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Please do not submit work to the forum that you do not want us to consider for the front page

Jay Dougherty

Jay Dougherty

Mangling Member
Editor
Please do not submit work to the forum that you do not want us to consider for the front page. We're using the forum first as a submission vehicle and only secondarily as a discussion, workshop, or feedback area. It takes time for editors to read, consider, and lay out front page pieces, and time is something we all have very little of. So it's slightly disappointing when we schedule a front page piece and the author then tells us not to publish it on the front page. There are other sites better suited to your work if your sole purpose is to get feedback or to work on a piece.

While I'm on this topic, please also only submit work that you consider worth publishing. I will add on a personal note that I tend to look first at work from those who do not submit frequently.

Thank you.

[USERGROUP=7]@Front Page Author[/USERGROUP]
[USERGROUP=6]@Front Page Editor[/USERGROUP]
 
Jay Dougherty said:
We're using the forum first as a submission vehicle and only secondarily as a discussion, workshop, or feedback area.
Click to expand...

perhaps limiting 'submissions' to only once per week
would reframe the landscape of the Poetry & Prose portions of the forum
in a way to reflect this editorial approach of

searching for front page selections

silent lotus
 
Niall M Oliver said:
I think that is a great idea.

Also, as I have been one of those guilty of using the forum for feedback and discussion, I must apologise, I didn't realise this was foremost a submission vehicle but I have now noted this point.
Click to expand...

What I'm thinking now is that a one-per-week limit makes sense from a number of angles: to encourage members to submit their best work (rather than daily work), to allow editors the time to consider each submission, and to give the impression to new members that their submissions won't quickly be lost in the deluge of submissions from more frequent submitters.

I would also remind members that I remain available to assist in setting up a new site for the purpose of creating a workshop/forum environment. (However, I will not be interested in managing or running such a site.)
 
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Niall M Oliver said:
I think that is a great idea.

Also, as I have been one of those guilty of using the forum for feedback and discussion, I must apologise, I didn't realise this was foremost a submission vehicle but I have now noted this point.
Click to expand...
.
Far as I'm aware, you can still use the forum for feedback and discussion, even if it is a submission vehicle. I would hate for commentary to stop.

I think the one-week rule is a good idea.
 
Trish Saunders said:
.
Far as I'm aware, you can still use the forum for feedback and discussion, even if it is a submission vehicle. I would hate for commentary to stop.

I think the one-week rule is a good idea.
Click to expand...

Yes. In fact, each category description reads thus: "Submit work for front page consideration and discussion."
 
Maybe twice a week ... haha I know I don’t submit shit from one week to the next but one a week feels harsh, when I was writing more often I’d post 2 or 3 times a week...
 
Michael Ashley said:
Maybe twice a week ... haha I know I don’t submit shit from one week to the next but one a week feels harsh, when I was writing more often I’d post 2 or 3 times a week...
Click to expand...

Miguel

please don't start a discussion about

whether weeks are 5 days or 6 or 7

if there is one or two sabbaths

if the truly creatives
have no idea anyway of what day it is


if an inverted question mark "¿" is only acceptable below the equator




The Truth . . .

it almost found me once
pissed in a cheap hotel room,
the mini-bar emptied,
I read three pages of the Bible
that I found tucked
in a drawer next to the bed,
got to the part where God
said "be fruitful & multiply"
before I tossed it aside
deciding to browse
the pay for view porn instead,
scrolling down the titles
it's clear what's on offer
selecting a suitable film
& as I reach for the tissues,
my eyes catch the small
innocuous leather bound book
sat on the bedside table,
but there is no hesitation--
even without a preview
and with a £4.99 price-tag
nympho-lesbian zombies
just seem more appealing.


Michael Ashley

January 2012

*
 
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Por supuesto... cada persona es diferente... pues para mi una semana tiene 3 días ... jaha
silent lotus said:
Miguel

please don't start a discussion about

whether weeks are 5 days or 6 or 7

if there is one or two sabbaths

if the truly creatives
have no idea anyway of what day it is


if an inverted question mark "¿" is only acceptable below the equator

*
Click to expand...
 
