Page 105 of Rhymes with Metaphor
Chapter 25: The Debut
One of Reg’s thesisexaminers recommended he submit his thesis to a small publisher he was connected with, but another examiner suggested that it would be better for his career to publish the poems separately in literary journals before collecting them in one volume.
“Can I help?”said Joel.
“As secretary or muse?”
“Both.”
“You don’t know one poetry journal from another, do you?”said Reg.
“I can learn if you teach me.”
Joel was infuriatingly organized.He laughed at Reg’s “submission tracking system” (five notebooks).
“That’s inefficient,” said Joel.
“No poem was ever lauded for beingefficient.”
Joel was useless at deciding how to group the poems into batches or how to choose which journals to submit them to.But for the mindless formatting and submission processes, he was golden.Joel created an email address “just for your submissions.”
“I’ll check it twice a day from now on,” said Joel.“Is there anything else I can do for you now?”
“Yes,” said Reg.“Take your clothes off.”
––––––––
The next morning whilethey were having another lie-in, Reg said, “I have to make myself sociable tonight.I’ve got this MFA end-of-semester thing to attend.”
“Can I come?”
“Do you want to?”said Reg.“It’ll be lots of pretentious, self-congratulatory literati types with their heads up their arses reading their own work.”
“Will you be reading?”
“That’s the idea,” said Reg, stroking little circles on Joel’s wrist.
“Which poems?”
Reg let his hand wander further south.“‘The Taming of the Faun’ and ‘Elements.’”
“I haven’t read ‘Elements.’It wasn’t in your thesis.”
“That was the one I wrote all over you.”
“Oh,thatone.”
“Yes, that one.I haven’t assembled it into a readable format yet.It only exists as photos.”
Reg found his camera, and he printed out the images and showed them to Joel.Joel pored over them with great interest as Reg set them out on the unmade bed and arranged them in the order he wanted.Then he had Joel sit at the end of the bed with his laptop on his lap and type the words, stopping periodically to break them into lines and stanzas.
“Lovely,” said Reg when he’d finished.
Reg read it aloud for practice.He looked at Joel.“Well?”
