2022 in Review: A Long Haul
An extended look-back at my year of poetry in 2022. It's so long that I made audio, and even the audio is long. So sorry, but also sorry that I'm not really sorry!
Hullo Friends,
It’s a new year, it’s Capricorn season. Shoutout to the Capricorns of the world and a special shoutout to all the December Capricorns of the world, bless y’all.
For this first newsletter I wanted to share my 2022 in review. Basically a lot of stuff happened and I can’t even contain it all. Plus I’m LONG WINDED– so sorry and/or you’re welcome, haha. To assist with that, I’ve bolded sections of this newsletter.
Will they all be this long…probably not, but maybe?? Could I have sent each section out as their own newsletters? I mean, yeah, but as with much of my art making, I’m selfish! I’m doing this for ME and for my archives. But in doing it for me, it all becomes public and less about me and more about what can become inspired and generated by YOU as a result. That’s the hope, anyway.
I’ve recorded me reading this so it’s kinda like a podcast (lol or not idk). Anyway, I hope that makes getting thru the content a little easier. I want to say it’ll be a habit I maintain for this newsletter but idk, we’ll see.
Sections of the newsletter for easy perusing:
YEAR OF THE LOVERS
SYZYGY
BODYELECTRONIC
MISEDUCATION
PRIZES AND HONORABLE MENTIONS
PUBLICATIONS OF 2022 (Poems and Media Features)
PERFORMANCES
STATS AND SUPERLATIVES
END OF NEWSLETTER
YEAR OF THE LOVERS
I am not quite sure if this is accurate or where it came from, but I began the year believing that 2022 was the year of the lovers. Indeed, I began the year dating– though simultaneously feeling very skeptical and unhopeful about the future. And indeed, I kept breaking up (or simply stopping, right, cause you can’t break up if you were never actually together). For the next few months, more attempted lovers made their way into my life and left just as quickly– but the impressions they left have lasted.
In sum, dating was a total disaster– lots of flakes and lots of unnecessary emotional/mental/spiritual damage. [*deep sigh* I want to say so much more…] Basically there were no romantic lovers in this year of the lovers, just a lot of attempts. In fact, this was a year that I had to contend with what it means to be queer and ever-lonely/ever-longing.
Now, I don’t want to be totally pessimistic, because in the face of hardship, I looked around and found different kinds of love that keep you buoyant. I found my lovers in friends, friends who support me in all kinds of ways, friends who maintain friendship despite living far away. But I gotta keep it real, too, and note that when I say love, these loves are not the love that comes to mind. Romantic love, for better or for worse, holds a primacy over the concept of “love” and, very likely because of the cultures in which I've been acculturated, I specifically desire romantic love even though (or maybe because) I’ve never experienced it.
I mention all this because 1) it was my life 2) it made me feel especially sad and 3) a direct product of everything was art. In a strange burst I began writing about my queer romantic/sexual life in a way that just poured out of me. It felt like I had been holding in so much for so long and these recent events were the final catalyst. It wasn’t just words, though, it was music. Sounds– songs– flowed out of this ache in ways that continue to surprise me. The poems multiplied into lyrics, and the same hands that wrote the words began composing music to go along with them.
I have been attempting and failing to make original music since my college days of making mashups and posting them on soundcloud (where many still are, actually. they’re okay...). For a while I just believed I wasn’t cut out for it, despite my enthusiasm and passion about music. But with the poems, the sounds began to take shape, and there began budding structure and flow to sounds that previously seemed noisy.
SYZYGY
& I mention all of that previous section because it is that art that I’m most looking forward to in the next year, and also how I started 2022. It began with the release of my self-produced poetry-music EP called SYZYGY.
The word SYZYGY means an alignment of celestial bodies, like planets or moons creating a line. It can be seen as a kin concept to serendipity. I go back to the idea because I like the vastness of the term “celestial body” and I like imagining all kinds of life as having celestial bodies. For me, it represents a kind of galactic synchronicity, the kinds of harmonies that magic is made of. The project was written in the months before my dad passed away, and used divination techniques like card pulls of oracle cards and bibliomancy to compose the poems. The poems, to me, felt like fortune telling, like they augured a future. More surprising to me, they called out to me in other forms– they arrived as melodies, as tunes, as jingles, as mantras. They came in so many forms that it forced me to attend to not only their multiplicity but the multiplicity of poems generally. How many forms can a single poem take? How many different ways are there to arrange the sound and feeling of just one poem?
