mimsy and outgrabe

There's nothing quite like receiving a response back from a literary magazine to motivate you into sending out more work, regardless of whether or not that letter holds an acceptance or a rejection. Every time I receive back a slim envelope (usually with a printed -- or worse, xeroxed -- rejection slip), it's a reminder that my work isn't out there. And when I check the excel spreadsheet that I keep as a kind of submission log, I'm reminded further that I REALLY don't have any work out there. There's no envelope sitting unopened on an editor's desk. There's no manuscript filed in a cabinet, waiting for some poor graduate student to swing by and slog through the unsolicited submissions. There's nothing but the sound of the air-conditioner rifling through the pages on my desk, and the electrical current humming through my laptop. (Actually, you can't really hear the electrical current humming through my laptop. That was, as we say, a bit of purpl...

The headline for this post sums up this morning's work pretty succinctly. I managed to work out that first stanza, and to come to terms with what will be a fairly bastardized version of the Spenserian stanza. It will have Spenser's stanza shape, and the heptameter last line, along with a slant rhyme -- I'm going to admit that I just don't like true/exact rhyme but that I'm fairly in love with what happens, sonically, when there's internal- and end- slant rhyme. So yeah. That's my deal. Or this poem's deal, anyway . . . until tomorrow, when, most likely, I will reread my work and despair, OR when I struggle with the second stanza and feel myself straining under the weight of this ridiculous challenge I've given myself. I am, however, still fairly buzzing with good feeling over my little "win" of an acceptance from yesterday. I feel lighter for it -- more optimistic. It may be a small thing to some people, but it feels overwhelmingly affirm...