Todd Boss, poet

1. Write what you’d like to read (not what you think they’ll publish).
2. Submit your poems to POETRY magazine at least once a year, even though your poems are rejected every single time. Do this out of respect because you also read POETRY magazine. Continue for 15 years.
3. Read and submit to other journals likewise. Same timeline.
4. Repeat steps two and three but with different results.
5. Using your published poems alone and without contacting one yourself, inspire a major author (preferably Sherman Alexie) to introduce himself via email, flatter you obsequiously, and offer to get you the attention of an editor at a publishing house (preferably W. W. Norton & Co.).
6. Book contracts are best paired with beer.
7. Repeat steps one and four indefinitely.

Note: Results may vary. Tastes are subjective. Timelines may differ. Beer selection process may begin prior to receipt of contract.

Here’s the cover of my second poetry collection, PITCH, due out in February 2012 from W. W. Norton & Company.

It was a shock to see it, at first. PITCH is a collection of poems that spiral from a specific event: the time that my father lost the family piano off the back of his pickup truck when I was 12. The accident took place at the very rural, heavily forested corner of County Highway NL and State Highway 27, just east of Fall Creek, Wisconsin.

But this piano, in this picture? This here’s a city piano. I doubt it’s ever seen a field or woods. Read the rest of this entry »