Solicitations

This past year, I have started to get a whole lot of solicitations for poetry, contributions to anthologies, contests, and invitations to collaborate. These emails seem to come every two months or so. Sometimes these solicitations come from people in the general poetry community like Bruce Covey of Coconut who expressed enthusiam and real knowledge of my work, or a colleague like Nick, an editor extraordinaire (check out Pinoy Poetics if you haven't already) who asked for some poems for a special MiPo edition on AA poetry. More often then not, these invitations come from individuals who have picked up my name from the directory at Poets & Writers, publications like Ginosko or Marlow Weaver's In Our Own Words, or someone who's maybe heard about my work thru NPR. The worst of these are generic chain letters that don't make it past the junk mail radar that don't know the poems of Equivalence from Nutritional Feed, or missives that gush flattery (see "Daily Dharma post"). What they see is a commodity - colored poet, female poet, Chicago poet, collaborative poet, ekphrastic poet, poet who makes visual art, Buddhist poet, poet under 35, political poet, sex-depraved poet, experimental poet, poet that fits my project's demographic and readership. The best of these show an integrity and care for the work. I have started slowing down enough to say, thanks for the invitation but what have you read and what are your aesthetic interests and how is your project interesting or relevant. And I have just plain started saying no. And it feels right - not as in a self-righteous, I'm-too-good-for-you primadonna, but to have discriminating awareness and to see when there is an agenda on the table and to know who you can and cannot work with and to call that for what it is. I thank my early publishers, Jerry and JB, who taught me collaboration, hard work, communication, vision and integrity. I have entered a new phase of my life, a new phase in my artistic practice. When the remaining projects on my computer have finally all made their ways into the world, I will be done with indepedent publishing in poetry. Here's to cooperative publishing. The new rule of thumb is that there are a handful of long-time friends to whom I will continue to say yes, but where new opportunities present themselves, to go on your nerve, recognize and smell bullshit coming like Jane Allen, and to never fear "no."