Got any ideas on something "catchy" to say to the editor besides, "please find my submission enclosed", etc.

Editor of what? A local newspaper, a fashion magazine, a literary journal?


Les

Literary journal.

How about---"thank you for reading my submission"

then make sure its a darn great one . . .

"please find my submission enclosed"

Since the editor of the publication probably has a staff to screen letters for publication, I doubt any suggestions to publish your own work would be allowed, however you could get noticed by including some of your own work in your reply.

For instance, you could say something like: "Your feature article on ------- was on the mark. I wrote the following as a response to that poem: -------


Les

[tinyurl.com] />
[tinyurl.com]

As Miss Dickinson said:

"Are you too deeply occupied to say if my Verse is alive?"

[www.todayinliterature.com]

Talia, please read Stephen's post. He beat you to it by about 6 hours.


Les

oops

Stephen

Another interesting letters to the editor story concerns Hart Crane and his poem about (Herman) Melville's tomb:


At Melville's Tomb

Often beneath the wave, wide from this ledge
The dice of drowned men's bones he saw bequeath
An embassy. Their numbers as he watched,
Beat on the dusty shore and were obscured.

And wrecks passed without sound of bells,
The calyx of death's bounty giving back
A scattered chapter, livid hieroglyph,
The portent wound in corridors of shells.

Then in the circuit calm of one vast coil,
Its lashings charmed and malice reconciled,
Frosted eyes there were that lifted altars;
And silent answers crept across the stars.

Compass, quadrant and sextant contrive
No farther tides . . . High in the azure steeps
Monody shall not wake the mariner.
This fabulous shadow only the sea keeps.


Harriet Monroe, editor of Poetry magazine, accused Crane of being overly obscure, and asked for an explication, specifically:

''Take me for a hard-boiled unimaginative unpoetic reader and tell me how dice can bequeath an embassy (or anything else); and how a calyx (of death's bounty or anything else) can give back a scattered chapter, livid hieroglyph...''

I have to confess a sympathy with Ms Monroe insofar as the difficulty of the piece is concerned, but Crane wrote back:

... "some poetry transcends logic and can transport the sympathetic reader to places beyond the reaches of mere rationality.

''I ask you how Blake could possibly say that 'a sigh is a sword of an Angel King,' '' Crane wrote. And he offered intriguing explanations of his own lines.

''Dice bequeath an embassy, in the first place, by being ground...in little cubes from the bones of drowned men by the action of the sea, and are finally thrown up on the sand...These being the bones of dead men who never completed their voyage, it seems legitimate to refer to them as the only surviving evidence of certain messages undelivered...''

The calyx, he wrote, ''refers in a double ironic sense both to the cornucopia and the vortex made by a sinking vessel. As soon as the water has closed over a ship this whirlpool sends up broken spars, wreckage, etc., which can be referred to as livid hieroglyphs, making a scattered chapter...''


What does that do to help get a particular editor to more carefully read a given submission? Probably nothing, but I found the tale particularly fascinating.

Probably the best for now is

"Enclosed please find my submission. Thank you." Include a stamped, self-addressed envelope in case of returns.

pam

Well now, I think I have been misunderstood. I am aware of all the "safe and supposed" ways to do such a thing...I was just interested in some creative and fun ways to go about it...like the way Miss Dickinson did.

And I know Stephen posted E.D.'s...that's where I picked it up.

Perhaps what inspired it to be written? Like, "While cleaning up a particularly large mess of doggy doo on my carpet this morning, these lines came to me in a flash, and wrote themselves with almost no effort on my part." Or, "Having answered the doorbell just now, and spending over an hours talking to a visitor from Porlock, I sat down and penned this verse."

Everything that I've heard from published writers is that 'creative and fun' cover letters mark you as an amateur- until, of course, you've been published enough to be known, or are personal friends with the editor.

Good luck on the submission!

pam

One could always start with "Dear Heartless Philistine" and then get nasty from there......

Good ed. for Jesus' sake forbear
To read the lines enclosèd here;
Blest be the one that prints these lines
And curst be he that them declines.

Oops, that doesn't make any sense. Better would be,

Good ed. for Jesus' sake forbear
To reject the lines enclosèd here;
Blest be the one that prints these lines
And curst the one that them declines.

I thought it was three bears, but i guess inflation