4/16/2024

You Must Submit: Week 2 of National Poetry Month

We've reached the middle of the month and the first major challenge to momentum. Life gets in the way, our friends are distracted, and the rest of the affairs in our life get their shit together enough to pose a serious threat. There's diminishing returns on that first howling romp into adventure. Eventually your feet hurt on the long walk to paradise. Eventually you run out of songs to keep your spirits up. If you're me, you run out of immediately accessible memories about your breasts to write about.

But we plow on, we find smaller ways to motivate ourselves. We think in terms of days. We try to be less grand and bombastic. One trick I've found? Submit. The added benefit to national poetry month is an increased fervor amongst literary journals and magazines to get work to publish. And we poets just have all these brand new poems rattling around in our cupboards. It's a beautiful symbiosis that keeps one engaged and keeps one's eyes on the ball. But like all second-quarter stimulants, it has its nasty downsides as well.

One of the reasons there's so much joy and pleasure in the first blushes of NaPoWriMo is the way it feels like taking charge. We hopeful poets make this grand descision to write, to commit to this endeavor. We plan and plot and strategize for each day's labor. There's so much to take charge of. There's so much control, and then we ride that high right into the submission process where we...wait to hear back, which can take as long as multiple weeks. It's a brutal contrapasso to the hubris of creation. Congratulations, you little gods of your little notebooks, you benders of metaphor and alphabet, here is your boulder. Here is your pool and apple tree. Here is your canto in the Florentine tapestry of deserving. How dare you. Now sit there and think about what you've done.

Never before have I felt that cruelty as acutely as I did this week when I managed to finish compiling my first full length collection. I toiled over title, I toiled over composition and placement of each poem, some of which I'd written years ago, and then slotted them into place patiently as a carpenter. This was my chair. But, of course, by the time I was done with it I had no remaining sentimental attachment to even the most recent pieces. They became alien and impersonal. They became tetris shapes. They had lost their music.

One of the most enduring references that I've plucked from the ether is from the EDM artist DeadMau5 in the trailer for his Masterclass on Electronic Music. It's during the trailer's more somber section dealing with the frustrations of making EDM. A world-weary DeadMau5 explains how in ProTools: "See, that’s my life right now. Because if I could just play it, I'd play it, but I can't so I have to draw it."

Poems were just blocks of text I chunked and slammed into different gaps in the structure I'd built, like spackle in a riddled drywall. It wasn't until I finished and could step back and see the entire wall that I felt the warm return of a sense of pride at making something. That's my drywall. That's my spackled slab of plaster. And then I sent it off. And waited. And let's be clear, I have no issue with anyone taking any amount of time to read my work. Whatever the outcome of any submission, I could at least rest assured that my work was being read. That's a genuine comfort in this choked air of content.

Incendiary content creator and writer Ben Croshaw once said in a YouTube video that "Releasing videos on YouTube is kind of like throwing messages in bottles out into a churning sea made up entirely of messages in bottles. The chance of your message getting noticed and someone being sent out to rescue is punishingly slim."

And that can be how it feels. It can feel like howling into the void. Normally I feel a kind of comfort in that. I like writing for myself. When I need validation I perform or pepper my girlfriends with whatever poem it is this time. But I have sentimental and contradictory need to make a book. I want something solid. Something real.

One of my friends is a metalworker and sculpture artist. I see her work on social media and immediately feel the positive and negative charges of a uniquely artistic kind of lightning: genuine admiration and bitter envy.

I love seeing the lens through which she interprets the same anxieties of gender and identity and politics and the euphoria of living within one's truth. Their work is also about their transness in the same way my poetry is, but it's bent and blown into metal, into machinery, into solid rust and intractable honesty. Their work takes up space in a room. I want that for my own work, but am forced to take succor from posts like these, that fire off into the ether and disappear into the charnel house of the online. I don't need or want to be famous. I want- I need - to be real. I want to carve my heart onto the world in a way that will outlive me. In a way that won't expire when my domain name does.

And so I want to make a book. And so I must wait. And write. And wait. And submit. I must acknowledge that I have no more power. I must submit.

I must wait.

Yours with an open mouth,

-B