I Gave Myself Too Many Chairs to Draw

Here's yesterday's "Draw Two Panels" strip.

I like the two "drawn" panels (the ones that have appeared previously) enough that I am loath to remove either of them from the deck, even though I could certainly discard either of them now. The warning by "Elspeth Parks" was one of the very first random cards I created for the deck, and I feel like it's trying to tell me that this process has its own built-in pitfalls.

Maybe I'll just keep all four panels from this strip still in the deck.

My Panelists Archive: The Playwright: the Page and the Stanza

The real highlight of my next piece for The Panelists wasn't so much the essay but the comments section, which will go live as an archive here on this blog in about twelve hours. We were doing a week on the work of Eddie Campbell, and I came out of semi-retirement as a comics critic to write this:



As part of our week devoted to the works of Eddie Campbell, I’d like to expand on something Charles noted about The Playwright yesterday, in a way that might help me understand why The Playwright doesn’t, at least to me, really feel like an Eddie Campbell book.

As Charles noted, the original black-and-white serialized version of The Playwright appeared in DeeVee in a different format, the layout of each page working from a three-by-three grid. In Top Shelf’s The Playwright, these nine-panel grids are reformatted one tier (usually three panels) to a page, which shouldn’t seem like a significant alteration. Having only reconstructed the original DeeVee pages in my head, except for the one that Charles posted, I can’t testify to the actual effects of the change. But I think it’s within my purview to offer some speculations.

Eddie Campbell is a master of the nine-panel grid, and his mastery comes chiefly in his sense of timing. The Alec books are full of single-page anecdotes that build to their punchlines with the timing of an expert pub-stool raconteur. Here, for example, Campbell the self-publisher tries to explain to his daughter where the money comes from.



Notice the way the first tier sets up the anecdote and delays its beginning, establishing a casual tone. (And yes, the title panel takes up one of the "beats" in this grid.) This same joke could have been told in four panels with a little condensing, but the newspaper strip isn’t Campbell’s native format, and that’s not his customary pacing.

One of my favorite Campbell nine-panel grids is from The King Canute Crowd, and it’s interesting to me partly because of the ambiguous relationship between its text (in part, an anecdote with a nice punchline) and its images (Alec cleans his glasses and gives a slight smile). But I’m also really interested in the rhythm of this page, the uneven movements of its notional “camera,” the blank panel accompanying the punchline, the way the images are a self-contained unit but the text carries over from the previous pages—all in all, it’s a fascinating little bit of comics timing.



Plus, you have to feel a little nostalgic about the way Campbell “paints” with Zipatone.

Just between the Alec omnibus and From Hell, Campbell has easily eleven hundred pages of nine-panel grids under his belt, and that’s not counting Bacchus or any of his other projects. It’s his favored format, and I’d imagine that by this point in his career, he could spin any event, from removing a splinter to the fall of Rome, into a well-paced page on that grid of regular intervals.

Granted, The Playwright is drawn from Daren White’s script, but I can’t help watching for Campbell’s storytelling rhythm in the book. And in fact I think it’s there, but the current edition obscures it, or overwrites it with another rhythm. In most of the chapters of The Playwright, it’s not hard to reconstruct the original pages as you read, and to see that each set of three tiers holds together in a way that those tiers don’t mesh with the ones before or after them.

The first chapter, for example, is built from two three-tier pages of voyeurism on the bus, a page on the girl with “ever-so-slightly crossed eyes” that our protagonist Mr. Benge once dated, a page of swipes from old erotica (mostly), a page on Uncle Ernie, and a page of Mr. Benge making and serving tea. Each original page has its own subject, and each would serve as what Will Eisner called a “metapanel,” containing its several discrete units in one larger unity. The new edition reconfigures the existing panels into smaller syntactical chunks, and it alters the rhythm of the story.