In this spirit, I even made some [weird lol] visuals for the poems. (Visual for poemsong “Sacrificial” & Visual for poemsong “Cosmologic” ) BTW i finally made a youtube channel where I am trying to be better about posting visuals as well as live performances. You can also find some on youtube. One of these days I’ll get all my footage on there so if you ever get a hankering to hear a poem, it’ll be right there ready and waiting for you.
SYZYGY was the beginning, for me, of stretching my experimentation with poetry and poetic forms. It also bled into performance– I found that by nature of these poems being songs, it made them easier to listen to, to repeat, to memorize. I found that I memorized these particular poems much easier than my normal process of memorization, and I found that, like water, these poems could be poured into various vessels and still maintained. This is to say that even though I composed these poems to specific soundscapes, they are capacious enough to fit into other instrumentals like a freestyle. These literary and performative sentiments were all the more magnified in my chapbook of poems, BODYELECTRONIC.
BODYELECTRONIC
BODYELECTRONIC, my debut poetry chapbook, came out in April 2022 with Trouble Department, a small indie press based here in Colorado. [I am actually out of stock myself for signed copies at the moment, but here are two links if you would like to purchase a copy: https://www.shopatmatter.com/product/bodyelectronic/ and
https://troubledepartment.com/?product=bodyelectronic-poems-by-aerik-francis-paperback-preorder
]
First, I should say that a chapbook is just a small collection of poems, usually around 30 pages long. Chapbooks are such a cool medium of writing to me– poets often create them as zines, as collaborations, as tour momentos, as a first introduction to the written wor[l]d of the poet. For me, I think about it like a musician, and an EP is just a small project. For me, my chapbooks are condensed and specific projects that are a necessary part of my artistic universe. They aren’t poems that “didn’t make the cut” for a larger book, but rather, just contained in a different vessel.
BODYELECTRONIC contains poems about existing digitally simultaneous to our physical existence, and the range of emotions that carries. I was really interested in the way we curate a virtual world that is, on one hand, separate from the “real world”, but on the other hand, interminably connected and mutually constitutive. I think about how my body has a response to receiving a notification, for example, or the slippage of the window as a screen we look out of and a screen we look into. These are poems I find myself returning to often, and these are poems that take many shapes and forms.
I participated in an in-depth conversation about the project with Vincente Perez that can be viewed here. I also had a release event with some artist friends at Counterpath in Denver where I did an experimental performance of the chapbook, and footage of that can be found here. I mention these both in reviewing the year and some of the cool events I got to take part in over 2022, but also to reflect on how expansive this little chapbook already has demonstrated itself to be.
I’m really excited to continue celebrating BODYELECTRONIC in 2023. I have two projects that I have been working on to further expand out BODYELECTRONIC. One is an audiobook project and the other is a collaboration generating an AI remixed poetry collection called ELECTRIC NOBODY. I’m excited to share those this year, sooner than later.
MISEDUCATION
I got some really exciting news in 2022 for new projects forthcoming. My second chapbook MISEDUCATION was selected as the winner (!!) of the 2022 New Delta Review chapbook prize judged by Dorothy Chan. Her comments on the project were so generous and lovely, I’ll share them here: “This is the future' is what I kept saying to myself while reading Aerik Francis' MISEDUCATION. This is a radical contemporary love letter to the queer BIPOC lineage that reminds us of the importance of community, the expansiveness of family, and of course, the power of both resilience and resistance in taking back what is rightfully ours. Francis' speaker carries the greatest internal strength through this high confrontation and abolition of irrelevant canonical standards, such as 'biective beauty.' I've been waiting for this collection. I'm in awe of what Francis does to language, through its decolonization, as well as its infinite innovation. Through textures and hybridity, their voice has simultaneously redefined what a collection can do, while paying homage to the critical voices who came before them. Francis is an artist who will keep pushing poetry anew--there are absolutely no limitations this is an important book.”
