To my college literary magazine

The BBQ Pit
1

You won’t accept my poem. Fine. Okay. I can accept that. Really. I can. You must know what you’re talking about

Except, wait! You accepted a rhyming, didactic poem that personified each of the various foods in a refigerator.

Oh. My. God.

I fucking conform to your standards as best I can. I submit a poem with FUCKING RELIGIOUS IMAGERY! Okay, I’m not claiming that it’s the next work of Shakespeare. BUT IT IS BETTER THAN THAT SKATA THAT YOU JUST ACCEPTED! My fucking Goddess.

And now, you’re thinking of cutting my story. Fine. Whatever. I don’t give a damn anymore. It’s not as though I’ve been given a valid reason. No, “it’s creepy” is not a valid reason.

This about this for a moment, people. If I can scare you without showing blood, without violence, without saying “he looked like a psychopath,” without a murder, or aliens, or even any real danger, do you then maybe think that my story has some fucking merit? Or did you not get past the fact that gasp religion was NOT portrayed positively in the story?

Goddess.

Maybe I’ll submit one of my other stories to you. I’m thinking the one about the obsessive-compulsive pedophile. You know, the one that got national-fucking-recognition? I’ll submit that one. And I’ll bet you reject it.

Fuck you. Do you know how fucking hard it is to get published outside of a school magazine when you’re 18 years old? I was hoping that I could use your magazine as a springboard. I worked for months on that story. Don’t tell me that it isn’t good. That it doesn’t have value. I know that it does, but now, I don’t know how I’m going to get it published.

You couldn’t even offer any real criticism. I would have loved to have heard something like “I don’t think that your episodes really fit together.” Or “I think that the Elisha story that you worked into the text should be omitted.” Or even, “I think your conflict is forced.” All of those, I would have accepted as valid criticism. But no. You said “It’s too creepy.” Guess what? THAT’S NOT A REASON!

And I really loved the politics of the selection committee, too. The peer pressure. The angling for friends’ work. The absence of objective viewpoints. The throwing around of names. “Oh, I was trying for more of a Frank Stafford thing here.” Guess what, sweetcheeks? I’ve read Frank Stafford. Your work ain’t no Frank Stafford poem. But, oh, if I say that, you’ll all get mad at me. The author is on the senior staff? Well, sorry. The poem still isn’t up to par.

You know what? I give up. I give the fuck up. I’m sick of this shit. I’m not going to spend another three hours trying to convince you that you are fucking clueless. I don’t know how many more times I can say it. I don’t want to have to say, yet again, that just because YOU don’t know who Frida Kahlo is doesn’t mean that the rest of the people on campus are ignorant. IT DOESN’T MAKE THE POEM BAD! (Yes, this actually happened to one of the best poems that was submitted. Some of the people didn’t know who Frida Kahlo was. My-fucking-God).

Fuck you. Your collective talent is NOTHING. I hope you choke on the vomit which you praise as literary masterpiece.

I hope you don’t miss me at your next meeting.

2

Angel -

Don’t let it get to you (so much). And don’t quit. Most college literary magazines (run by students) are quite amateurish, and not taken seriously in the literary world. In my experience, the people who run them are fairly inept and generally self-involved. Don’t beat yourself up over this.

Also, (as I’m sure you are aware) rejection is commonplace in publishing. If you seriously want to be a writer you will undoubtedly receive numerous rejection letters. You will feel the pangs of criticism, both constructive and otherwise, throughout your career. In the highly competive (read: nearly impossible) world of fiction writing, you must have an incredibly strong backbone and be completely unyielding in your perseverance in order to survive. If you let every rejection stir your emotions so passionately you may drive yourself a bit mad and give up on that which is obviously a fundamental part of you. And that would be a shame, cause a writer writes. That’s what s/he does.

Of course, if you believe in the poem, send it elsewhere. Send it to other literary magazines; send it to The New Yorker; send it to other colleges. (Only one bit of advice - include a very clear, concise and well-written cover letter or all will be tossed in the trash.)

