Creative Antiquities, Part II

I did go and read my old verse, "Dream-mare," in that on-line zine named Surprising Stories (as you may do here: http://surprisingstories.dcwi.com/Dream.htm).

It is a piece of verse I remember feeling quite satisfied with -- and somewhat dissatisfied with. On the one hand, it is, to my mind, a good example of a particular type of verse ... you might call it short dramatic verse, since the dramatic element takes precedence over other aspects. This sort of verse suited some areas of the small press, being the staple especially of the dark fantasy and horror-emphasizing zines.

Back in the 1980s I felt I excelled in writing short poems in which some single element loomed over others, within the confines of rhymed, sometimes idiosyncratically metered verse. Oftentimes the verse in these zines took the form of stilted balladry, in which the sentence structures and the line structures were, for all practical purposes, one and the same. In mine I usually held to a pattern of straight rhymes or slant rhymes, while making every effort to de-emphasize the pattern by means of phrasing. I avoided having the sentences align with the metrical line wherever possible -- which is a practice that allows you to instill a strong sense of closure within the final line of the verse.

That last line is the one place in a verse where the end of the sentence and the end of the line can only fall together.

I remember one editor, in writing to me and accepting a poem or two, saying that he finally understood what I was doing in my poetry. He had just discovered that if he read my poems as if they were spoken colloquially, or conversationally, they suddenly "worked," or "made sense." Previously he had been in the habit, apparently, of pausing at the end of each line. The editor's exact words, of course, escape memory. Yet I do recall the surprise I felt, that this should have represented a leap, for him or her. (As I recall it was a him.)

This Surprising Stories, by the way, seems attractive. I was happy to see the index page -- for it is very much the sort of cover you might have encountered, a quarter-century ago, when you opened a large manila envelope sent by one of the many intrepid editor-publishers of those times. The presentation of the poem is quite nice, too -- with an effective illustration by La Joillette.

Cheers ...

Writing Without Payment

As a human being you house within you the potential to do an infinite amount of work for no payment. As a writer, you tend to realize the potential.

The poetry I mentioned, last posting, provides a nice example. The strange aspect of the matter is that we who felt the urge toward poetry, in earlier Age of Masses decades, put out cash in order to even have the whisper of a chance of publication. Back in that strange time, absolute requisites for the poet included the purchase of paper, envelopes, and, above all, a great many stamps.

Stamps! I feel the great philatelic treasure trove of the Modern Century well might be all the self-addressed, stamped envelopes of the greats, the not-so-greats, and the not-great-at-alls, among the poets and other writers of the generations before mine. Those envelopes would have been postmarked in towns and cities where all the presses, small and large, pursued their own struggling lives; and they would have borne the writers' own names and addresses, typed there by their own fingers. As I did in the 1980s, those writers must have thrown all such ephemera away. The latent philatelist in me would love to hold the envelopes that returned rejections to the late greats. What immense histories would be contained within those slender, emptied confines.

Who knew to what a degree matters would change? The stamped, self-addressed envelope still exists -- but in a time when so many small presses and even professional presses accept electronic submissions, their existence must be under threat.

In recent years I have been in the situation of still writing poetry but not, by and large, sending it out. One element playing into this is the rise of electronic submission. I find it hard to bring myself to commit that act. A part of my soul cries out, "What, no postage costs? Where is the expression of commitment? Where is the demonstration of determination? No wonder the world has gone to the wolves!"

Cheers ...