I know I’m not the first person to draw a comparison between the regular intervals of a comics grid and the regulated stresses and measures of metrical verse. Since I spend a lot of time in my day job thinking about the structures and rhythms of poetry, I tend to think of the comics page as analogous to the stanza in formal verse: a fixed space in which a large or small amount of action can take place, a measured unit against which a number of different rhythms can be deployed.

When the syntax of a poetic sentence runs over from one line to the next, the energy or tension that line break creates is called enjambment, and we could fruitfully think about the ways that comics scenes or story beats can be enjambed not only from tier to tier but from page to page, even when there’s no page turn involved. Many poets (and many cartoonists) will instead use the natural interruption provided by a stanza break (or a page break) to shift locations, conclude sentences, or otherwise divide one unit of meaning from another.

Thinking about it through this analogy to poetry, we could say that the original published version of The Playwright, constructed out of fairly unified pages that attach less strongly to each other, is not a heavily enjambed comic: the energy that pulls us from one page to the next is more a question of narrative than syntax. Creating more divisions within the pages, making each original tier its own new page, changes this somewhat: now, from page to page, we have a varying amount of “syntactical” pull. Sometimes the end of a page marks the end of a thought; sometimes it’s only part of an incomplete thought.

We also lose some effects of layout: the heroic genital endowment of “the actor,” for example, is squarely in the center of its original page (panel five of the nine-panel grid); its daunting omphalic (well, just phallic) centrality no longer dominates the tiers of images before and after it.

And we lose the force of nearly half of Campbell’s (or White’s) punchlines in this new format: if the first tier of what was a three-tier page is now on the left side of the book, its final tier will also be on the left, sharing visual space with the beginning of the next (original) page. That problem is a little difficult to describe, but it’s easy to show you. Here’s an imaginary or reconstructed version of that page of swiped erotica from the first chapter, laid out as I imagine it was in DeeVee:



And here’s the way it now appears in The Playwright.




The vulgar openness of the final panel is, in the original, set against a set of demure and old-fashioned concealments; full-body portraits are abruptly replaced with a close-cropped, partial, and fleshy torso. In the single-tier formatting, however, the punch of that final panel is somewhat diminished. I suppose we could argue that in its new position this panel draws a metaphor to the folds where the book’s two pages meet (an interesting reading that I don’t think I can entirely support). Or we might argue that there’s something gained by juxtaposing the more lurid moments of the playwright’s imaginings with poor domestic Uncle Ernie. In this case, however, I think I miss the set-up and release of the original, and something of its emphasis on the playwright’s chaste repulsion from the biological. In other words, I think the rhetoric of the original layout is stronger.

But that’s not to say that I would call The Playwright in its new edition crucially flawed. I haven’t said anything about the various benefits Campbell is able to wring from handling the story in color. (Robert Stanley Martin has written insightfully about the significance of particular colors; I am also interested in the way that hand-coloring the book’s repeated photocopied panels or enlargements undermines and revises its interest in stasis or repetition.) The new rhythm of the reformatted Playwright just strikes me, I suppose, as less poetic, and more like the prose of a novel or essay. We move from page to page in this book as we would from sentence to sentence in a paragraph. That’s appropriate enough to its subject matter: this is, after all, a sort of a biography, and those don’t generally come in stanzas anyway. I do wish I could read them both side by side to make my choice between them.

Stay tuned for that comments section!

Sonnets on Student Radio (for a Limited Time)

Yesterday my friend Liz and I were on the radio to talk about and read a few sonnets that she and I have been writing, mostly as a game for each other, over the past couple of years.

I think the conversation was pretty entertaining, and I think the sonnets have turned out well. If you'd like to hear the program, I'm pretty sure you can stream it until next Wednesday morning (Oct. 26), when it'll be replaced by the new week's program.

Follow this link, then follow these instructions:

Click on the "stream" button next to the "Proximate Blues / Writers@WRUV" segment of the Wednesday schedule. Once the stream starts running, our interview is about one hour and five minutes (1:05) into the program. It lasts about 45 minutes.