Finally, you can build a web-site, post all or some of your work, link it here and ask for genuine criticism. I can’t speak for anyone else, but I’ll read it. And offer any thoughts I may have (hey, they’re few and fleeting, but they’re all I’ve got…).

So good luck and don’t give up.

:):):):slight_smile:

Leander

3

what leander said.

provide a link in Cafe society and you’ll get a far better audience than any wannabe literary magazine.

4

I apologize for showing more interest in this poem than in your own work, but (snort) it sounds like something I MUST read. Could you possibly post excerpts?

And I fully agree that college literary magazine editors are idiots (although they probably did me a favor by teaching me that I wasn’t thick-skinned enough to write fiction).

5

I agree fully, but must speak as a former editor of one of those rags. Most of the submissions are pretty damned amateurish, too. We could tell what year the student was and what he was reading by the style he had adopted and if I’m never again in a meeting in which a poem is described as “Prufrockian” it will be too soon. While it is true that most editors wouldn’t know a good poem if it bit them in the ass, you must realize that they are only rarely exposed to quality work. It shouldn’t be surprising they don’t recognize it.

6

I agree fully, but must speak as a former editor of one of those rags. Most of the submissions are pretty damned amateurish, too. We could tell what year the student was and what he was reading by the style he had adopted and if I’m never again in a meeting in which a poem is described as “Prufrockian” it will be too soon. While it is true that most editors wouldn’t know a good poem if it bit them in the ass, you must realize that they are only rarely exposed to quality work. It shouldn’t be surprising they don’t recognize it.

7

I’d love to, but I don’t currently have a copy of the poem. I’ll see if I can get one. If I can’t…hm…there might be an online version of the magazine this year–or so I hear–so if there is, I’ll post the link in MPSIMS. If there isn’t…I’ll probably post excepts there, anyway.

It is a funny poem. Don’t get me wrong on that. It’s just the kind of thing that strikes any sort of credibility out of the question straight off.

And, for the (long) record, I’m not upset at the idea of being rejected; it’s happened before. And I’m going to continue to write, whether they accept me or not. I just didn’t like having to sit there and watch as they cleaved my work from the (not) superior whole. Inexpertly. With dulled knives and broken scalpels.

I think I need to sleep.

8

Yea, don’t sweat it, we’re all learning a bit.

That said, I’d love to read your creey story. It sounds decent.

9

And I hate to sound negative about about the future of this country, but I wonder if your expectation that most of them ought to know who Frida Kahlo is is on firm ground.

Unless we’re talking about an art school, I would expect the percentage of run-of-the-mill college students to know Frida Kahlo to be small, and the percentage who know anything beyond “wasn’t she an artist?” to be even tinier.

And for what it’s worth: I am no Kahlo fan - wholly aside from her politics, I have always thought she was a surrealist wanna-be. I love Dali; Kahlo, I can do without.

  • Rick
10

(patronizing, eye-rolling, I’ve been through THIS before tone of voice)

And I’m not even going to ask how you liked that Intro to Modern Art class taught by the fiftyish, unreconstructed leftist professor who hit on most of the girls in the class. :wink:

11

As a Never-Gonna-Be writer, I have to tell you that it takes perseverance. Lots of it. I want to win a Hugo. I want to win a Nebula. I want to astound the world with my literary ability and change the face of science fiction.

Right now I’m working on the school newspaper and I have a baggie full of rejection letters from the magazine publishers.

Don’t give up. Don’t let the bastards grind you down. Take their rejection to heart but don’t accept it as gospel. They aren’t the be all, end all of literary criticism in this universe.

That said, I have to tell you that if you want to be published big, you won’t get anywhere starting small. Working for the college mag may springboard you into working for a professional mag but being published there will NEVER persuade someone else to publish you. They get too many submissions to care that you were named Bumfuck Weekly’s author of the month.

12

Excellent point. Remember that Poe got much of his own stuff published because he was the magazine’s editor.

13

::blinks:: I’m not an art major. Really. I’m not. I just…know who she is. I thought it was common knowledge… :o

14

Here’s the deal:

“You better love your work, and the doing. Because what comes after, there’s no guarantees. Sometimes, you get the frosting on the cake. Sometimes you don’t. But if you love the doing and you believe in what you do, it’s OK.”

