My First Publication

I don't submit to as many literary journals as I once did, and I have a variety of reasons for that state of affairs.  The main one is that it costs so much more than it once did to submit.  I know that journals will tell us that they aren't charging much more than the cost of postage, printer ink, and paper, but I can do math, and that's just not true.  They charge 3-5 times more than the cost of postage.  

And yes, I could afford a year's worth of fees, but do I want to spend my money that way?  Just on the slim chance that a poem will appear in a journal?  If my goal is to have readers, I'd have more people see my poem if I published it on Facebook or on this blog.  If my goal is to have my poems in a form where future generations might see it, I might be better off taking all those fees and self-publishing in book form, and then sending that book to as many libraries as possible. 

The odds of publishing have never been great, but before social media, I didn't have the same sense of how many people were submitting to journals.  And most of us are writing work of high caliber; I know, because I often see some of those poems on social media.  Mine are no better, no worse.  How does one catch an editor's eye for inclusion?  I know it's a matter of luck, of timing, of connection.  I might have something to do with that (knowing an editor, having a specific poem that fits a specific topic/form), but it's rare.

One thing that's strange about me is that I like the process of submitting.  I like going through my poems and putting together a packet of poems that speak to each other.  I like remembering the poems I've written and thinking about them as a larger way.

Still, I submit occasionally, especially when it's free, and I've gotten encouragement in the past.  This morning, I submitted a packet of poems to Beloit Poetry Journal.  Long ago, when I was first submitting poems printed on paper and mailed in envelopes, I sent a packet to them, and they published it.  That was in 1997 or so, and I've been submitting regularly since with no luck.  But I submit because it makes me happy to remember that long ago acceptance.

For a lark, I went to the BPJ website to see if my poem is in the archive.  It isn't, but my name is there.  Happily, I could go to my own records to help myself remember the name of the poem, and astonishingly, I still have a copy of the poem, and not just the journal itself (which I do have, but which is in a box packed away and hard to retrieve on a whim).

I do tend to keep everything--it's the grad school training in me, the knowledge of how important manuscripts can be, long after they find "final" form in publication.  So, to close this blog post, here's a copy of one of my first publications, which appeared in Beloit Poetry Journal, in 1997 or 1998 (along with a gentle reminder that the speaker in the poem is not autobiographical--real life Kristin did not feel this way):

Land Mine Treaty


I’d like to have a baby,
but there is no
Cambodian farmer
so desperate for cash and vegetables
that he is willing
to dig up any field
as he hunts for old land mines
or just more land to farm.
No one to plow my acreage,
no one who will risk that
explosion.