Let me know what you think, if you get a chance to listen to it.

Animal Alphabet: X is for Xenopsylla cheopis

I'm posting this Animal Alphabet entry a day early because I am going to be in the classroom almost all day tomorrow.

Often you have to cheat a little when you get to X. One very popular ABC in our house spells fox backwards to get its X animal. Dr. Seuss just lists a few words you can use x in. Another of our favorite abecedaries basically coins a word from the Greek. And quite a few just resort to words that start with an "x" sound, like "expotition."

My cheat this time is to turn to scientific binomial nomenclature, which is full of Hellenic formulations. There's a horrid species of flower bug, for example, named Xylocoris maculipennis; it's notorious for practicing not merely traumatic insemination but male-to-male traumatic insemination, in which the aggressor's sperm migrate to the testes of the victim. There's also the death-watch beetle, Xestobium rufovillosum, the common name of which refers to the ticking sound it makes by banging its head on old furniture and old timbers.

But if you're going to do up a bug, why not go right to the top of the ladder of nastiness?

It may not be the most lethal animal on earth any more, but this week X is for Xenopsylla cheopis, the oriental rat flea, a.k.a. the plague flea.

(Clicky, enlargey.)



John Donne had no way to know what terrors a flea could really be guilty of. This nasty little guy is a disease vector both for the bubonic plague and for a strain of typhus, and when it carried the Black Death through Europe nearly half of the population died in a four-year period.

I tweaked the anatomy a bit to get the cartoon going, since I didn't just want to reproduce the standard on-its-side-on-a-microscope-slide image that other people have done better than I can. Any overly picky entomologists can have a full refund.

This is hardly the first flea to appear on the Satisfactory Comics blog. We've been "asked," in the past, to draw manga fleas. And Satisfactory Comics #5, of course, featured as its main villain the world-dominator manqué The King of Fleas.

(Maybe one of these days I'll finally post the Kang of Fleas.)

Next week: you wouldn't think you could carry a pouch there...

Animal Alphabet: P is for Pangolin

This week's entry in the Animal Alphabet is "Another armored animal..."




Here's a link to an ARKive video that will show you the funny bipedal walking that Marianne Moore describes in her poem.

The pangolin is the only mammal that is covered with scales.

Real overlapping scales have evolved in four places in the history of life on earth, as far as I know. The most obvious is in a subset of the reptiles (lizards and snakes). The name of that group, the squamates, derives from the Latin word for scale.

Can you tell me the other two groups of animals that have overlapping scales? Both groups are extant, not extinct.

Animal Alphabet: J is for Jerboa

This week's "Animal Alphabet" drawing comes with a fragment of a poem by Marianne Moore, one of my favorite poets.



That's the last couple of stanzas of "The Jerboa," because J is for Jerboa. You can click the pic to make the words legible.

If you have any questions about this critter, I refer you to the Moore poem. It starts on p. 10.

Animal Alphabet: H is for Hoatzin

This week's Animal Alphabet drawing is a little scruffy, but I am so out of practice with inking, and I was so pleased with my pencils on this one, that I decided to stick with a rough drawing (plus a spot of color and a few tweaks) so I wouldn't kill it.

For many years, in my mental collection of near-cryptozoological treasures, H has been for Hoatzin.



The hoatzin is a South American swamp bird, a majestically bemohawked turkey-goose-pigeon of a thing, an awkward, unwieldy flier because it feeds on leaves (and therefore has heavier fuel tanks than those warblers and wrens that eat more energy-dense meals). Apparently it's also smelly enough to have earned "stinkbird" as an alternate nom de plume.



I dig the hairstyle, but the major reason I like the hoatzin is that its chicks have an anatomical anomaly. They are born with small claws—"thumbs" at the wings' last joint and another small "finger" claw at the very point of the wing—that the baby birdies can use to clamber around in the swamp scrub from an early age, before they can fly. (You can see one in action here.) There's a lesson, if you ever needed one, in vertebrate homology.

