done to death

I spent some more time over the weekend with the hunger palace, the part of the FEED manuscript most in need of work.  Also the part I've yet to spend any effort in trying to submit it's individual parts and would like to soon.  One hand, the piece as a whole might need to be taken in as a whole, which eventually as a zine project it will be. Probably later this year, complete with the images I created to go with them.  But also we're dealing with the weird discomfort I feel over submitting pieces that are a) more personal than usual and b) leaden with a whole lot of baggage. Also, while their partially about mothers and daughters and food disorders, they are also about death, which always makes me feel like I'm treading a line between art and cliche. Death, as I always say, having been done to death.

But I'd like to get them out there a little. And I am determined to fulfill my 100 rejections plan, which of course means, at the very least, I need to send out 100 submissions to get rejected.  I've done a bit of tightening and minor edits, but I'm still stuck on pulling out some parts and general ordering. As a whole, they are definitely more essayistic than poetic. Which of course leaves me looking for journals who publish that sort of work. I have series of post-its in my sketchbook of places I'd like to hit up this year, but it sometimes seems you blink and 100 new journals appear, while another 100 disappear or cease publication.

I do like the ways that the more essay-like pieces in the mix with the prose poems in the larger manuscript, so I think they work well there.  Just on their own I'm not quite sure what to do with them.  Last year, when I finished them, they were too raw.  I felt kind of resentful, in advance, of putting them out in the world and them facing rejection.  It didn't seem to matter, whether or not editors responded to them--mostly since I needed to write them regardless.   Or more that I gave no fucks on whether anyone else would like them, only that I had written them.  With time, it's softened a little, and the tweaks I've made to them make them smoother and stronger as prose.  And I guess if I am aiming for rejections anyway--they might be the very thing to help get me to my goal.