the proletariat woman in the sweatshop

Something awesome courtesy of Pictures for Sad Children (follow link or click image for better visual):

And also, VerseDaily:

"Such a small time, the present,

where the dark pool waits under the battleship sky,
where the lily is not blooming yet but will,
where the ice cream truck chimes in the vanishing distance,

someone's daughter running penniless alongside."

- Lightsey Darst, Young Helen

Mary asked me my thoughts about why-bother-trying-to-get-published-in-magazines. Here's what I told her.

1. Affirmation that what I am writing pleases other people is nice but not necessary but sometimes helps me feel justified in spending the time I spend on writing.
2. Having an audience to which I feel mildly obligated helps me get around to revisions once the initial feverish IDEA is on the page
3. Rejection letters are fun to collect
4. Submitting to magazines risks that your poem will be frozen in a "final state" if accepted, unless you re-publish it later in some other collection.
5. I change my mind a lot about whether I care about being published in magazines. Eventually it would be nice to have a book published so I could hand it to my friends and family and say, "see? all the time I was avoiding you, I was doing something worthwhile." And I think being published in magazines can help that happen. Maybe.
6. Also, maybe one day being published will help me get to know more poets and be able to form something like a community with them and obsess over National Poetry Month like I already do with you and Amelia and Carrie.
7. So overall, I see it as a tool, I guess, a way of tricking myself into doing things I could probably do without publishing anyway.