Lately, I’ve felt like I don’t read anymore, as if I don’t like books (!). Like I can’t. I tried to jumpstart the process, went and got a library card — something I’ve been neglecting doing for almost a year since I moved halfway across Texas again, since I left the beach.
Do I even like reading poetry?
How can a so-called poet be that guy? Library books, gifts from my brother and my friends over several years, books I bought to research publishers, winners of last year’s contest that I’m applying for now, but don’t hear back from — they all stack up.
Maybe I’m not totally dead inside. I listened to Dante’s whole damn Divine Comedy (finally!) a few months ago. I didn’t really know what it was before, it had just been on that perpetual back burner list of crazy things that everyone should probably read. But it’s a shame not to be able to read it in Italian. The English translations are just the whole of the subject matter, which was insane, incomprehensible, and more worthy of its reputation than you can even image, don’t get me wrong. But it wasn’t really poetry anymore. But the 14,233 lines, my god, the thousands of lines, which are all eleven syllables (supposedly) and rhyme, ABA, BCB, CDC, DED, EFE, etc., ad infinitum. It doesn’t seem possible. I listened to it every night, in the shower, as I fell asleep, then I would back up to whatever I remembered before dying in heaven, swimming in the speeches of Beatrice as the last 33 canticles of paradise ticked away. But it’s a shame. Oh, to live a life just to learn old Italian to try and comprehend the majesty. But I’m already almost a whole year into my online Persian classes with my wonderful and extremely patient teacher https://www.instagram.com/persian_with_ayda/
I’ve been doing a lot of submissions (finally!), but I didn’t listen to the advice that I read, and I just submitted my whole poetry books to several publishers, but none of the single poems have been published before. They kept coming back rejected, of course (in hindsight!). Now, I’m backing up to the very beginning, focusing on one small chapbook (short, 30 pages) collection and looking to try and just publish one single, solitary poem. I attended a lot of Zoom classes and poetry events, but I didn’t like them, mostly. Do I even like other writers? But one time, one solitary day, one person left a comment during the event that a poetry book might have 25-40% of its poems already published singly in journals before being accepted as a book (ideally!).
I read of people who submit poems and books on Submittable.com to over 100 different publishers and journals. I still don’t think I could ever become that person. You see, I’ve worked as a scientist and a medical writer for a long time now. When we write manuscripts, of course they are often rejected by the scientific journals (usually!). The general consensus, at least to me, is that if you’ve already done three submissions, you’ve just got some vein of unrealistic idealism in you, and it’s just time to submit it to the lowest acceptable journal and just publish it somewhere and forget about prestige due to your apparent lack of novelty.
I found this article particularly interesting for anyone like me who’s trying navigate the submission machine while not becoming a submission machine:
https://www.rattle.com/essay-whats-really-wrong-with-poetry-book-contests-by-david-alpaugh/
“Every once in a while, to be sure, an exciting, original book of poetry is selected by this suicidally inefficient process. Unfortunately, when this happens a book that deserves to be widely read is just another dim star lost in the milky way, barely able to shine its light beyond the captive audience that the contest launches into orbit around it.“
Do I write or (at all!) read anymore? I remember my old friend used to say she wasn’t able to enjoy anything anymore, like anything, and I used to think that was crazy, impossible. Used to.
There was a tweet that haunted me, that still haunts me.
I went back to the library instead of the book store, even though I found a wonderful slim poetry book by Pablo Neruda the last time I went to the used book store, and I bought it for a few dollars:
It happens I am tired of being a man
My other friend says she always forces herself to finish the book once she puts it in the stack. Starting it, she commits to finishing it, and invariably does. I have no patience for such things.
At the library, I returned all the (almost completely unread!) poetry books down the return chute with a disappointing clatter. The librarian smiled and only mouthed ‘hello’. I think she remembers giving me my shiny new card a few weeks ago. I doubt she remembers the adamant couple that walked up to the desk during my library card rendering process, proclaiming that there was apparently a cat outside the building, restrained in some manner, allegedly in a cage for unknown reasons, in the hot sun, with no water, and would she, the librarian, please announce over the library loudspeaker (should such a thing exist!) that whomsoever’s cat that was should immediately go and tend to it. After a lengthy discussion about whether or not that was the sort of the thing that the librarian would typically do, without revealing whether or not the library had such a system in place, she sort of looked at her colleague. So the other guy at desk did so, as he was sitting much nearer the intercom microphone, somehow distilling this kerfuffle into an intelligible announcement.
