— it was generally miserable, and sometime around 2020 i just stopped caring. i think this was helpful. i basically have a form cover letter, i order my poems in the packet alphabetically by title (rather than than trying to find some perfect order in which they speak to one another, or whatever), and i generally tailor the process to be as quick as possible. most submissions are ultimately declined; my acceptance rate is somewhere between 10-20% most of the time, and so having a perfect package (or not) doesn't seem to make a difference.
i mention this because this week i've started sending out work again, really for the first time in a while. three submissions last sunday to canadian lit mags. last year i think i sent out like six or seven submissions total, & stopped when a magazine took one of my poems (good enough for the year, i thought). in the late 2010s and early 2020s i was pretty disciplined about submissions, & i'm trying to get back to that mindset. a few submissions a month works out to 30-40/year, and at some point, it becomes a numbers game. i've had long stretches of rejection (i remember like 17 or 18 submissions in a row around 2019), but in general, if the work is good enough, some of the poems will eventually find a home somewhere. and they do.
i've started sending work out because i'm trying to get back into the regular cadence of writing and lit mag submission and ms editing and ms submission. for the last year, i've mostly just been doing the first of those. but more and more i've started feeling my age, and being unpublished (from the perspetive of not having a full collection) has been something that's been weighing on me a lot lately, not just because i feel like it's something i need, but because i've lost a bunch of friends in the last half a decade, and i've become acutely aware that it's impossible to know how much time is remaining. i might have another five decades. or i might die in an auto accident, or of a congenital heart defect, like two of my old friends did.
this is longer than i expected; this is more macabre than i expected. what i'm trying to say is that i'm trying to slip back into the discipline of submission, and use that to start improving and sending out my manuscript again. i've said it before, but i think it's good, really good, and maybe this is the year that an editor finally tells me yes.