Michael Ashley said:
Por supuesto... cada persona es diferente... pues para mi una semana tiene 3 días ... jaha
Click to expand...







The Truth . . .

it almost found me once
pissed in a cheap hotel room,
the mini-bar emptied,
I read three pages of the Bible
that I found tucked
in a drawer next to the bed,
got to the part where God
said "be fruitful & multiply"
before I tossed it aside
deciding to browse
the pay for view porn instead,
scrolling down the titles
it's clear what's on offer
selecting a suitable film
& as I reach for the tissues,
my eyes catch the small
innocuous leather bound book
sat on the bedside table,
but there is no hesitation--
even without a preview
and with a £4.99 price-tag
nympho-lesbian zombies
just seem more appealing.


Michael Ashley


January 2012

~
 
silent lotus said:
The Truth . . .

it almost found me once
pissed in a cheap hotel room,
the mini-bar emptied,
I read three pages of the Bible
that I found tucked
in a drawer next to the bed,
got to the part where God
said "be fruitful & multiply"
before I tossed it aside
deciding to browse
the pay for view porn instead,
scrolling down the titles
it's clear what's on offer
selecting a suitable film
& as I reach for the tissues,
my eyes catch the small
innocuous leather bound book
sat on the bedside table,
but there is no hesitation--
even without a preview
and with a £4.99 price-tag
nympho-lesbian zombies
just seem more appealing.


Michael Ashley


January 2012

~
Click to expand...
Oh SL! Thanks I forgot about that one I was reading it thinking it sounds a bit familiar... I see bits now that need changing!

smh... the never ending edit... life.
 
Michael Ashley said:
Maybe twice a week ... haha I know I don’t submit shit from one week to the next but one a week feels harsh, when I was writing more often I’d post 2 or 3 times a week...
Click to expand...

That's one way to look at it. Another way is to see this place as less of a discussion board and more of an online arts magazine with a submission engine at the back end. Has any of us ever submitted to a single publication 52 times in a year? I haven't. So once a week is pretty liberal, I'd say.
 
Jay Dougherty said:
That's one way to look at it. Another way is to see this place as less of a discussion board and more of an online arts magazine with a submission engine at the back end. Has any of us ever submitted to a single publication 52 times in a year? I haven't. So once a week is pretty liberal, I'd say.
Click to expand...
Well it’s your baby... I come here for help and advice from my fellow artists... Jay this place is better than a fucking submission engine. Just my opinion.
 
Michael Ashley said:
Well it’s your baby... I come here for help and advice from my fellow artists... Jay this place is better than a fucking submission engine. Just my opinion.
Click to expand...

Trying to figure out a way to lighten the load on editors. Maybe I need to change the "Journals" board to "Journals/Workshop." In there people could post more freely, and editors could ignore that, if they wanted to, and concentrate on submissions that folks want to make.
 
Jay Dougherty said:
Trying to figure out a way to lighten the load on editors. Maybe I need to change the "Journals" board to "Journals/Workshop." In there people could post more freely, and editors could ignore that, if they wanted to, and concentrate on submissions that folks want to make.
Click to expand...
Oh yeah I understand I just don’t think a quota is the way... you could have a separate submit for front page thread... idk what the answer is but part of being an editor is trawling through a lot of shit! Maybe they should just suck it up!? Jeje hope you’re well Jay! I’ve started another job here in Spain that means I have to travel a lot so don’t have too much spare time :( but it’s all good!!
 
It seems like there is a greater variety of artists contributing now which is a good thing. I think you could also consider changing the front page every two days, instead of everyday...give the featured piece more of a chance to remain up. Not that many online submission places can maintain such an ambitious of a publishing schedule.

I think once or twice a week is a good idea, but it's your magazine.
 
