Which is to say, for the uninitiated: I love spending time in a sweaty room filled with 30 or so people all on stationary bikes listening to the army-drill-esque shrieks of the instructor telling us to increase our resistance, or pedal faster, or climb the (imaginary) mountain like it’s our only path to salvation.+ And I love the light-headed, dizzying feeling when I step off the bike and back to earth and the way I need to remind myself—when I am still sweaty, when my feet have made solid contact with the gym floor, when I exit the room and head out of the building—that there is a world and a life I need to deal with.

While I honestly enjoy the actual activity of a spin class, I greatly appreciate that while I am there all I can concentrate on is the present moment: pushing my body to pedal faster, increasing my bike’s resistance to support my body as I stand and climb, feeling what it is for so many parts of my body to manage a ridiculous variety of motions at the same time.+ There is no mental space to worry about whether I bought more cat food, or how I will find enough time to grade papers, or when I last updated my to-do list, or whether I’m happy that that poem is—like so much of what I have been writing lately—in long-lined couplets or whether I should try shorter-lined tersets.+ All that matters is that moment of pushing my legs into perfect little circles on the spincycle.+ The rest of the world fades away…

In the strange ways, this gives me hope.+ The fact that there are ways that I can exist purely for the moment—or that my experience of life is entirely in the moment—makes me wonder about the individuality and “of the moment”-ness of what I create.+ Specifically, what I want to get at here is my manuscript.+ To me, it’s this culmination of years and years of writing, revising, building confidence in myself as a writer who can find a readership.+ There is a history for me over my manuscript that places it within a context that I can’t entirely forget.+ No matter how much I numb myself to the types of strange, precious attachment I could have to my work, my mind is still an active timeline on the history of this book and how it came to be.

To a reader in a contest, however, my manuscript is not that different from the sweat-bomb version of me atop the spincycle.+ My work—57 pages, binder clip, stanzas and titles and metaphors all over the place—is absolutely its own beast.+ The context I know is utterly irrelevant.+ There is no intimate understanding of the boundaries or signature marks of my aesthetic range.+ My work is considered a potential book and only has to answer the question of whether or not it is existing well—completely—wholly—as a potential book.+ Just like in the spinning room my task is to climb to the top of a mountain—three times—at the end of an ass-kicking 45 minute workout, my manuscript needs to be solid enough—at the end of my ass-kicking writing process—to rise above the thought that it could be easily rejectable or somehow complete and engaging enough to capture someone’s attention.

Last year, when I sent my manuscript to contests, it was constantly changing.+ The ever-shifting table of contents, title, and page length left my book anything but able to “exist in the moment” as an individual, complete, and whole entity.+ Instead, my book was just the next moment in a string of manifestations.+ Any contest reader could pick up my book and know that it still had holes, had obviously come from something, and was still on its way to another state of existence.+ I sent my work out while it was still vulnerable to serious edits.+ And I would often think to myself, “well, the editor of the press is an expert in this and just needs to know what I’m going for and buy into it enough that he can then do his job” and, well, edit my manuscript into a viable shape.

Now I don’t know the fate of my manuscript in this year’s contests, but I know that I believe in the actual manuscript that exists—the computer file, the binder-clipped collection of papers, the thing I am sending out to way too many contests—as a complete, ready-to-shelf book.+ Without preciousness or needy attachment, I can say that I love my book.+ It’s interesting, engaging, soulful, and chock full of interesting words and sounds.+ I spent a lot of time ordering, re-ordering, thinking, revising, filling in holes.+ I spent a lot of time learning how to believe in myself as a writer who can put together a real, worthy, engaging, interesting book.+ And now, I can absolutely trust that whoever reads my work will find something that is whole and that exists independently of my authorship or someone else’s needs as a reader.+ No matter how my book fares in this year’s contests, I can at least be proud of that.+ And maybe it’s coincidence or divine intervention or luck of the draw, but it happens that many of the judges I know about for this year’s scheduled submissions are straight from my list of “dream judges.”

What about you?+ Does your manuscript exist as a nicely whole entity that someone can read without sensing what else might be there—just beyond the words, the line breaks, the pages?+ How do you feel about what you’re sending off to contests?

