Wednesday, July 8, 2009

Easy Green Proof in Telephone

Telephone was definitely the biggest deal poetry magazine I ever got any work in based on cold submission, and to this day I look at "Easy Green Proof" in issue 16 and feel a quiet pride and self-importance granted to me by no other accomplishment. This is not at all to dismiss the pleasure of being published with equal care and effort by people who were friends, or friends of friends, but that element of being personally connected necessarily calls into question the purity of someone I didn't know, in particular Maureen Owen, a great poet in her own right, deciding my work should go into the mix of poems by people I considered real, if rarefied, presences, like Hannah Weiner writing to spirits or Andrei Codrescu.

It took me years to realize that I'd misspelled "harnessed" as "harnassed" and the editors of Telephone had taken my spelling as intrinsic to the poem. And for years after that, that was the only thing I wanted to change about the published version of the poem -- I felt that way about no other work of mine at the time.

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