A few years ago, when I was thinking about writing a sequence of animal-riddle-incantations with obscure answers, I came up with this little rhyme about the hoatzin:

Dragon's feathered mane, or turkey wattle?
Archaeopteryx, or Quetzalcoatl?
(Not much of a singer;
His wing has a finger.)

And really, if you were going to try to split the difference between archaeopteryx and Quetzalcoatl, I'm sure you'd come up with something like the hoatzin. If I could come up with a couple dozen riddles like that, do you think there would be a market for such a book? I figure it'd appeal to a particular sort of nerdling child.

If you do a google image search for "hoatzin chick" you may see a drawing or two in which people seem to have misunderstood the location of the little claws. Let me add my own doodle to that misinformation campaign:



That's not how the claws work...

Animal Alphabet: D is for Dobsonfly

I could have predicted this would happen. I'm so swamped with grading this week that I pretty much have to punt on the Animal Alphabet. Before I could even properly decide between dung beetle and dobsonfly, the deadline is passing...

Fortunately, I have a preliminary sketch-doodle that I can post.



A dobsonfly, in case you don't know, is what a hellgrammite grows up into. The thing that's missing from the preliminary sketch is a sense of scale: for insects, dobsonflies are large, and those pincers the males have are pretty impressive.

And as I was scanning that doodle, I thought, "Where have I seen that before?"

It turns out that my notebook for Spring 1996, early in my grad-school days, is full of drawings of dobsonflies and hellgrammites.



I was working on a poem then, eventually drafted too much under the influence of Hart Crane I think, about water insects.



The diagram of the three arrows represented the three worlds I wanted to describe: the water-strider's transit across the surface of the pond, the metamorphosis of insects like the hellgrammite and the dragonfly, and the hand of the human collector passing down into the underwater world. Or at least that's how I read it now, fifteen years later.



Like most of my old creative efforts, it's a little embarrassing to look at: yet another old failure. But maybe there's something I could learn from those fifteen-year-old notebooks (scribbled by a twenty-four-year-old) if I had a little more tranquillity in which to recollect them. Today, however, I'm back to the grading piles. Poetry (and drawing) is for another day.

Two Poetry Podcasts? I Guess So.

Sorry for the blog silence these last few weeks, folks. It's the end of the semester. Regular posting will probably resume in a week or so.

Meanwhile, here's an odd collection of two poetry podcasts:

One, here, has the audio from a reading I gave last month at the art museum here on campus. (I read with another poet, Abby Paige, who has the second half of the reading.)

Another, here, went out on the radio Thursday morning when my advanced creative writing students took a field trip to the campus radio station to read their poems on-air.

I think they're both pretty pleasant to listen to. My thanks go to Chris Evans, whose "Writers@WRUV" program hosted both the broadcasts and the podcasts.

Guess the Odosketch: Watch It Closely.

While I was preparing for class tonight, it occurred to me that it might be useful for me to sketch a little something.



Bonus points for you if you can tell me what I'm drawing there.

A Link to Click

Nothing major to report, but here's my review of Beth Ann Fennelly's most recent book, Unmentionables. It's a good book. If the review gets you interested, here's a link to a place where you can buy the book itself.

Doodle Penance: "comic freedom poetry"

The week's "Doodle Penance" has to be a solo effort, because Mike has other things on his mind. But I'm going to supplement my little doodle with a few selections from other cartoonists.

That's because when I read this week's search term — "comic freedom poetry" — a little slideshow started in my mind: it was something like "Stereotypical Comics Hippies I Have Seen Outside the Undergrounds," and featured the following images.

First, of course, Chester Williams, a minor character from out of Alan Moore's run on Swamp Thing. Chester's the guy who finds one of Swamp Thing's hallucinogenic tubers in the swamp...



(That's a page drawn by Stan Woch, and collected in A Murder of Crows.)

