Hi everyone! I’m stoked to be writing to you here!

I’ve got some neat things in the works for this space, but to start, send me your poems!

Specifically, I’m looking for poems that have been endlessly rejected. Poems you wrote that you love(-d) but your workshop dumped on. Poems you maybe have come to accept don’t work in a way that you don’t see. The poem you did 18 drafts of that will never be clean.

Every week or two I will choose one of these to spend some time with, mark up, and meditate on. I’m interested in what’s not working with the poem, not necessarily to fix it, although I imagine sometimes poems will get “fixed”, but because I like thinking and talking about the aesthetic spaces poets inhabit. That’s how I get my kicks, and my friends usually think my reads are helpful.

Poems will be published anonymously—though you’re welcome to out yourself in the comments on the post—and by sending me something, you acknowledge that it’s your work, that you hold the rights to it, that I can use it for / do with it whatever I see fit, and that whatever I say is just a comment on your poem—not you as a person. Because it’s a time-intensive task, I don’t expect to be able to use all the poems I get; please understand.

So hit me up! Send a poem in some non-arcane file format to normalghost@gmail.com with the subject line “Why’s this poem no good?” I’ll do my best to tell you.

/

About me:

I live in Portland, Oregon, where I’m the humanities department for a great culinary school. I also edit poetry / interview poets for draft: The Journal of Process, and help organize readings for If Not For Kidnap. I’m also in the middle of a seasonal stint curating poetry for The Fanzine. My book, Eyelid Lick, which is about love and LSD, was put out by Fence Books in 2012, and last year Mammoth Editions put out a chapbook of mine called Slow Motion German Adjectives. [Twitter] [Blogger] [Instagram]