That’s from David Lynch, talking about how he handled seeing “Mulholland Drive” rejected by ABC. According to the article, he still feels pained by that rejection.

You’d think otherwise. This is, after all, David Lynch. David “EraserheadElephantManFuckin’TWINPEAKSandBLUEVELVET” Lynch. Why he should feel hurt by some dimfucks at a TV NETWORK maybe beyond belief, especially since he was able to turn the show into a movie that’s getting some great publicity.

The point I’m trying to make is, yes, they’re dimbulbs at the literary magazine, and at your age, I would have taken my manuscripts and slunk off with my tail between my legs. Now, older and deadlier, I would stand my ground. Cut my story? Why? Why exactly? What is your point? Not my poem and yet this one? Why?

Maybe it wouldn’t help. Hell, it probably wouldn’t. But I’d feel better fighting over it and beating the bastards at their own game. At least you can go post your poems and ask for advice in “Cafe Society.” Someone did that recently with some posters they created for a Christmas play, and most of the comments were very insightful, far better than I had received in a college “Creative Writing” class.

Anyway, keep fighting for your work, and keep your eye on the main thing, which is the work itself.

15

I completely agree with Fretful. I have a real taste for didactic poetry, and one that actually rhymes and at least nominally addresses food piques my interest.

Sorry, but this is a steaming pile of llama shit. Poetry does not have to be dark, somber, serious, angst-ridden, or somehow directly proceed from the soul of a sensitive artist. Furthermore, I think you are giving the genre of didactic poetry extremely short shrift. I’ll give you a hint: almost all of the surviving didactic poems from the ancient world, when this genre was actually popular, are only nominally about their expressed subjects.

Go ahead, try to convince me that Vergil’s Georgics are really just about farming.

I have a feeling that anyone who writes didactic poetry today has at least some awareness of the great didactic poems of a past. $10 says that the author was thinking of Vergil, Lucretius, and perhaps even Aratus when he/she wrote his magnum opus. Shit, there’s even a hilariously funny Greek piece about fish, called IIRC the Ophaleutica. Guess what? It ain’t really about fish.

Bottom line: if you don’t know shit about the genre or the degree of technical skill it requires to write a didactic poem, don’t be so quick to knock it.

16

Sorry. I oversimplified when I labeled it as merely didactic. It was blatantly didactic. It ended with a couplet that paired “sing a song” with “let’s all get along.” It was funny, yes, but it didn’t really have much merit as a piece.

I’ve written didactic poetry before, and humerous poetry, as well (with varying degrees of non-success). However, stating the moral at the end in neon blazing letters is just something that I’ve learned to be generally not-good. But I’m sorry if I slighted you or Vergil in any way.

17

Well, Maeglin, I haven’t read it any more than you have, but my experience with the genre of “What college students like” would cause me to put my money, were I a betting man, on it being about food in a refrigerator with the requisite “jokes” about rotten food getting up and walking or being a science experiment gone horribly wrong.

I didn’t say you were. Intro classes are often taken as electives by non-majors and my prediction of you having takien it and by whom it was taught was intended to sound like a typical editorial meeting at a similar magazine. I didn’t name the professor because he is an archetype with a different name at every school.

She wasn’t common knowledge in 1935 (and most of her fame was because she married well, not to put her in the class of Yoko Ono :wink: ). She’s less so now. The only people who talk of her today are those on both sides of her being on a stamp.

18

[QUOTE]
*Originally posted by Angel of the Lord *
**

I know you, don’t I? You were one of my freshperson/first-year students, right?

Get a grip. Write for your audience. If I might say it again, write for your audience. You submit a poem about Kahlo to the Paris Review or The New Yorker, but not to the Bumfuck University Ego Booster.

Face it; just because it’s “intellectual” doesn’t mean it doesn’t suck. I spent many years in school learning that. Try to pick it up without 50K in student loans.

(If you take this advice, you have to pay half my loans off. It’s only fair)