Trish Saunders said:
It seems like there is a greater variety of artists contributing now which is a good thing. I think you could also consider changing the front page every two days, instead of everyday...give the featured piece more of a chance to remain up. Not that many online submission places can maintain such an ambitious of a publishing schedule.

I think once or twice a week is a good idea, but it's your magazine.
Click to expand...

No moves yet. I'm always thinking about these things.

Also thinking about opening up Kiss My Poetry and Ten Million Flies--two additional lit/art mags that I've toyed with for years now--and accepting submissions for those from here.

Addendum: Now open for submissions: https://openartsforum.com/forum/forums/ten-million-flies.53/
 
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It can't be said too often: You must do what you think is best, given demands on your time! (I imagine D.C. is a ferocious place to be right now! ( Go impeachment! ) Ten Million Flies and Kiss My Poetry sound fun.
 
Michael Ashley said:
Oh ten million flies.... me gusta! Jeje
Click to expand...

lol

flies02.png
 
Michael Ashley said:
Jeje​

oh I have a love hate relationship with the flies.... I love them for what they are... the ultimate fucker... but then I just have to kill any that are near me... ¡nothing quite as satisfying as a non-moving fly on the cold tile!
Click to expand...


I suspect I liked the name because I remembered a line from one of Bukowski's poems: "the flies are angry bits of life."

2 Flies - Poem by Charles Bukowski

The flies are angry bits of life;
why are they so angry?
it seems they want more,
it seems almost as if they
are angry
that they are flies;
it is not my fault;
I sit in the room
with them
and they taunt me
with their agony;
it is as if they were
loose chunks of soul
left out of somewhere;
I try to read a paper
but they will not let me
be;
one seems to go in half-circles
high along the wall,
throwing a miserable sound
upon my head;
the other one, the smaller one
stays near and teases my hand,
saying nothing,
rising, dropping
crawling near;
what god puts these
lost things upon me?
other men suffer dictates of
empire, tragic love…
I suffer
insects…
I wave at the little one
which only seems to revive
his impulse to challenge:
he circles swifter,
nearer, even making
a fly-sound,
and one above
catching a sense of the new
whirling, he too, in excitement,
speeds his flight,
drops down suddenly
in a cuff of noise
and they join
in circling my hand,
strumming the base
of the lampshade
until some man-thing
in me
will take no more
unholiness
and I strike
with the rolled-up-paper -
missing! -
striking,
striking,
they break in discord,
some message lost between them,
and I get the big one
first, and he kicks on his back
flicking his legs
like an angry whore,
and I come down again
with my paper club
and he is a smear
of fly-ugliness;
the little one circles high
now, quiet and swift,
almost invisible;
he does not come near
my hand again;
he is tamed and
inaccessible; I leave
him be, he leaves me
be;
the paper, of course,
is ruined;
something has happened,
something has soiled my
day,
sometimes it does not
take man
or a woman,
only something alive;
I sit and watch
the small one;
we are woven together
in the air
and the living;
it is late
for both of us.

Charles Bukowski
 
Jay Dougherty said:
I suspect I liked the name because I remembered a line from one of Bukowski's poems: "the flies are angry bits of life."

2 Flies - Poem by Charles Bukowski

The flies are angry bits of life;
why are they so angry?
it seems they want more,
it seems almost as if they
are angry
that they are flies;
it is not my fault;
I sit in the room
with them
and they taunt me
with their agony;
it is as if they were
loose chunks of soul
left out of somewhere;
I try to read a paper
but they will not let me
be;
one seems to go in half-circles
high along the wall,
throwing a miserable sound
upon my head;
the other one, the smaller one
stays near and teases my hand,
saying nothing,
rising, dropping
crawling near;
what god puts these
lost things upon me?
other men suffer dictates of
empire, tragic love…
I suffer
insects…
I wave at the little one
which only seems to revive
his impulse to challenge:
he circles swifter,
nearer, even making
a fly-sound,
and one above
catching a sense of the new
whirling, he too, in excitement,
speeds his flight,
drops down suddenly
in a cuff of noise
and they join
in circling my hand,
strumming the base
of the lampshade
until some man-thing
in me
will take no more
unholiness
and I strike
with the rolled-up-paper -
missing! -
striking,
striking,
they break in discord,
some message lost between them,
and I get the big one
first, and he kicks on his back
flicking his legs
like an angry whore,
and I come down again
with my paper club
and he is a smear
of fly-ugliness;
the little one circles high
now, quiet and swift,
almost invisible;
he does not come near
my hand again;
he is tamed and
inaccessible; I leave
him be, he leaves me
be;
the paper, of course,
is ruined;
something has happened,
something has soiled my
day,
sometimes it does not
take man
or a woman,
only something alive;
I sit and watch
the small one;
we are woven together
in the air
and the living;
it is late
for both of us.

