Today’s fascinating language note: “cleansing the palette,” which I use here as a jaunty jeu de mots, actually occurs with much more frequency than “cleansing the palate,” even among wine-tasting guides. While I’d like to believe there are folks out there sippin’ Glidden, I think that many have fallen victim to a cruel homophonous joke. I will claim this as just another reason not to drink wine.
This week promises to be a rough one, not only because I’m between sessions (the spring semester ended on Friday, the six-week summer session begins on Monday) but because I plan on trying my own patience. To wit: I took another tour through my poetry and fiction tracking guides to try and get a better sense of where work stands in my circulatory system, and I find myself inclined to let the kite-string unspool. I also find myself inclined to mix metaphors, which is why I’ll be working on a short story today rather than a sonnet.
Last September, with several new poems in hand and several old ones playing out the string, I craftily mixed and matched to put together four renovated batches of submissions. It was a productive strategy–several older poems were happily placed by springtime–but one that will oblige me to be even more crafty next time I mix and match. To make sure my best work is being sent in the best combinations to the best places, I’ll have to assemble a variety of custom batches. That will make work much tougher to track.
Normally that would not be a significant concern, but the jury is still out on the verse I’ve written in the New Year. I have thirteen packets oustanding from those those September mailings, all of which would have to be remixed; twenty packets (seven left pending from January mailings, thirteen from March), however, consist of brand new work, none of which I’ve placed as of yet. Some editors from magazines I admire have kindly sent me near-miss notices, but it’s tough to gauge the relative strength of work and set the bar for my aspirations until I have a sense of how the output from a given season of my writing career is registering in the world. This is especially true given the new directions my work has taken–while my ego is quite healthy, it’s tough to decide if experiments stand to succeed without some concrete indication of their success. Stupid circular reasoning.
Accordingly, while I may send out a few special batches out to journals that do not accept simultaneous submissions over the summer, I think I’m going to sit on my hands and see what happens to those 33 that are already out there in the world. With a little luck I’ll know of their fates by the time September rolls around, and from there–with the palette duly cleansed, and with a better understanding of how those poems relate to the new work I produce over the summer–I should have a clearer sense of What Comes Next.