I have been sitting with so many negative emotions and feelings from my time in a phd program that I eventually left after 3 years. I feel like whenever anyone gives me an inch to talk about academia I take a mile and rant about my bad experiences– to this day. It’s obsessive and gross and annoying, honestly! It’s stuff I wish I were over. But then I go on twitter and see all the same discourse and issues regenerate and mutate. So this chapbook is the best I can hope for in terms of addressing these conversations, in terms of figuring out how to hold those experiences healthily by containing them in a small condensed vessel.
I hope it is not too self-indulgent to say that this chapbook excites me– it’s like nothing I’ve ever created or will likely ever create again, I think. It is experimental in its forms and sharp in its aim. The speaker is bitter and unapologetic. The poems are angry and grudge-holding and grieving. I really hope these poems can land where they need to go, to remind people they are not alone and what they may be experiencing have names.
Okay and also, I’m so excited for the cover art. I’ll share more details about that soon, but what I can share for sure is the phenomenal artist I’m working with. Her name is Ophelia Arc and she is a polymath multi-media artist based in New York. We became acquainted as cohort members of the Fall 22 Milkweed Learning Hub through The Chrysalis Institute. Ophelia is so cool, so talented! She creates these wonderful sculptures that are both gorgeous and disturbing, and most importantly to me and my work, incredibly embodied. Her work contains so much thought and detail and labor, and when I saw the pieces I just had a gut feeling that I wanted these to be the image-portals into the poems. Please check out her work at ceaseandperish.com and follow Ophelia on IG @ceaseandperish
PRIZES AND HONORABLE MENTIONS
This year was the first year for a lot of people to feel comfortable traveling again. I was really excited to hear one of my good college friends was coming to Denver/Aurora for a week in the Spring. I remember I was in a car with Zean, Jorge, and Lauren as we were heading to go on a hike (something I seem to only do in CO with people who are not from CO– I also rolled my ankle on said hike, yikes!). During the ride I got an email and I opened up near immediately. I made a screechy sound when I read it and learned my chapbook MISEDUCATION was a finalist for the Tupelo Prize. I dunno, it was just so unexpected– and then like, the strangeness of being a finalist but not really getting anything as a result except, perhaps, “hey, your work was good” which is indeed a kind of indication. I got lucky in that the chapbook was picked up a few weeks later in another prize. But I mention this moment (lmao how many times am I gonna use that phrase?) because 1) I was with friends receiving this news, how sweet and 2) it was the first good news I got in 2022.
Okay so I’ve been talking about chapbooks this whole newsletter without mentioning my full-length poetry collection that I have been submitting out since Spring of 2021. This year was the first time I got something more than form-rejections for this work, which is great because it lets me know that the work resonates for at least one reader in the way that it resonates for me. BODYPOLITIC was an honorable mention (aka among the top THREE manuscripts for the judges for this submission pool) for the 2022 Andrés Montoya Poetry Prize, where judges noted of the book: “Aerik Francis’s intimate poems make music of theory and politics centered on the African-LatinXXX-American.” What was wild is that I was at Book Bar and I saw an advertisement for a reading from a poet named Sheryl Luna. The ad mentioned that her book won the INAUGURAL Andrés Montoya Poetry Prize, and that she was a CantoMundo fellow like me. So yes I’m glad that my work got some recognition for sure, but it was also a cool portal to meet another Denver-based poet whose work I had never encountered previously. The manuscript was also named as a finalist for the 2022 Saturnalia Books Poetry Prize. The manuscript is also currently on shortlists for Nomadic Press 2024 cohort as well as the Phillip Levine Fresno Book Prize (I’m hoping to hear results of these very very soon). And of course I have submitted the book out to dozens of other places I’m still waiting to hear back from.