Chester's a pretty sympathetic guy, even if he's not the smartest or most upright of characters. I'd be willing to argue that you can tell a lot about a cartoonist's outlook from the way he treats his aging hippies. Faded idealism is a vulnerable sort of personality, and some cartoonists won't treat it kindly. Early signs of Frank Miller's cynicism, for example, are obvious in his handling of this all-business peacenik in Ronin.



(You'll probably want to click that to enlarge it.)

And of course you'd know that these hippies belonged to the satirical and grotesque world of early Dan Clowes, even if he hadn't signed the title panel.



All of this leads to my own "freedom poetry" doodle. I'm not sure what this says about me as a cartoonist, though.



Maybe I'm trying to say that freedom really isn't the secret to good poetry?

A Link or Two to Click

Well, check this out: one of my poems that got published in the latest Hayden's Ferry Review is available online. Enjoy.

Also, my review of an excellent book of poems by one of my favorite living poets, Maurice Manning.

Doodle Penance: "my wife is always mad when i leave town."

Here's another "Doodle Penance." This week, someone came to the site looking for information on "my wife is always mad when i leave town." (with a period at the end of the search, just like that) and spent no time at all on the site. Clearly, we need to address this topic.

I think there's a historical figure who would like to address the topic. Yes, you there, in the golden mask?



I don't know. Maybe that's not a convincing rendering of that famous mask. Maybe you'd recognize that fellow better if I showed you a drawing of him by a much better cartoonist?


That's an altered image from Eric Shanower's gorgeous Age of Bronze.

And damn, does Shanower's line make my lettering look sloppy. Ouch.

Or maybe your range of reference extends more to recent filmic
adaptations of ancient myth?




Those don't look so convincing to me. As far as I'm concerned, only one movie Agamemnon stands the test of time.



Now that's the mug of a high king.

Mike, what's your take on this one?

...Well, gosh, Isaac. When I read the search term, I couldn't help being struck by the strong, song-like pulse of its five iambs; I was sure I'd heard it before somewhere. And while its metrical perfection might serve for the first line of a sonnet, the down-home register of the language led me to follow my hunch that its true poetic home lay in an old bluegrass track.

Sure enough, a little online sleuthing confirmed that the line leads off the first verse of the little-known "Homebody Holler," where a henpecked hillbilly sings, smokes, and drinks away his frustration at being cooped up at home in an Appalachian hollow by his needy bride, who can't abide his forays into town. My discovery inspired the following doodle:



I like the dialect touch of "tater bug," referring to the round-bottomed mandolin as pictured in the singer's hands. Yet the rhyme with "shrug" in the last line seems a bit too precious for a genuine bluegrass tune. These doubts compel me to confront a hard question: WHAT'S WRONG WITH THIS PICTURE?

Well, for starters:

1) No mandolin has a neck that long.
2) No hayseed would wear a ten-gallon hat; that's for cowboys.
3) There's no way that jug would still have a cork in it if the pipe is already smoking.
4) About that pipe: do you really believe that a hick like this would have a holder fitted to the end of his corn-cob contraption?
5) That there beard is more Amish than Appalachian. Where's the 'stache?

All these errors cause me to doubt the authenticity of the song itself. I believe I may be the victim of a cruel internet hoax. Well, it wouldn't be the first time.

Highbrow Kirby Character Collage

Not much time today. Maybe my last "Swansea Find" post will come next weekend.

But this floated (electronically) across my desk today, and I thought it was worth taking out of context:



There are two Simon & Kirby heroes, The Fighting American and The Guardian, both of them variations on Captain America. (To me that looks like fanzine art, maybe even traced from a couple of different comics, but not Kirby.) In the background, the Smithsonian Castle, in an old postcard image (printed badly, with seriously off-register color).

The creator of this little collage? This man:



Here's the New York Times article, to provide some context.

Discuss.

