I sent 4 poems off to the Book Guild
somewhat tongue in cheek as i described them at the time to "look like a bunch of airheads" and
very inappropriate recipients of say the poem Judge [book 101] which was one of four i sent
.. in truth they were probably more focused than i imagined.
I was rather taken aback to receive an email asking for 60 poems on paper and
after a letter questioning why they couldn't get modern and use the web i wrote said 60 or more poems
only to have them rejected. If you have sent m/s off to a publisher maybe you have something similar...
"many thanks for your ... unfortunately .... we wish you blah blah .."
You Do Not Need to be Published .. the copyright is always yours ..
you are reading this and if the subsequent stuff has any merit it will get
whatever recognition is deserving
you may gather from this that i don't believe that financial reward promotes any better or lesser
merit in the resulting work .. large scale projects such as religious propaganda obviously
counter this, however, most artists I would suggest, have lived and died in relative poverty.
From my own perspective i stopped producing art with the notion of financial reward about 3 years ago
and you will see from this m/s that the results are somewhat inconsistent ..
this is because of the perceived limitations required of publishing and time constraints. This was most evident when i was painting ..
where the pictures had to tell some kind of twee story to sell [ we were self publishing the prints then and so
the results were easy to see and the compromises easy to make !!] You might argue that
in prostituting oneself in this way you only have yourself to look to ..
and that is why i have stated and reiterate
You Do Not Need to be Published .. the copyright is always yours ..
same with the paintings ...
Best of luck with your own endeavours.
Karen bookguilder is part of a larger collection of poems by Mike Burr written at the behest of the Book Guild but subsequently rejected by them .