3.
In prison I became a writer of poetry and short fiction. One day, all the editors I had sent work to got together and sent me a letter. It said:
Do not send short stories that turn out to be all a dream.
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Do not send stories in which the climax is the gruesome death of the protagonist or her pet.
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Do not send poems featuring birds, feathers, flight or the unbearable lightness of being.
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Don’t send us any poems that crassly exploit nature.
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Do not send poems lacking elevated language.
Do not send poems that are funny but not poetic.
Do not send poems whose accounts of shattered childhoods play on our heartstrings.
Do not send poems that are too agricultural.
Do not send poems about deer in your fields. We don’t want to hear about storks or red-winged
backbirds (see above).
We don’t want to hear about all you have lost.
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Don’t tell us about your captain raping you when you were in the Merchant Marine.
Don’t give us any material that comes from your ugly soul.
No memoir poems featuring drunkenness and debauchery.
No automatic writing or “channeling.â€
No recycled mythology, western or eastern.
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No hate. No excesses of love.
Nothing you would have written for your mother in elementary school.
Nothing from your fucking diary or journal. No diatribes against your ex-wife or husband.
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No poems about your pet, alive or dead.
Nothing praising Jesus, especially: no Jews for Jesus propaganda. Nothing we would find in a
pamphlet in a toilet stall in a Greyhound bus station.
No poems about your travels on Greyhound buses. No poems whatsoever about “looking for
America.â€
No poems about hunks you met on the train and had brief affairs with.
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Do not send us illustrations, especially those of underwear models with six-pack abs, especially
if they are photographs of the hunk you met on the train, who fucked your brains out in your
state room.
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No “Hallmark†sentiments. No fancy fonts, please. No bizarre spacings or other “experimentalâ€
work—we’re no longer in high school.
No poems from high school students. No poems from high school dropouts.
No poems from people who fancy themselves Kerouac or Bukowski. No poems from women who
would like to fuck dead poets.
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No poems with a cover letter that reveals you as a rank amateur, moron, or douche bag.
No poems about your pet, alive or dead.
No poems about your experiences on crack or meth. If you’re not Aldous Huxley, no poems
about your LSD trips, good or bad.
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No poems about your paranoia after smoking too much dope.
No poems bashing your mother or father. No poems bashing your ungrateful children.
Come to think of it, no poems at all. No prose either.
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Keep your lousy writing to yourself.
Please.
Mitchell Krockmalnik Grabois has had over six hundred of his poems and fictions appear in literary magazines in the U.S. and abroad. He has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize for work published in 2012, 2013, and 2014. His novel, ‘Two-Headed Dog’, based on his work as a clinical psychologist in a state hospital, is available for Kindle and Nook, or as a print edition. He lives in Denver.
