Too many rejections to count! Well, okay, not really, just three—from Barge, The Common, and New South, but they are mounting up. I’m now nine poems and fourteen submissions in the hole. It would have been fifteen, but earlier today I sent off a submission to Anobium, a new journal out of Chicago. I preordered their first issue, which showed up last Friday just in time for me to take it on the road to New York. I liked it, so I sent them five poems that I think (hope?) will fit with their aesthetic.

On the plus side, Constellations will be publishing four of my poems (“Abstraction in Green,” “On Call,” “Homographia,” and “Twelfth Night”) and one very short story (“Speed Reading”). [Note to authorized readers: I’ve added all five pieces to the padlock page.] Since all of those pieces had been rejected umpteen times, it feels nice to get them out of the running. I’ve sent off messages to other journals withdrawing those pieces from consideration. One of the journals had been sitting on “Homographia” for so long, the whole publication apparently outright disintegrated all over it; my message to the email address from which they last wrote me (in 2009, assuring me that though it had been over a year, my poem was still under consideration) bounced, and their web site is MIA.

I’ve got so much to do in so many different directions that I’m finding it nearly impossible to focus long enough to write anything coherent. I have about half of a New York poem drafted, I think, but I have no idea when I’ll be able to sit still long enough to punch it into shape. Last year I used a vacation week over the summer just to write, but this year we’re going to London soon and I can’t really spare the extra time away from work.

If I wanted to write poetry, I focused my efforts on the wrong field of study. All those years frittered away on reading Joyce and Dante when I could have devoted them to the mastery of time, space, and dimension...