Why I Will Not Submit

Geof Huth, "sand-wish-" (23 April 2019)

The title of this essay is a lie, not because it is untrue but because it is designed to make the reader assume a meaning I do not intend. I am not suggesting here that I will use the force of my will to resist submission to some evil force outside of myself. Though that would be the reader’s likely first thought upon reading the title.
Instead, I will explain why I do not (a bit different than “will not,” and also a bit starker) submit my creations for publication. Except for one fact: I don’t completely understand why I do not submit anymore. All I really know is that the process hurts me more than thoughts of my death.
This morning, a good friend of mine—meaning someone I have known for a long time and whom I get along with (I have no close friends except my wife)—wrote to ask me to submit some visual poems to a publication he helps run. I responded in a frenetic state over the course of seven minutes (lightly edited hereunder for purposes of clarity and anonymization):
I think you told me about this publication before. I almost never submit anywhere. I’ll think about it but then will probably forget. My work will likely not be actually published anymore, except when I do it [which is a kind of making]. I hate the process too much. Way too time-consuming for something I don’t like and which rarely bears fruit.                I used to send stuff to one publication—so once I year I would submit something—but after the first time one of my pieces wasn’t chosen I stopped submitting anywhere. Every couple of years I submit somewhere, nothing happens, and I remind myself not to submit.
A publisher asked me to submit a certain visual poem they had found online. I couldn’t find what they wanted so I sent them something similar and they didn’t want it. That was my submission this year.
I’m actually tense now just thinking of submissions.
So I’m pretty sure I won’t submit.
Misreading my comments a little, my friend asked me to send a dozen of a certain set of visual poems, and told me to relax, in a kind way. My response was likely a surprise to him:
All I can do after this conversation is write an essay about why I don’t submit anymore. I’m literally shaking thinking about this. I’m not sure why I changed, why I can’t submit anymore. Maybe the essay will tell me. Might be just the pain of rejection is sharper now. Or that I don’t believe in anything I make. Or that I care only about making.
He pulled one answer of my three, which he called “self-doubt,” and said he struggled with this as well. But I hadn’t given him an answer. Instead, I had suggested three answers of possibly concurrent applicability. Truth is I really don’t know. He responded after a few minutes with a simple greeting to have a good morning, to which I replied:
Thanks. First time I’ve been in a depressive daze for so long. I can’t shake that bad feeling. Our conversation was the cause. It’s a huge fear-and-flight feeling that fills everything: my body, my mind, my speed concerning everything. I can’t quite think straight through this dull yet painful daze. I’m a very destroyed person but usually keep it in check. Apparently, by avoiding thoughts of submission of poems. Back to dazèdness.
He said he could probably help me someday with “submitting anguish.” I replied,
You can’t help me with submission “whatever.” Avoiding it is all I can do.
That last bit from me reads a little cold to me now, but I intended it only as clear word of my state, then current and forever continuing. I’m certainly not preparing myself for the future process of submission. Instead, I’m taking a different path. I show my work constantly to the world, but always via my own platforms: social media and the occasional blog posting. I don’t even post my work in social media community spaces related to what I do: visual poetry, poetry, mailart, art. Doing so probably seems too much like submitting to me.
It has been hours since my friend and I messaged back and forth, yet that feeling of dread and immense weariness suffuses my body. I’m moving slowing, intellectually and physically. I am writing from a grey depressive relapse, out of a dead soul.
I just this moment (in the middle of the last sentence) pulled myself out of a dumbfounding brown study, a steady stare through everything and at nothing. Having come here to explain my state (which no-one needs to know or care about), I’m wondering if my plan to write this out of my system, to purge my soul, will work.
Why even write this? I do not want suggestions. I’m not asking—that is for sure—for people to ask me to submit anything. I simply want to make and document what I make and show it to a small part of the world. I understand the limitations of my skills. My poetics is, essentially, a balancing act with my skills at one side and my attempt to find additional skills at the other. It is an attempt to make, in the absence of the possibility of making anything good enough—or good enough for long enough. Yet it is mostly a way to entertain myself, and maybe to occupy my mind.
I’m a massive maker. Most of the things I create are small, but I make many of them. I call this process maximal minimalism. My making serves as a purging and a filling of myself. Keeping occupied helps me avoid falling into a depressive state.
I am sleepwalking through my day. My hands are tingly and numb. My reactions are slow. I have to watch what my feet do.