And we waited.
“Announce it again, maybe they didn’t hear you.”
“I’m sure if they were in here, they would have heard me…I’m sorry, there’s nothing else I can do.”
He almost convinced me, too.
Did you know the president of Iran was murdered a few months ago? They (the “they”s, whoever they are) planted a bomb in (only!) his helicopter, of the three helicopters in the party, and they crashed it into smithereens on a remote mountainside in the rain and fog one night. Some poor AP journalist was required to report: “Iran reached out (a phrase which is always your first clue that nonsense follows: ‘reached out’) to America for assistance, but it turned out, there was nothing America could do.”
I’ve no doubt the alleged cat is fine. Ebrahim Raisi is most definitely dead on the mountainside, and he never even made it into my poem about dictators THE DAY WHEN…. Of the adamant felinophile library couple with the thick (eastern European?) accent, I have no news. It turned out there was nothing the library could do.
Still, the library feels like a high and lofty place, without agenda, without prejudice, teaching children (and adults!) the joy of reading. A clean, vibratory place. Shining. Ambivalent but providatory. Like the only place I ever go that’s not trying to swindle you out of a buck or sweet talk you into something.
I looked for weird things in the poetry section and wasn’t disappointed (this time!). It happened that Roland Barthes’ mother died in October of 1977.
Go on.
It happened that Roland Barthes was a writer, and, once a day, or every so often for the next 22 months, he scribbled (in French!) a thought, or a revelation on a note card from October 26, 1977 – June 21, 1978. I was intrigued. Eventually, these were compiled together in a book and, later, translated into English in Mourning Diary.
November 4
Around 6PM: the apartment is warm, clean, well-lit, pleasant. I make it that way, energetically, devotedly (enjoying it bitterly): henceforth and forever I am my own mother.
November 5
Sad afternoon. Shopping. Purchase (frivolity) of a tea cake at the bakery. Taking care of the customer ahead of me, the girl says Voilà. The expression I used when I brought maman something when I was taking care of her. Once, toward the end, half-conscious, she repeated, faintly Voilà (I’m here, a word we used to each other all our lives).
The word spoken by the girl at the bakery brought tears to my eyes. I kept on crying quite a while back in the silent apartment.
Maybe I’ve just become too selective now, and only read dead people, but not dead presidents. Maybe I’m just a snob. They say he was in line to become the next Ayatollah. His blood is on the mountainside, but I’m still wondering why I imagined the library cat as an orange cat, and why no librarian’s assistant ever mentioned Raisi being in mortal danger on the loudspeaker, and whether he succumbed to one of Dante’s 33 Cantos of hell, the pleasant boiling oil, the deeper tortures of deeper unconsciousness where hell becomes frozen over, in impenetrable ice, or whether some saving secret virtue lofted him to some lower drudgery of the 33 Cantos of purgatory, forever running in swift hoards with the emaciated shades of human forms who were too much entranced with the taste of food in life, who can by virtues after death, raise themselves, atone, become, who feel the passage of time in death, or how much of this was allegorical?
Roland’s mom must have been nice: “18 months to mourn a mother, or a father.” Maybe Zahra Marwan will paint a sad French book about him (and his mother!).
Will anyone in today’s world half die, face the middle underworlds, yet return to us to tell the tale in our own modern language, with today’s characters frozen in ice as he approaches the very hairy, calcified, frozen form of the devil himself, munching on Judas Escariot, and relay the whole tale in rhymed eleven-syllable verse?
I have Roland’s (and Dante’s!) delusion or self-assurance, or simple observation:
October 29
In taking these notes, I’m trusting myself to the banality that is in me.
I have recently updated my homepage with descriptions of what I’m working on these days. JAY B HUGHES
What is your experience with submissions, for poetry, or anything else?
JAY B HUGHES Author Page 
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