Of Droog and Doggerel

It seems only appropriate, after yesterday's post, that I speak to you about the sensational character find of 1975, Droog. According to this encyclopedia page Droog did appear one other time, but thanks to Joe Stinson and Wilkey Wong...

...I've read pretty much his entire history in Marvel Comics.

Apparently, Droog is a mutated dog belonging to the Gremlin, that Soviet son-of-a-supervillain descended from the Gargoyle, who was Hulk's first foe. He looks a lot like a Triceratops, and he talks a lot like Len Wein writing doggerel couplets. Everything that Droog says is in rhyme, and actually it's kind of endearing.


Like most poets, Droog is strong enough to smack the Hulk around.

I love this panel. It hits at least three of my childhood nostalgia centers: dinosaurs, superheroes, and Dr. Seuss.

Seriously, isn't that beautiful? Who needs Stegron?

Writing dialogue for the Hulk around this time was a piece of cake, I'd bet. As long as he got in one "Hulk is the strongest one there is!" per issue -- and maybe "Smashing is what Hulk does best!" -- you'd be all set.

But I imagine it'd get a little dull, which might explain the completely ridiculous Yiddishisms of Sidney E. "Gaffer" Levine elsewhere in the issue (I'll post those later), or the ridiculous smugness of a SHIELD agent named Clay Quartermain. Writing a monster that speaks only in rhyme seems like a nice counterpoint. That's probably what Alan Moore was thinking when he made Etrigan and Alexander Pope speak only in rhyme.

Anyone who has a passing familiarity with the Hulk knows that he's stronger than a sturdy wall, Droog. Are you throwing him at it just to complete your couplet?

No, wait, I'm sorry. I call shenanigans. I don't care whether it fills out the meter of your line nicely, Droog. If there's one thing the Hulk isn't, it's fragile.

And, as it turns out, it's the walls that give way, crumbling around Hulk and Droog. Wein takes the opportunity to turn out a couple of narrative captions filled with quatrains. This leads to a panel that shows three things: smoking rubble, a footnote from the previous panel, and a footnote on the footnote, attributed to none other than Smilin' Stan himself.

Probably Whitman is rotating because he was never much for rhyme himself.

As near as I can gather, after they rise from this rubble, Hulk and Droog get hit with some kind of bomb, and Hulk gets knocked under the surface of the earth. Droog is almost never seen again. I'm not sure what brought him into a single issue of Daughters of the Dragon, or who "Megacephalo," his new master, was.

But I got to thinking: brightly colored dinosaur, talks in rhyme ... Did Droog get some cosmetic surgery in the '90s and resurface with a new and even more friendly identity?


The only way to determine the truth, of course, is to have Barney fight the Hulk. Then we'll see who is the strongest one of all.

Special lettercol bonus: Just for Mike, from this issue's "Green Skin's Grab-Bag":

...And people wonder why we include a letters column in our comics.

Unsplendid News, Everyone

I'm still pretty ridiculously busy, though apparently not as busy as Mike...

... but I have a little news, completely unrelated to Leap Day: I've got a couple of poems in the new issue of Unsplendid, which also has audio of me reading the pieces. Here's to the internet.

I'm sharing virtual page space with my friend Juliana Gray as well as with the poet Charles Martin (who gave a reading at LIU last semester), so I feel like I'm in good company.

And now, please, you may continue your celebrations of the life and accomplishments of Georges Batroc.

Poetry Submission Guidelines

This is a non-comics post, inspired by the stuff that kept me away from comics this weekend.

Some of you may know that, in addition to my other jobs, I am the poetry editor for Confrontation, the literary journal published by Long Island University. I've spent the weekend reading unsolicited poetry manuscripts. I probably sent out two hundred rejection slips between Wednesday and Saturday. Lots of fun, that.

In the hope that this post will occasionally get hit by a googling, would-be-publishing writer of poetry, let me suggest a few guidelines for writing and submitting poems. None of these are hard-and-fast rules, and I can't claim that Confrontation uses them as strong criteria, much less that they are universally applied. However, sticking with these guidelines may get your poems read (instead of simply discarded) by more editors.