My usual state is hyper-aware and focused. With people, I’m gregarious and a bit loud. I have to be that way so that I am not myself. I have pushed myself, with force of will and heart, into the open world. I don’t usually want to dwell there, but I know that I should, so I have learned how to live there well and happily—but sometimes I am reminded I am not of this place.
On Monday, the president of an organization had told me I had been selected for an award recognizing my 29 years of service to the state—or that slender sliver of the state (in terms of population and professional focus) that I have somehow helped in my professional roles. A slight shock hit me at that moment, a small terror. I didn’t know how to respond. I want to be seen (that is part of what my making is about), but I don’t want to be recognized. After considering how to respond, I wrote back with, “Thanks for this surprising bit of news.” I should feel honored—I assume—by this small recognition, but I am literally embarrassed by it. I might be in favor of the idea of recognition, but I’m disturbed, when I am its object, by the reality of it.
Later today, I removed mentions of my small number of tiny awards from a document that records them for me. I want to escape. One award I did not ever record there was one given by an association I’m active. I received it for losing an election. Consolation prizes are not really awards. They are more like dirt rubbed into a wound. I should note I expected to lose, and the person I lost to should have won. These are clear facts. I didn’t have the wound until I faced the fact of public cleansing of the wound.
But no-one can understand the strange ways in which others operate. I wouldn’t expect anyone to understand my reactions in these cases.
It’s been over three hours, and my arms are still tingling. I’m only slowly pulling out of it, but I am rising up out of this numbing funk.
My real work isn’t my works themselves when I am alive, though, so I don’t need submission. My real work is my archive. For reasons unknown to me, the University at Albany began accessioning my papers in 2006, thirteen years ago. They hold a body of records of mine of unknown size—and also that portion of my personal library that I consider defines who I am and what entrances me. Conceptually, the works I have created fall under the collection “th’archive” (everything I’ve made and kept), and all the published works I’ve collected and kept fall under the collection “alibrary.” Together, they form the umbrella collection of entitled “thislife.” People are meant to know my works after I’m dead, and they are supposed to understand the smallness of it from the tininess of the names of the collections—how they are never capitalized. And they are supposed to see the near-anonymity of their very onymous creator because the titles of the collections are nearly totally generic. The fusedness of their titles, their portmanteauness, demonstrates there was a human of some kind behind them once.
Everything must be perfect, but nothing can be perfect, so everything is always wrong, off, askew.
I show people mostly my visual works and my tiny textual ones. My work with sound people only occasionally hear, and my poems of more than a few words people almost never see. So my non-submission hides some of my work almost absolutely—except in the form of performance.
Why do I perform but not publish? Because I control the presentation when I perform? Because I never ask to perform but am asked to perform? Because sometimes my friend, the poet Mark Lamoureux, sets up readings for us together? Because it is immediate? Palpable? Real?
It might be because I am not shy, but I mean to be cloistered. Because I make no sense.
Maybe this is the quandary of solipsism, in the philosophical sense. Descartes thought he solved it, but the mind only ever really knows its own self. Yet we believe in the other consciousnesses of the world. Trapped inside ourselves no matter what we do, we realize that too much attention to our own self obliterates the surging hordes of others around us. Wanting to be known, to be seen as a true and separate actual person—and maybe even to be known as a maker of things—seems necessary for the individual human. We need evidence from others that we exist and even that we matter. But to be seen too much, to be recognized too deeply, is to take away the realness of everyone else—to fall into solipsism’s slippery trap.
Yet this might not have anything to do with my sickness here. It might be what my friend thought: that I know I can never be good enough. That I can identify what I do wrong, but I can’t identify anything I do right. That to open myself up to review is to cut open my chest to see the blackness of my heart or to crack open my skull to see the desiccation of my brain.
I didn’t used to be this way. Maybe I was stronger then, or more foolish. But I would send things off and await a response. If I were rejected, I would be dejected, but not for long. If I were accepted, I would be pleased, though not overly so. But I have changed.
Maybe my issue has to do with time. I have only limited time, and I would rather make and show than make and submit and wait and maybe publish and maybe not. Certainly, that is my rational reason not to submit, but it’s not my emotional one. It’s not what has forced me back into an instant panic the minute after I returned to write more of this essay.
I suppose, I know I will fail when I submit and the fear of knowing how great that failure actually is is why I avoid ever facing it. I don’t want to reveal my real self to the world because I know the real world will understand my failure.
Say what you will about these thoughts, claim they are nonsense, but say this not to me, for I am already shaking from your thoughts.
ecr. l’inf.