Submitting Poems for Publication (Not)

Even though I have written hundreds of "poems" and published many or most of them on a Google blog, I have always been reluctant to submit them to magazines or book publishers.

I've been discussing this issue with my therapist for years.

While there's an undeniable sour-grapes factor, what it comes down to is mainly disinclination (laziness and ineptitude) and a sense of futility: I don't believe in my heart that I would be successful.

I'm also pretty sure that no amount of success would be satisfying and worth the effort--there's the sour grapes factor.

I felt very much the same thirty-some years ago when I was working on my vita and sending job applications to colleges and universities in hopes of getting interviews at the MLA convention.

It's interesting to think of the different capabilities required by the different activities associated with writing.

Composition itself is a bit like puzzle solving--something done alone by oneself.

Editing is partly an extension of composition: you review a piece by saying it to yourself, and when you don't like a line or phrase you rewrite it. 

The other part of editing is fixing mistakes and inconsistencies and trying to improve readability by changing punctuation or typography, which is a different brain process entirely.

Submitting is a process that, like applying for academic jobs, requires belonging to a community from which you learn the standards applied in selecting candidates, and such community-belonging requires actually being a reader of poetry magazines and books of contemporary poetry. 

From my teenage years I have hardly followed the contemporary poetry scene at all, and I have never been a much of a poetry reader, except, when I was younger, of the classics - Shakespeare, Milton, Blake, Keats, Yeats, Eliot, Williams, and so on - partly out of obligation, and partly for enjoyment.

That I have a PhD in English is a not-so-marvelous anomaly.

To publish my work, I would have to "learn the market" by reading magazines and books, but the poetry I would try to publish has already been created in nearly complete ignorance of the market, so that suddenly to orient myself towards a market would seem cynical - and probably also futile, as I am seventy-three years old and don't have much time left.

I want the remainder of my life to be joyful, not full of frustrating and probably futile tasks that I'm ill-suited for.