The sad reality is that in the poetry industry nobody gives a fuck about you until you have a full-length book out that is not self-published. The industry has no respect for self-publishing (because if you self-published, they wouldn’t exist, nor would they be able to profit from your work and give you minimal royalties). It sucks because these book contracts/publishing deals are just as bad as the record deals in the music industry. Artists are being paid in the idea of clout more than anything else. And even then, I dare you to ask a poet with a book out if they feel successful. And for the poets reading this with a book out, do you feel successful? You should, and yet the industry tears us down, as many industries do. Most poets I know are sad and hungry for more– they probably don’t get the readership they want, don’t get the prizes they want, don’t get the opportunities they want, etc. At some point, I had to realize that I can’t be relying on outside validation because the validation is profit-seeking and not at all involved in care. So there are reasons why I elect to keep trying to get my book published, but I’m thinking if there is no luck by the end of the year, I should elect to start self-publishing (and not through Amazon! I understand that I have to sell my soul in some regards in order to get sales, but I refuse to support Amazon as much as I possibly can, even though some things I participate in are likely funded in part by Amazon money. Siiiiighhhhh capitalism). I want to start a publishing house, but that’s for another newsletter and another time.
Basically all I wanna say is that BODYPOLITIC is only getting better over time and that someone should pick it up. There is a lot of emphasis on the “first book” in the poetry industry and various “first book prizes” and “emerging poet” opportunities. So many fellowships and residencies are only for poets who don’t have a first book out. In many ways it feels lose-lose – get your book published but lose potential opportunities, or never get published but be a little more eligible for things. I believe BP to be my first book and the first necessary portal into my literary universe. That being said, I have drafts for TWO MORE FULL LENGTH POETRY COLLECTIONS. So basically I am sitting on 3 book manuscripts. And obviously I’m biased, but each book is vastly different from one another, and they are all solid good drafts. A part of me wonders that if I were to die tomorrow, would these projects just be lost forever? Or would I become another popular poet only in my death, and that’s how these projects will manifest. The 2nd manuscript is called ubiquities and it is about communing with my family’s ghosts, specifically my dad. The 3rd manuscript is called ASYMPTOTIC (towards a queer love poem) and I refer to these poems as “situationship poems” that grapple with the idea of romance and love (probably some of my most vulnerable but also my most funny poems). I’ve also been writing about my chronic illness (thinking that will be a chapbook project) as well as what I call “apocalypse poems” or perhaps more specific “modern pastorals”. Basically I have a lot of projects and it makes me frustrated that they are all getting dammed up because of how opaque and limited the poetry industry is.
Okay okay okay…
To continue on with good news, I was the Spring Poet-in-Residence for Tiny Spoon Literary Magazine where I facilitated poetry workshops on what I call body poetics. The workshop was so fun and a few writers that I admire actually attended my class and had said they had a good experience! What was also cool about this opportunity is that it was at the same time as I was asked by Shades of Honey to do an in-person poetry workshop. So basically for this workshop series I did an in-person event AND a virtual event, which is fantastic and I would love to continue offering as many avenues of accessibility for my work as possible. (Shoutout to Shades of Honey too, def one of my favorite Colorado-based arts organizations!).
I was also selected to be included among the Fall 2022 cohort for the artists-in-residency Milkweed Learning Hub at the Chrysalis Institute. This was such a cool opportunity to meet other artists and to explicitly address my emotional and mental health as it relates back to the artist life. One of those things I didn’t know I needed in my life until I had it. And word on the street is that this virtual residency also has an in-person component and I may or may not be attending an in-person residency in Fall 2023. Stay tuned!
Look at all these words, lol! How could I possibly say 2022 was not a success when I consider all of this luck that has been granted to me. So thankful for the support of my family and friends and these organizations who have highlighted my work.
PUBLICATIONS OF 2022 (Poems and Media Features)
On one hand I want to say that I didn’t publish as much as I did in 2021. But like, you just read the previous sections, so you can already see that doesn’t make much sense to say. So I want to provide links to the poems I published.
First I want to say that I LOVE context. I have a little proverb I tell myself, that the only thing we can always use more of is context. When I sign books, I often include a number of hashtags and one of them is simply #MoreContext. I like to imagine people put that hashtag on twitter and it comes up empty and they get all confused– in a way performing out the need for more context for #MoreContext (lol). For some reason, people believe that context is explanation, and that explanation takes away the magic of art. As for me, I believe context only deepens the art and makes visible connections/citations/networks in the art that may not be apparent. Plus, I consider my art as other beings in and of themselves, with lives separate from mine just as much as they are directly connected. One thing I love about posting my poems on Instagram is that I can write long-ish (they have a character limit *eye-roll*) captions that peak into my inspirations for writing. I love doing it– to me, my poems contain so much [of my] life that readers can’t possibly glean on their own.
