This is the twenty-fifth
in a series of short essays/reminiscences by a variety of authors and friends
of the press to help mark the quarter century mark of above/ground. See links to the whole series
HOW TO GET PUBLISHED
How do we get published? All of us desperate, aspiring poets want to
know. After a long dry spell, the
question mutates and becomes: what am I doing wrong? Naturally, we want to simplify the business
and say “luck”, or tilt everything the other way and talk about “talent”. The actual complexity of getting creative
efforts out there and into public memory is just too daunting. So, perhaps we should say not “luck” but
“happenstance”, not speak about randomness like a random number generator, but
of continually coming out in the literary environment until we are seen by the
right eyes, handled by the right hands.
It’s circumstance really.
The
circumstances as I remember them went something like this. I did a reading in Toronto many years ago for
Stan Rogal, the inimitable poet, novelist and literary spark plug. The Idler Pub Reading Series on Davenport
Road, I think it was. At the time my
children were still young, and I would write sitting on the couch with them
while the TV blared Thundercats or Transformers. Needless to say, my attention span was
crap. The situation was bound to change
the form of the poems.
Having
been a fan of the legendary John Thompson, a New Brunswick poet who died tragically
in 1976, and especially the ghazals in Stilt
Jack , I began to play with couplets, writing two lines that made some
sense (almost) but not so much when paired with the next couplet. The couplets became ghazals, and the ghazals
became a series. The poems ended up
being “anti-ghazals” both as a nod to Phyllis Webb’s work (see Sunday Water: Thirteen Anti-ghazals; she
seems to have invented the term) and a wincing recognition that no one capable
of reading ghazals in Arabic, Farsi, or Hindi would have acknowledged the
resemblance.
And
I thought those poems would go nowhere.
They were too weird and too few for a book. Except one day much later Stan was talking
with rob mclennan: generous, energetic and brilliant rob mclennan. Stan said something to him about Eric’s
ghazals, which were a decade old by that time, and rob contacted me. Thanks to the incredible underground network
that rob and his above/ground press had developed, the chapbook called Northeast Anti-ghazals found its way
internationally to god knows where. Some
guy in Australia was very complimentary.
It was fantastic.
So,
dear tyros of the internet, all I know is get your arse out there and do
it. It’s about saying ‘yes’ whenever you
reasonably can, about being like the dandelion floating your poems around the
world on the wind (not that your poetry is fluffy of course….. we’re only
talking distribution here). There are
good eyes who will see you. (Like rob
mclennan.) There are great ears who will
hear you. (rob always has his ear to the
ground.) And there is above/ground
press, not just as a place to submit to, but as a model for how to build
superlative, durable and essential networks on a writer-to-writer basis. And there are some damn good poems there.
Thank
you, rob.
Eric Folsom is a poet and a longtime resident of the Kingston
area. He has published four books, most
recently Le Loutre: a Poetry Narrative
with Kingston’s Woodpecker Lane Press.
He also authored Northeast
Anti-ghazals for the celebrated above/ground press. In the summer of 1976
he worked as a bingo caller at a Conklin fairground, refining his poetry skills
by rhyming calls during the games. The unhappy bingo players made him stop.
Folsom is the author of the chapbook Northeast Anti-Ghazals, originally published by above/ground press
in 2005, and reprinted in 2011.
