Brandon Holmquest, Calque

"The great merit of Mayhew's study is his sustained effort to document and interrogate Lorca's reception, unique among American encounters with foreign literatures in its nature and extent."

--Lawrence Venuti, TLS.

"Se trata de Jonathan Mayhew y su extraordinario estudio Apocryphal Lorca. Translation, Parody, Kitsch. Esta obra se ocupa no de García Lorca sino de cómo los escritores estadounidenses han reinventado a Lorca, desde Spicer y Rothenberg hasta O’Hara y Koch. Asimismo, es una discusión de la Deep Image —¡cuánto hay que desmenuzar de ese capítulo!— y la manera en que la poética norteamericana se ha apropiado de lo lorqueano (o lorcaesco) y del concepto de lo 'otro' que éste representa. Éste es un libro repleto de sutilezas, de tesis, apuntes, datos."

--Heriberto Yépez

"Apocryphal Lorca, sin embargo, es mucho más que un estudio de las vidas posteriores de Lorca en la poesía americana entre principios de los años 50 y 70. También ofrece un acercamiento histórico a la traducción de su obra, descubriendo reseñas de prensa significativas y discurriendo acerca de reconocimientos críticos. El texto es elegante y fresco; el análisis amplio e históricamente específico."

--María Delgado, Revista de Literatura

¡Bemsha SWING!

3 jun 2005

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