October-November is full of book contest/open submission deadlines. More information on the listed prizes can be found on the Poets & Writers website. +Which ones are you submitting to?+ Can you guess where I am sending my work?

• Carnegie Mellon Press (open reading period, $15 reading fee): October 31
• APR/Honickman Prize ($25 fee, Marie Howe will judge): October 31
• Canarium Press (open reading period, no reading fee): October 31
• Hollis Summers Prize/Ohio U Press ($25 fee, judge unknown): October 31
• Elixir Press Poetry Awards ($25 fee, judge unknown): October 31
• Lexi Rudnitsky Prize/Persea Press ($25 fee, judge unknown): October 31
• TS Eliot Prize/Truman State Press ($25 fee, judge unknown): October 31
• Miller Williams Prize/ Arkansas Press ($25 fee, Enid Shomer will judge): October 31
• Bakeless Literary Prize/Greywolf Press ($25 fee, Carl Phillips will judge): November 1
• Walt Whitman Prize/LSU Press ($25 fee, Fanny Howe will judge): November 15
• Nightboat Book Poetry Prize ($25 fee, Kimiko Hahn will judge): November 15
• Perugia Press Poetry Prize ($25 fee, judge unknown): November 15
• Yale Younger Series Prize/Yale Press ($15 fee, Carl Phillips will judge): November 15
• Vassar Miller Prize/U. North Texas Press ($25 fee, Lisa Russ Spaar will judge): November 15

Stephanie Kartapoulous is a guest blogger for 32 Poems can be found on Twitter.

Books at a Charlottesville Bookstore

We welcome a monthy guest post by Stephanie Kartalopoulos. Ms. Kartalopoulos will blog once a month about poetry contest submissions.

Over $400 in poetry book contest submission fees. Somewhere around $50 in postage. Who knows how much in printer ink, reams of paper, time, and my own personal worry?

Though these sound like the normal statistics for any writer who sends her work out into the publishing world, it holds a really specific sort of meaning for me: essentially, it’s the stuff that makes me call myself Contest Girl. To be a bit less opaque: this is the list of things I can remember about last year, my first year sending my first book manuscript out to contests.

To be honest with you, when I was sending out my manuscript last year, I barely knew what I was doing. I knew that I had enough poems that held together in imagery, meaning, and linguistic capacity for me to consider them part of the same book. I knew that I wanted—and could Taste! See! Feel! Imagine!—my very first poetry collection. And I knew that I wanted to send my stuff out to something more than just journals (which is also to say that I was ready for a whole different group of rejection letters). I think, though, that’s really about all I knew. I had a gut instinct that this group of poems somehow, somewhere, would be recognized as being worth the time and effort for someone to publish. So I sent my manuscript—a haphazardly-constructed title, poems ordered according to what my “gut instinct” that week instructed—to contests. Even though I didn’t think it was everything it could be. Not yet. Even though I would shrug my shoulders with anxiety and insecurity whenever I thought about it. Even though each manila envelope I sent out was like entering a strange, unknowable abyss over and over again.

And somehow, I got lucky. Not lucky enough for my book to be on the happy road to publication, but lucky enough to have gotten a couple of semi-finalist nods and for a wide variety of readers to express distinct hope and faith in my work. Lucky enough for me to get some great advice from friends and mentors on the overall shape and feel of my manuscript. And lucky enough to believe that there was something undeniably there for this group of poems. And the more I submitted to contests I was maybe not yet ready to win, the more I came to think about whether my work would fit into a press’s catalogue, what would happen if I changed the order of my poems, what the title of this book really was. It took time, energy, and money, but I emerged from last year with a manuscript I’m now, finally, happy with and don’t mind spending the money on. Contest Girl somehow got a bit of a brain and a good dose of confidence. For this contest year, I really believe in what I am sending out into the contest-universe. It’s not a matter of giving my envelope to the postmaster and saying a brief “I’m sorry” to the contest gods before rushing out of the post office. It is, however, a matter of me sending out each envelope with a bit of a hope and a prayer that whoever reads my manuscript is ready to experience everything that my book has to say.

