Last night, babysitting involving an Olsen twins movie. Starring Steve Guttenberg. Weep for me. A little?
***
Stressful days, though as I said to a friend, I'm shedding some of that stress. But I think it's more accurate to say I'm becoming better at compartmentalizing it. Boxing it up.
Still, I'm finding the margins between feeling good and awful, rested and wrecked, shrink. Every other day it seems like I hit a wall at some point and have to drag myself.
***
I declined an acceptance from a good journal. And I kind of feel bad about it. They wanted a poem but only if I agreed to lose 9 lines in the middle. And I just didn't agree with the edits. I've only declined edits twice before: once over a comma and once over a change in tense. Both those journals still wanted the poems in question.
It feels rude, almost, to disagree, like I don't appreciate their interest and attention. But this was the right decision to make, I believe. The poem will find another home.
About Me
- Paul
- Paul Guest is the author of four volumes of poetry and a memoir. His debut, The Resurrection of the Body and the Ruin of the World, was awarded the 2002 New Issues Poetry Prize. His second collection, Notes for My Body Double, was awarded the 2006 Prairie Schooner Book Prize. His third collection, My Index of Slightly Horrifying Knowledge, was published by Ecco Press/HarperCollins in 2008. His fourth collection, Because Everything Is Terrible, was published by Diode Editions. His poems have appeared in Harper's, The Paris Review, Poetry, Tin House, The Kenyon Review, and elsewhere. His memoir, One More Theory About Happiness, was published by Ecco in May 2010 and selected for the Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers Program. The recipient of a 2011 Guggenheim Fellowship and a 2007 Whiting Writers' Award, Guest lives in Charlottesville, Virginia.
6 comments:
Paul, you were right not to compromise. It's YOUR work, and I'll bet a good deal of thought went into those nine lines. They deserve to stay. What was their reason? Space?
Paul:
I agree. I've agreed to two changes as well. Both were because I had way too much poem for what was there.
I have disagreed on several changes as well. It's a matter of what is best fo the poem.
I've been asked several times to rethink small things in poems. It's so amazing to me that some people read poems so closely as to actually have a reaction -- any reaction -- that I've always embraced the calls to revise.
Of course, not always in ways the editors were thinking, which is another conversation entirely.
Me=naive.
I had no idea editors did this. My poems have all been taken as is or rejected as is. Huh.
I kinda love that there are editors out there paying that much attention.
Even if totally wrong.
I've had it happen several times over the years and almost always I've agreed with the editors; the suggestions were usually very smart, very deft. I appreciate the attention.
Just for the record, I want to say that Steve Guttenberg is so under-appreciated.
I bet he would have accepted the edits.
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