Okay so here are a bunch of links to podcast features, interviews, and poems– in chronological order from most recent (late 2022) to less recent (early 2022):
“Aerik Francis – The Waystation Podcast” / The Waystation Podcast / The Chrysalis Institute / Audio Interview / December 2022 / Online_The Limits of Language_ / The Nation / Print and Online / November 2022
_Gigan for Contemporary Autumn_ / Smoke and Mold / Issue 7 / Online / November 2022
Reader Talk-Back, Dear Senthuran: A Black Spirit Memoir / The CultSTATUS Arts Haven - Hoo-Doula/Voo-Doula / guest feature / Nov 2022 / Online (Featuring marathon reading of Dear Senthuran text in full )
“What is Fashion Coup?” / Fashion Coup with DJ Alisha B radio show / guest feature / October 2022 / Online
_I Haven’t Been Writing_ / Kissing Dynamite / Issue 46 / October 2022 / Online
Meet Aerik Francis / published written interview / Canvas Rebel / October 2022 / Online
“Episode 5: Aerik Francis and Nico Wilkinson: Poetry, Performance, and Perspective” / Western Colorado Writers Podcast / Interview / September 2022 / Online
Metro Arts & Sacred Voices / radio interview / KGNU / September 2022 / Online
_Bodies of Water_ and _Pulsing_ / Slamming Bricks Anthology Vol 2 / September 2022 / Print
BODYELECTRONIC Conversation Series: A Dialogue with Aerik Francis and Vincente Perez / July 2022
The Chapbook / Bull City Press podcast / Poetry audio feature / July 2022 / Online (Featuring poetry reading of _Inbox_, originally published in the chapbook BODYELECTRONIC)
Deerfield Public Library Podcast / Queer Poem-A-Day / Poetry audio feature / June 2022 / Online (Featuring poetry reading of _GPOY as Rainbowfrog.gif_, originally published in HAD, October 2021)
_House Song_ / DWELL Poetry Anthology / South Broadway Press / June 2022 / Print
_Academia Abecedarium_ , _Competitive Edges_, _Casually Cruel_, and _Grateful_ / New Delta Review / June 2022 / Online
Interview with Aerik Francis, Spring Tiny Resident / published written interview / Tiny Spoon Literary Magazine / April 2022 / Online
_Apocalypse Party_ / Bat City Review / Issue 18 / March 2022 / Print
Conversations with Aerik Francis / published written interview / Voyage Denver / February 2022 / Online
So thankful for all the individuals and editors and artists who have collaborated with me in all of these projects! The thing that always surprises me about publications are the little connections that bloom as a result. There is a kind of momentum that develops with these sorts of things, so thank you to all the folks who keep me moving.
PERFORMANCES
The real boon of 2022 was in performing my poems. This is the realm in which I can see what & how my poems affect people in real time. For me so much of the magic of poetry is in its dynamism, how it appears on the page and how it appears in the air.
And frankly, outside of education, this is also the realm in which the money is made for poets. For the most part I don’t really get financial compensation for publishing poems (although I have been surprised at how more publications are making this a priority! And I’m thankful for the times my work was financially compensated after being published!). And when I first started performing, I didn’t really get paid for that either. But this year marked a shift in that for me, and organizations were more willing to give me money for my performance work. Yay!
This year I got to perform for so many different and lovely audiences. I got to perform in rooms full of Black folks, full of Latine folks, full of queer folks, full of trans folks, full of youth, full of non-poetry lovers. I got to perform a number of times alongside musicians and even to my own music. Book releases, conferences, burlesque venues, open mic features… I got to even perform not just in Denver but also Aurora and Boulder and Colorado Springs and Grand Junction. I performed in Atlanta (just an open mic, but still) and in New Mexico, as well as virtually in the Bay Area.
Another thing that surprised me is my repertoire. Y’all, I have dozens of poems memorized at this point. I’m not even sure how I did it, sometimes the poems enter my memory through osmosis, it seems. But so many of these performances were with a full set of memorized poems, which is cool because I just show up empty handed but fully embodied and then an hour goes by of just me sharing poems off the top of my head. It’s so cool. For instance, I recently just memorized my poem “The Limits of Language” that recently appeared in The Nation, and it just feels good to say it all outloud and know that these words exist in me.