The packet:

1. A cover letter is not your autobiography. It's good to write a sentence or two about who you are or what you have done, particularly if that informs your poetry in some way. On the other hand, telling the editor every trivial aspect of your life story only makes you seem like you crave personal attention. We don't care if you take walks with your dog, or if you recently returned from a vacation in Belize.

2. Send only a handful of poems. If you send more than four or five poems, and the first two or three don't interest me, I'm probably not reading to the bottom of the stack. Send only as many as will reasonably fit in your return envelope.

3. Submit to each magazine infrequently. There are a few people who seem to send poems to Confrontation about once a month. Sometimes they send the same poems twice, a few weeks apart. These people get read less carefully than others. Some of them are now getting their work returned unread. My rule of thumb: no more than once a year to any given magazine. But at the very least you must wait until your first submission receives some response.

The poems:

1. Justify left. Some people get the idea (from greeting cards, I think) that poems should be center-justified on the page. It's true that a poem with short lines sometimes uses a left margin that's pretty far from the edge of the page, and it's true that indentations and other typographical devices can deceive the careless eye. But very, very few serious poets have ever centered their lines on the page.

2. Put more than one word on each line. In high school, when I was first learning about poetry, I wrote a "poem" where there was only one syllable per line. (At fifteen I thought that was clever: I could put the line breaks wherever I wanted! And each new line got new emphasis!) Now I realize that the way syntax plays with enjambment is much more graceful when a line gets a chance to build up some sentence-energy before it's broken.*

3. Exclamation points should be used sparingly. Again, it's a question of the varying music of your sentences. Rules of thumb: no more than one exclamation point per poem; no exclamation points except in dialogue; no exclamation point at the end of the poem's last line. You are not Walt Whitman, and even he didn't exclaim everything.

4. Don't graphic-design your poems. I can imagine instances where graphic devices would be necessary, but they're usually used by clumsy amateurs. Clip art on the same page as a poem is a bad idea. Fancy fonts do not make your words any more poetic. Sometimes I get manuscripts in which each poem is in a different font, implying (to my mind) that they were word-processed years apart and have been living on in xerox copies since then: not a sign of careful revision practice.

5. Write about something beyond yourself. I don't mean that you can't appear in your poems. I only mean that the poems really need to have a subject beyond the ordinary events of your day and the private emotions they inspire. Describe something in the exterior world; make claims about some subject beyond you. Use language that exceeds your first conversational impulses. Consider distinct subjects and explore them imaginatively. This is the hardest rule of thumb for me to employ quickly, but it's also the source of the largest number of rejection slips.


All of these rules of thumb are based on years (yeah, yikes: more than a decade) of reading unsolicited poetry manuscripts, and identifying the surest signs of amateurish, crummy, dull, dopey, and laughable work. Any editor has to develop an intuitive rubric for sorting the slush pile: a set of guidelines that will identify work that takes no further consideration. That's what I use these rules of thumb for. They let me identify the poems that won't require more than a couple of seconds of my time.

If you are an aspiring poet who was drawn to this blog post by Google or some other means, and you're feeling discouraged, I have one encouraging rule for you. (I mean, something that will help your poems get better over time.) Though the rule has corollaries, it's essentially simple: read poetry. Read the poetry printed in books and in major magazines that are still way beyond your reach. In particular, read work that is a little bit outside your "comfort zone": something a little harder, a little more obscure, a little antique, a little unfamiliar. Buy a new book of poems every month, and devour what you buy. Write imitations; write responses; write critiques. Living an interesting life will give you good material for poems; reading published poems will help you develop the craft that turns experience into art.



*Before someone calls me on this, I should admit that I have written a poem in which a single word occupies an entire line. The poem is in syllabic meter, and one of the lines in each stanza is seven syllables long; the one-line word in question is Chroococcidiopsis.