Charles Bukowski
Click to expand...
Ah god bless Bukowski. Love the poem... we are all one really haha
 
Jay Dougherty said:
Trying to figure out a way to lighten the load on editors. Maybe I need to change the "Journals" board to "Journals/Workshop." In there people could post more freely, and editors could ignore that, if they wanted to, and concentrate on submissions that folks want to make.
Click to expand...

i have always used my Journals to first post poems & images to
and from there make selections for submissions


Jay Dougherty said:
Has any of us ever submitted to a single publication 52 times in a year?
Click to expand...

did anyone stand around at the post office in the old days 52 times a year
and lick submission envelopes sent to publishers that included a SAE to insure you would get a reply ?


silent lotus
 
silent lotus said:
i have always used my Journals to first post poems & images to
and from there make selections for submissions




did anyone stand around at the post office in the old days 52 times a year
and lick submission envelopes sent to publishers that included a SAE to insure you would get a reply ?


silent lotus
Click to expand...

Probably. :)
 
Trish Saunders said:
.
Far as I'm aware, you can still use the forum for feedback and discussion, even if it is a submission vehicle. I would hate for commentary to stop.

I think the one-week rule is a good idea.
Click to expand...


I agree with Trish. It helps to know what is/isn't connecting. There are too may times I have posted stuff I thought was good only to find out it was "Meh" and stuff I thought needed help get very favorable feedback. So it just tells me I'm not a very good judge of my own quality and the feedback mechanism is valuable input to understand what's working. Changing frequency limits is OK and will decrease the "reply" traffic for sure.
 
Tom Strong said:
I agree with Trish. It helps to know what is/isn't connecting. There are too may times I have posted stuff I thought was good only to find out it was "Meh" and stuff I thought needed help get very favorable feedback. So it just tells me I'm not a very good judge of my own quality and the feedback mechanism is valuable input to understand what's working. Changing frequency limits is OK and will decrease the "reply" traffic for sure.
Click to expand...

I'll just keep things as they are for now. There's not enough consensus on the time frame that's best.
 
Trish Saunders said:
Who voted it down? I seem to remember positive responses.
Click to expand...

Oh, I've forgotten. Didn't do a scientific poll. It's okay: I have the energy for now. I really appreciate that members can feature work here themselves. I often go to the featured work page as a shortcut to things I might feature. It's like having a board full of editors, really.

[USERGROUP=7]@Front Page Author[/USERGROUP]
 
With the new Kiss My Poetry and Flies submissions, we are seeing even more multiple postings. It's not just one a day now, it's more like two or three a day.
 
Elvis Otis said:
Jay, are people featuring themselves? Or not really? Not supposed to? I don't really get the function, but then again I haven't spent any time understanding it because that's not what I'm here for :).

And with all due respect, I don't believe crowdsourcing (via feature function) brings out the best work. On the contrary it maintains a dominant culture status quo, namely that those who are the "loudest," and most frequent users dictate. Please correct me if I'm off track, or just say "you're wrong" and get on with your work of editing ;).
Click to expand...

I don't think so, but I don't know. There's a bug in the feature system. I've set it up not to allow people to feature themselves, but it appears that they can. So we run it on the honor system. I think that most if not all of the members follow it. Occasionally you may see a post made, such as Marcel's, and then see it immediately featured. That's me because I try to feature a lot of visual art to keep the balance in this place. I also use the feature thingie as a reminder to myself to put stuff on the front page.