And this leaves me here: at the start of an entirely new contest season, a fresh ream of printer paper sitting on my desk, and a new box of manila envelopes with addresses already written out. An easy-to-follow Excel spreadsheet with every contest listed, every due date, every dollar I anticipate spending. And what looks, again, like over $400 in submission fees. Maybe $50-75 in postage. Who knows—again—how much in printer ink, reams of paper, time, and reminding myself to get my butt to the post office. What I do know, however, is that I am prepared to tackle every single damn detail associated with this strange abyss of a process.

So, dear readers, navigate this year with me as I schlep my stuff to contests, spend money on my manuscript, and think about the glories and pitfalls of this whole process. This month, I am sending my work to three contests: the Levine Prize (CSU Fresno/Anhinga Press), The Journal AwardThe Journal Award (Ohio State Press), and the Brittingham/Pollack Prizes (U. Wisconsin Press). All have postmark deadlines for the last day of September, and all have a submission fee of $25. What contests are you entering? How do you feel about the manuscript you’re sending out?

“If you read a book on paper, you’re going to be definitely stamped as retro,” Mike Shatzkin of Idea Logical Co. said.

One exception will be print-on-demand.

As for manufacturing new ones [books], well, the traditional press run may be facing extinction, but with print-on-demand technology, “pretty much as long as anybody wants a book they’ll be able to have a book.” Mike Shatzkin at BookExpo America, quoted from The Washington Post

Do you recall the days when people turned their noses up at online magazines? Do you remember when people turned their noses up at print-on-demand (POD)? Now POD is the way of the future. Goodbye, press runs! Authors no longer have to worry about selling out of copies. The whole concept of “first edition” goes out the window.

While I can’t imagine curling up with a child and a Kindle to read Good Night Moon for the 53rd time in two days, I can envision people reading books on electronic devices about 90%, or more, of the time.

What about you? Are you reading more online than on paper these days?

Thanks to Chilihead via the Creative Commons license at flickr for the photo.

$3000 and publication through the University of Nebraska Press for one
book of short fiction and one book of poetry. One runner-up in each
category will receive a $1000 prize.

Dates: Submissions will be accepted between January 15 and March 16,
2009 (postmark)

What to send:
Full manuscript (the author’s name should not appear on the manuscript)
Two cover pages: one listing only the title of the manuscript, and the
other listing the title, author’s name, address, telephone number and
email address.

$25 entry fee payable to Prairie Schooner
SASE for notification of results; all manuscripts will be recycled.
Optional: A self-addressed postage-page postcard for confirmation of
manuscript receipt.

Address:
Prairie Schooner Book Prize Series
Attn: Fiction or Poetry
201 Andrews Hall, PO Box 880334
Lincoln, NE 68588-0334

For more information, please see our website: prairieschooner.unl.edu
or email (replace (at) with @)

Guidelines:

1. Blue Light Press is dedicated to the publication of poetry that is imagistic, inventive, emotionally honest, and pushes the language to a deeper level of insight. We are a collective of poets, and our books are artistically designed.

2. Please note our new address. To enter, send a manuscript of 50 to 80 pages of poetry, typed or printed with a laser or inkjet printer, to:

Diane Frank, Chief Editor
Blue Light Press
1862 – 45th Ave.
San Francisco, CA 94122

3. Submit your manuscript between September 1, 2008 and January 15, 2009.

4. Include a reading fee of $20.00 – check payable to Blue Light Press.

5. Include a self-addressed stamped envelope for results. We must have a SASE to correspond with you. No manuscript will be returned without a SASE.

6. Please do not send manuscripts by registered or certified mail, as this requires a trip to the post office. If you want confirmation of receipt, include a postcard with your manuscript. We are not strict about deadlines – if your manuscript comes a few days late, we will still read it.

7. The winner will be announced in May, 2009. The winning book will go into production in September or October of 2009, depending on our production schedule.

8. Winner will receive 10 copies of the book and a 30% royalty on book sales thereafter. The book will be distributed by Ingram, Amazon.com, any bookstore you suggest, and published in cooperation with our partner, 1st World Library.

9. If you win the contest, you will need to give us your manuscript on disk. Acceptable formats:
IBM – MSWord or RTF (Rich Test Format).
Macintosh – Clarisworks, Quark Express, Word, or RTF (Rich Test Format).

