Submission Goals

I don't submit my work enough. I know I should. But I don't. Partly because I have this fear of sending my work out in the world before it's "good enough," before it's mature enough, and readable enough. Partly because in the last three years or so I have been trying to write seriously, I have met too many people who are more eager to publish than to write things that deserve to be published. Often times I am scared that I am becoming one of them. Which, for me, means that I am lacking those critical faculties which would inform me about the quality of my work. So, this is what I tell myself:

It's more important to keep going back to the writing table, than it is to seek publication.

But, then, I know it's equally important to be published, once the work is "good enough." I mean, if Toni Morrison or Pablo Neruda had kept their writings locked up in cute little journals in their reading-room drawers, I wouldn't be who am I today. So, both are equally important. Writing and publishing. I still think, it's extremely harmful for a writer to seek venues to publish one's work before it has matured fully, but once it has, it's important to work for that venue with the same enthusiasm that one has tried to seek within oneself during the process of writing.

Now, there's something that I have realized in the last one month, while working on my chapbook manuscript. Even if I think that a poem is complete now, chances are, I will get back to it, and do major revisions in the near future. In fact, two of the poems that I have been taking up lots of my revisioning time are the ones which were accepted by journals relatively easily. In short, my perceptions of a poem changes over time, and it's important to value that process.

If you're wondering, why am I engaging in this long gourchandrika, let me just get to the point: I am in an aggressive submission mode right now. My goal is to submit five of my poems to ten venues before the end of this month.