As to "dominant culture status quot," the group here isn't very big. Among the group, those who post are a small subset. So what I'm getting at is that it's easy to see the two dozen or so who post regularly as a "culture," but that's just the nature of the place right now. Not sure what to do about that, if anything.

It's an imperfect system. These things always are. The only other way is to use Submittable exclusively or take email submissions. I've ruled both of those out for reasons I've explained. If you have another suggestion, I'm all ears.
 
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Trish Saunders said:
With the new Kiss My Poetry and Flies submissions, we are seeing even more multiple postings. It's not just one a day now, it's more like two or three a day.
Click to expand...

These things are still experimental. I'm quickly seeing that we just don't have enough contributors to keep the ventures varied and interesting. I might can them, or I might exclude those boards from the "recent posts" listings, or something. I don't know yet.
 
Elvis Otis said:
I think community is great, I've been a member of online communities since the early 2000s, (and studied them academically) I get it :). And if patting each other on the back is part of it, all the better.
Click to expand...

My idea here was to try to show the audience out there (if there even is one beyond the actual people who get published--and their friends) that things published on the front actually get commented upon. Reason: I find the typical poetry publications, whether online or in print, sterile and anticlimactic because one has little idea (even with a "hit" counter) of whether anything is touching anyone. That's what I call almost pure vanity publication. It's just boring, to me at least. I know that for academics, having a(nother) line on your resume with a poem published in x, y, or z tier 1 journal means something. Otherwise, I don't know if it means anything at all. In other words, excepting those who are tier 1 writers, the whole act of publishing is often a narcissistic event. (There's also a business model in feeding narcisissm: publish people's stuff in pretty forms and then rely upon them to buy a bunch of copies. I suspect that's how a lot of these small "presses" break even.)

At first I allowed the comments to be shown on the front page, but there were reasonable objections to that, as some don't want to see their work commented on--they feel it cheapens it, somehow, and there's always the concern that some jerko will write something that needs to be taken down. So I compromised with a comment indicator, showing folks that the pieces receive comments but requiring registration in order to see the actual comments.

I recognize that what I'm doing here, or attempting to do, is fairly uncommon, and maybe it's doomed to be another failed experiment. I don't know. I'd like to broaden the contributors here, attract more, but my days of guerrilla marketing are over. I'm content with slow and easy. I am also somewhat fatigued by the whole social thing online, as I suspect many people are these days, so I'm more than a bit reluctant to try to grow the place substantially. We'll see. For now it keeps me active in internet technologies, and I read some nice work now and again, not to mention view it.

I keep dropping hints that I'm willing to help (almost) anyone start up a similar venture and do things their way, but so far there haven't been any takers. That probably means I'm crazy for doing this at all.
 
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Jay Dougherty said:
Trying to figure out a way to lighten the load on editors. Maybe I need to change the "Journals" board to "Journals/Workshop." In there people could post more freely, and editors could ignore that, if they wanted to, and concentrate on submissions that folks want to make.
Click to expand...

i
Jay Dougherty said:
Please do not submit work to the forum that you do not want us to consider for the front page. We're using the forum first as a submission vehicle and only secondarily as a discussion, workshop, or feedback area. It takes time for editors to read, consider, and lay out front page pieces, and time is something we all have very little of. So it's slightly disappointing when we schedule a front page piece and the author then tells us not to publish it on the front page. There are other sites better suited to your work if your sole purpose is to get feedback or to work on a piece.

While I'm on this topic, please also only submit work that you consider worth publishing. I will add on a personal note that I tend to look first at work from those who do not submit frequently.

Thank you.

[USERGROUP=7]@Front Page Author[/USERGROUP]
[USERGROUP=6]@Front Page Editor[/USERGROUP]
Click to expand...

I hope I've understood this correctly and I'm now using the journal section for certain poems.
 
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