Thursday, February 11, 2010

A Comparison Is a Law; Watch Its Sausage Being Made

Let's talk about cover letters! You guys, I am so tired of writing the phrase "have appeared or are forthcoming in." It clunks like a...
CUT TO MY INTERIOR MONOLOGUE

Like a polio shoe!

Like a polio shoe? That's definitely not okay to say.

Ever? What if there's no one in the shoe? What if it were, like, dropped on the floor by a doctor?

It still doesn't sound okay.

Now I feel bad, and I'm sorry for thinking it! I wonder why it's okay to talk about iron lungs but not okay to talk about polio shoes.

Because I'm pretty sure there are six or seven poets alive right now who would actually die if they weren't allowed to use iron lungs as a metaphor for, like, society.

Do I even know what a polio shoe looks like?

Whoa, that's certainly not what I was picturing. I was thinking of something clunky and black, like what Herman Munster wears, or Tom Cruise.

Wait a minute--no one else is calling it a polio shoe. Is that something I made up?

I should probably donate to a polio charity at this point.

If I took a twenty dollar bill and wrote, "FOR POLIO" on it, that money would be "for polio," but it wouldn't be a donation. God that is meta. But maybe it would raise awareness.

Then more people would understand that it isn't okay to compare things to polio shoes.

CUT AWAY FROM MY INTERIOR MONOLOGUE
...like a polio shoe. From this moment forth, I'm going to write, "my poems have gonna appeared," instead. Who's with me???

15 comments:

Richard Epstein said...

I have tried both "Richard Epstein's poems have appeared in places so obscure he can no longer find them" and "Epstein's poems were going to appear in the Veiled Prophet Parade, but he forgot," but neither one worked any better than the usual tepid pap.

RHE

Valerie Loveland said...

I stopped writing where I've been published.

Don't listen to me--my bio is always super short and uninformative. I almost always chicken out and just write "Valerie Loveland is the author of Reanimated, Somehow." and nothing else.

Patricia Lockwood said...

The problem is, too, that anything too far out of the ordinary enters the realm of Cute Bio, and I refuse to go there. Because if you allow me to be inappropriate one way then pretty soon I'll be dipping my boobs in ink and swirling them around on a sheet of paper and submitting that as my author photo. This is a sad fact.

SarahJane said...

"many of my poems have disappeared."

SarahJane said...

wait, I'm using that

Patricia Lockwood said...

Good one! How about, "My baby shoes have been bronzed in the following places"?

Richard Epstein said...

The sole. The tongue. The instep. That sort of thing?

Patricia Lockwood said...

All good names for literary magazines, in my mind.

Admiral Farragut said...

Perhaps "Many of my poems have been collected and sailed away in the following frigates..." - with apologies to whats-her-name.

Patricia Lockwood said...

My poems have gone down for money in the following alleys...

Radish King said...

My poems are whores in state run brothels. I've had over 500 poems published in the following places...


ps. I actually read the "500 poems" in a little tiny journal the other day and it made me bark cuz people usually write "over 100" when they aren't very good.

xoxox

Patricia Lockwood said...

Rebecca, I've read a few people who have published in COUNTLESS journals. Top that!

Anonymous said...

hee hee. boobs.

i just make sure that i end my bio with the number of chickens i currently own.

wait - is that too cute? do i need inky boobs now?

Patricia Lockwood said...

Cover your chicken's breasts with ink

Anonymous said...

oh! that is genius! i shall!