Joseph.h

Nikita, I’ve been meaning to shoot you a brief comment on your poem in Argot Magazine. Your language in “Anesthesia Blue Ribbon Queen” is fresh and bristly and affecting. I like it a lot! I have to say, too, that it seems to me to be part of an incipient sequence–one that would unfold the context of this harrowing situation. Anyway, just an idea!

Do you know the work of Olena Kalytiak Davis? I think you might find a soul sister in her–not her biography, but in her adventurous voice. You have to be adventurous if you’re a female poet living in Alaska!

Let me tell you what I’ve always done, for what it’s worth. When I feel that the work is solid but maybe not perfect, I go ahead and send it out. (I’m talking journals here, not book editors or agents.) While it’s gone, I focus on other, less solid work. Journals rarely respond in less than 6 weeks, so I get 6 weeks of work done before the rejection arrives. Or worse: the acceptance! When something’s accepted, I immediately notice everything that’s wrong with it. SO … here’s a real example. I had a poem accepted by the South Dakota Review, but I decided I wanted to tweak a couple of lines, which I did and sent the revised poem on to them along with my permission-to-print letter. The editor wrote back to say that he thought the change weakened the poem and that he wanted to use the earlier version. I said ok, of course, because whenever the poem gets collected in a book, I could always update it. But when the poem came out, I saw that the editor had been right: the revised poem was weaker. But I’ve also had it happen the other way: a poem comes out and I cringe: How could I have missed this or that terrible line or phrase? So when you collect it in a book, or submit it to an anthology, you fix it. I say all this to suggest that there is no such thing as perfection! Even after a work appears in print, there is a fluidity, a potentiality, a range of possibilities. If they don’t affect your “finished” work, they’ll find a way to influence your future work. Perpetual improvement! The “finished” works are markers along the path….

One of the best pieces I’ve ever read on the purposes and uses of an ongoing notebook. Also, a fine glimpse into a fine writer’s practice….

https://www.theparisreview.org/letters-essays/7431/revising-one-sentence-lydia-davis

Here’s another “passing strange”* mini-memoir about an unusual corner of the writing life:

“I was offered ten thousand dollars as part of a new award funded by the chairman of Barnes & Noble. But I was not supposed to tell anyone about it.”

Spooky!

*Othello, Act 1, Scene 3

From Nikita:

This article weirdly motivated me to polish and submit a short story for publication, start pitching more, and really dive into a novel I’ve been wanting to work on/compulsively avoiding! We just have to be the best we can and really dig into community like this.