The Usual Send-Out

The last two days have brought two rejection slips, one from Blackbird and one from Poetry Center San Jose's caesura literary magazine. I thought my poem "November Elegy" that I wrote for Harvey Birenbaum would be perfect for their current call for submissions on mortality. I've made a decision to stop sending work over to anything affiliated with San Jose State, even though I graduated from there and do appreciate what my MFA program did for me. It's simply become a waste of time, energy, and paper to send my work to their publications, to be honest, and other literary magazines tend to pick my work up eventually. Beating on a closed door is unproductive for me, and I am all about trying to make my life more productive these days. It's like I've gone back to what I was doing before I went there--sending work out, writing every day, going to local literary events, and that suits me just fine for now. I loved that life then, I loved my MFA program also, and I love my life now, too--as the hippies say, "It's all good."

Anyway, I am sending the rejected poems over to Mid-American Review (who read year-round, by the way--it's getting to the time of year when I have to start looking at which literary magazines read in the summer). I do feel that I've been successful with getting two acceptances this year--behind every acceptance seems to be about ten rejection slips, but that really goes with the business of sending work out.

At any rate, it is a most beautiful day at the Ponderosa. I have a bowl of morning glory seeds soaking, to be planted in the morning, and two deer browsed for about an hour in the garden this morning. And so life goes.