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Sunday, January 22, 2012

Poet Stalker

I have a confession to make: I am a poet stalker. There's this poet whose manuscript showed up multiple times as a finalist on the same lists as mine. We placed our manuscripts within days of one another. I started noticing his poems in many of the journals my poems appeared in. Then, when scoping out journals to see if they would be a good fit for my work (yes, I know it's supposed to be the other way around, but honestly that's how I think when I'm scoping), I would often happen across journals he had already published in, and then I would try them, thinking that maybe if they like him, they'll like me. That has resulted in a 100% acceptance rate in that subgroup of lit mags (that is, any journal that has previously published him and that I subsequently submitted to has, up until and including now, accepted the work I sent them).

Now I find myself watching for places he publishes, and targeting those journals based largely on his acceptances. I am a poet stalker! I scare myself a little bit! I bet it would scare him if he knew!

Do you do this? Or am I as crazy as I think I might be?

5 comments:

Mari said...

Sounds like a good strategy to me. Not so different from reading lit mags to see whom they publish and if that work is aligned with your own aesthetic.

I'd love to read more about your life in Kobe, when you're feeling inclined...

Jessica Goodfellow said...

I'll try to write more about life in Kobe. When I first moved here, i used to email my grandmother every day, and I told her stories about how Japanese thimbles are different from the thimbles I'd grown up with, and how I was asked to cut an apple into 48 identical pieces in order to share a single apple with everyone present at a luncheon, and all kinds of stories like that. But I've been here long enough that it's just my life, and I don't really notice how different it is. So I will have to concentrate to find interesting things to write about. But I'll try.

Mari said...

It may feel commonplace for you, but for your readers outside of Japan, not so. : )

Anonymous said...

Stalking? Not sure. Brilliant? Definitely.

Jessica Goodfellow said...

Hi Danny Earl Simmons, Thanks for checking out my blog. Glad you don't find this to be a case of stalking; I wouldn't want to be that creepy, but I worry....