Books by Blue Light Press:

Recent books include poets Alice Rogoff, Stewart Florsheim, Michelle Demers, Stephen Schneider, Leah Shelleda, Nancy Tupper-Ling, Kevin Zepper, Ed Meek, Xue Di, Sarah McKinstry-Brown, Ken McCullough, and Diane Frank. In 2009, look for books by Nancy Berg, Suzanne Niedermeyer, and our new anthology.

Naturally when I saw these lovely covers, I thought of my own book. The 2009 publication date is still a long way off, yet I have not come to a conclusion regarding the cover. I know that WordTech will do a lovely job if I don’t come up with an idea that grabs me. At the same time, it’s important to me to have some input and WordTech is open to that.

Since the book is entitled Midnight Voices, we searched for photos related to dark, midnight, clocks, women and so on. We found lovely photos, yet none of them seemed quite right.

If you are a poet with a published book, what was your involvement with the cover? What led you to decide on a certain idea for a cover? How involved were you in the process?

The postal policies that resulted have helped spur a vibrant political culture in the United States by easing the entry of diverse political viewpoints into a national discourse often dominated by the largest media organizations.

Now, this is all about to change, putting the future of The Nation, along with many other publications, at risk.

Postal regulators have decided to extend special favors to mega-publishers, like Time Warner and Hearst, while unduly burdening smaller and independent magazines with much higher postal rates–The Nation is being saddled with an unexpected increase of $500,000 in annual costs.

This could hurt your favorite local press or publication.

Please sign this petition before April 23rd to help prevent these unfair rate hikes from hurting your favorite small press or publication.

****

Here is the updated NaPoWriMo list of poems. I missed April 15, but I was already 2 poems ahead. I’ve written 20 poems in 18 days. Phew. This is hard.

I was to meet S. at Busboys and Poets (bookstore and restaurant). I arrived a bit early and decided to look around the plentiful poetry section. What poet isn’t amazing by a bookstore with a big poetry section? I was getting elbowed by other people looking at the poetry books. Instead of being annoyed, I was delighted to have competition for the books. Usually, the poetry section is quiet.

S. showed up, and we had a meal of African stew and salad. I felt so holy after that healthy meal, so I had to come home and have one of Husband’s famous egg-turkey-swiss sandwiches to get my cholesterol for the day. Ah, I can feel my veins getting narrow.

After the reading, the stage opened up for other poets. S. read amazing work — poem in the voice of a jukebox anyone? — and a man in the audience invited her to read in Annapolis. Her poems — new and raw from NaPoWriMo no less — removed all of our heads from our necks.

I’ve been a poetry-purchasing fiend as of late. Travels on Saturday took us to Vertigo in College Park, and I picked up a small book of Neruda’s love poems. Saturday evening took us to Border’s Books in Silver Spring, and I purchased yet more Neruda. Sunday took me to Busboys and Poets, and I bought Kim Roberts’ The Kimnama.

April is now, as we know too well, ‘Poetry Month.’ During these 30 days, poets are asked to give interviews, people who never read poetry might be asked to read a poem (gasp!), and the essays on the ‘Death of Poetry’ proliferate.

In these scintillating essays, we often learn the following:

• No one reads poetry
• Poetry presses are going under by the boatload
• Independent bookstores are dying (does not have to do with poetry but we may as well mention it in our essay for filler to add some excitement)
• No one understands poetry
• Poets do not make money

We know people read poetry. Even if it is not poetry that we like, people are reading it. Didn’t 4,000 to 5,000 people recently attend the AWP Conference in Atlanta? You can visit my blogroll and find a bunch of people reading and talking about poetry. Then, you can visit their blogrolls and find more people reading and talking about poetry, but you won’t have time. You really should be writing! So, you can just trust me on this one.

The birth of POD means that poetry presses can flourish. I saw an invitation to local DC Poetry presses for a meet and greet. Oh my, I had no idea that we had so many presses in town. I am listing only the three that I can remember.

VRZHU
Red Morning Press
No Tell Books

Here are some more presses that poets I know have talked about that are not based in DC:

Ghost Road Press
Switchback Books
WordTech — many imprints

Sandra offers reviews and pictures of books from more poetry presses.

Enjoy not reading poetry.

Your friendly blogger,
DA