Wednesday (Sent Submissions) Musings

I sent out 17 hard copy submissions today and submitted 3 online submissions. This brings my grand total to 20. Most of the journals have a 3-4 month turn around, so I’m going to try and put them out of mind for now. Most of the places I sent to I feel good about. I read samples online and in print, so I tried to send certain poems to certain journals. I also try to send to one or two long shots. In a way, this another way to torture myself, but I also think it can’t hurt.

I know that it is impossibly hard to get work accepted. The poetry world is flooded with a lot of mediocre poems but there are also a lot of wonderful, emerging writers out there. I know that out of these 20 submissions, it is a very real possibility that none of them will amount to anything. If that happens, then you send again the next submission period. Persistence is an important part of the battle.
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This is fascinating. I used to live in Texas…

Hundreds, if not thousands, of poetry enthusiasts, cowboys and the downright curious have come to Sul Ross State University for shows in the past, he said.

This troubling at the least. I’ll probably post more about it later this week, but for now here is the link:

But in this new era of lengthening unemployment lines and shrinking university endowments, questions about the importance of the humanities in a complex and technologically demanding world have taken on new urgency. Previous economic downturns have often led to decreased enrollment in the disciplines loosely grouped under the term “humanities” — which generally include languages, literature, the arts, history, cultural studies, philosophy and religion. Many in the field worry that in this current crisis those areas will be hit hardest.