Gorilla Out of Shoulder Blades

In the literary genre, there are better and lesser credits, just as in journalism. The brand name credits have always alluded me, sometimes by a nose. APR hexed me as an undergraduate, handwriting a precious consolation note beneath its then 1983 standard rejection slip: "sorry to say no!". Even as a student I was baffled. WTF did it mean? I have supported APR intermittently, and would and shall continue to do so, with the luxury of resource, even if I never get a slice of their space, but like Kenyon, APR is a status brand; in marketing terms, I have few of these, the best being a minority anthology out of Pittsburgh, another fallow destitute period where I abused the young man who accepted me in it-- and yet, even today, simply by taking blind aim, I wind up in the laps of African American scholars who see my suffering as a corresponding voice to their historical memory: I had the gall, if you like, to ask one of these if she might consider writing a forward to my long tortured poetry manuscript, the strongest of them. "I am not sure I am the right person," she wrote, but if I do trouble her with it, why does such hypocrisy offer momentary glee? My psyche is far more interesting than that of Lee Doty's nurse (to pick an old scab).

I make the damnest effort to stay away from lesser known student journals, precisely because of the scaffold of credits I do have, but this is because of a towering giant who is no more. Len was truly independent, and he never humiliated me as did the Poets and Writers community, but I am caught with my zipper painfully pinching my crotch: I am too established not to ignore a great deal of what Allison transmits and writing magazines advertise, but cannot limit myself to APR and the Atlantic, creatively, and expect to survive. I am even less as a freelance journalist, but face nearly the same difficulty in getting commissioned for content. The digital world imploded an already wobbly pay for play patronage system: It killed Len's singular loyalty driven Small Press Review. I miss what the man meant to me.