There are certain poems or short stories in a
book-length manuscript that I think of as the orphans. They are difficult to place
on their own in magazines or anthologies. You could send them out twenty times,
and they get rejected in twenty different places. All their poem/story-roommates
have been adopted by different journals, but these guys are still in the literary
orphanage, unable to find a home.
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| An Orphanage. |
This orphan is completely overlooked by every prospective parent who drives up in a fancy Bugatti, wearing an elegant ensemble.
Why? And does this mean you should take the orphans out of your manuscript?
Sometimes the fact that a particular poem or story
can’t get published on its own means that it is not of the same quality as the
rest of the work in a manuscript. Other times, it’s just a matter of luck—a
poem or story needs to be in the right place at the right time in order to get adopted.
Here’s an example. I had an odd poem in my last
full-length book, My Mother and the Ceiling Dancers. The title of the poem was “Terrestial Extra,” and the piece was a bit
of a concrete poem, with a fairly elaborate layout on the page. Most magazines
steer clear of poems like that. Also, it wasn’t very personal. The poem was
speculative, dealing with whether the earth contains all the shapes that life
could assume anywhere in the universe. Not everyone’s cup of tea. Not even a
few magazine editors’ shot of crème de cacao, apparently.
This is where a good book editor can make all the
difference. An experienced editor will either give you the confidence to
believe in a poem or story that hasn’t made it into print, or tell you the hard
news that you’ve got a literary piece of spinach right between your two lower
front teeth and you just have to get rid of it. In the case of “Terrestial
Extra,” my editor, Sammy Greenspan at Kattywompus Press, thought well enough of
the poem that she encouraged me to include it. Thank you, Sammy! Sure enough,
the poem got accepted right before the book appeared, and by a superbly printed
anthology, Overplay/Underdone,
published by Medusa’s Laugh Press, a collection of poems with strong visual
elements. My awkward orphan had found the perfect foster home!
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| My poem "Terrestial Extra" in the anthology Overplay/Underdone |
But good editors are hard to find these days.
Sometimes you feel you have to include a particular orphan in your book because
it would leave an unexplained gap to take it out. Sometimes an orphan does have
to go, if there is not a compelling reason why it belongs with the others in a
collection, and/or it seems to be lowering the bar for that book. I wish I had
five dollars for every poem I’ve written like that, poems that I’ll never
publish. There are many more of them than there are orphans that I end up
leaving in a manuscript after the final cut. Other times, an orphan just needs a
little cleaning up and a new outfit. It has never quite come together the way the
other pieces in the collection did, and it is asking for your help to make it
better.
Sometimes you get lucky with an orphan. An editor
may say to you, “I’ve got some space at the bottom of a column, the magazine is
going to press tomorrow, can you send me a poem?” That’s when I bring in the
orphans. I know I’ve got an editor who is not going to be super choosy, they
will just be happy to have a poem. That’s often the only way that orphans find
a home.
I have to confess a stubborn fondness for those strays,
like the matron at the orphanage who takes a liking to a certain sniffly boy
with a rabbit nose and terrible cowlicks. There is something about their
awkwardness, their inability to even strive for perfection that makes them
compelling to me. At least, when they are my own work.
Other recent posts about writing topics:
How to Get Published: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4
Getting the Most from Your Writing Workshop
How Not to Become a Literary Dropout
Putting Together a Book Manuscript
Working with a Writing Mentor
How to Deliver Your Message
Does the Muse Have a Cell Phone?
Why Write Poetry?
Poetic Forms: Introduction; The Sonnet, The Sestina, The Ghazal, The Tanka
How to Be an American Writer
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