I’m actually a little scared for 2023 in that I am not sure I will be able to replicate this kind of success this year. I dunno, we’ll see!
Here is a full list of ALL my performances this year, more than I’ve ever had before!
Transgender Day of Remembrance event featured poet / Transgender Center of the Rockies / Space Annex Denver / Denver, CO / November 2022
Featured poet for Off the Clock Vaudeville Variety show / The Clocktower Cabaret / Denver, CO / November 2022
Featured poet for CO-CEAL event / Regis University / Denver, CO / November 2022
Southmoor Elementary 4th Grade Poetry Night Guest Poet / Southmoor Elementary / Denver, CO / October 2022
Flowetry poetry feature / Redline Contemporary Art Gallery / Denver, CO / October 2022
Book Release event for Crisosto Apache’s GHOSTWORD feature performer / Counterpath / Denver, CO / October 2022
Keeping Colorado Springs Queer poetry feature / ICONS / Colorado Springs, CO / October 2022
National Poetry Day featured poet / Community College of Aurora / Aurora, CO / October 2022
Guest Facilitator for 2022 National Latinx Writers Gathering / Albuquerque, NM (virtual) / October 2022
BODYELECTRONIC official in-person release event (featuring Meca’Ayo Cole, Liza Sparks, and DJ Alisha B) / Counterpath Press / Denver, CO / September 2022
3rd Annual Latine Heritage Month Story Hour / poetry feature for Lil Miss Story Hour / Fiestas Patrias / Colorado Springs, CO / September 2022
4th Annual Slamming Bricks Poetry Slam (1st place in the slam!) / Grand Junction, CO / September 10, 2022
Shades of Honey poetry reader / City Park / Denver, CO / August 2022
Sacred Voices poetry feature / BookBar / Denver, CO / August 2022
48 hours of Engaged Art: Roots Radical performance feature / Slam Nuba: The Guillotine Hip-Hop show / Redline Contemporary Art Center / Denver, CO / August 2022
[margins] literary conference (performance with Slam Nuba and panelist with Shades of Honey) / Denver, CO / August 2022
ArtPark Studios event featured poet / Denver, CO / July 2022
Nomadic Press’s GET LIT reading series / virtual (Oakland, CA) / July 19 2022
BODYELECTRONIC conversation series / virtual event / July 17 2022
Dwell: A Poetry Benefit feature performer / The Village Institute / Denver, CO / June 2022
OOZE featured poet / Ashokra Farm / Albuquerque, NM / June 2022
Punketry 5th Anniversary featured poet / Mutiny Information Café / Denver, CO / June 2022
Micro-Poetry Event with The Lickety~Split and The Offing feature performer / Online (streamed on instagram) / June 2022
Book Release event for Jessica Lawson’s GASH ATLAS feature performer / Counterpath / Denver, CO / June 2022
ArtPark Studios event featured poet / Denver, CO / May 2022
Counterpath Opening Event feature performer / Denver, CO / May 2022
Listen to Your Skin Jazzetry feature performer / Denver, CO / April 2022
Tiny Resident poetry workshop / virtual / April 2022
Shades of Honey poetry workshop / Denver, CO / April 2022
ArtPark Studios event featured poet / Denver, CO / March 2022
Mutiny Information Café Open Mic featured poet / Denver, CO / March 2022
Poetry for Personal Power brunch featured poet / Denver, CO / February 2022
Creative Strategies for Change featured performer / Denver, CO / February 2022
Diversity Day featured performer with Slam Nuba / St. Mary’s Academy / Denver, CO / February 2022
I try my best to keep my website updated, so you can find all of my past events as well as my upcoming events here: https://www.phaentompoet.com/events (you may notice that I do indeed have a number of events coming up– how exciting!)
STATS AND SUPERLATIVES
Rejections are always the secret hiding behind any successes. I got a lot of rejections this year. I applied to all sorts of poetry fellowships like the 92Y Discovery Prize (which is technically due today and I have not started my app, lmao. They extended the deadline to Monday though, so I still have time) or Cave Canem or the NEA grant (that I was newly/barely eligible for) or the Ruth Lilly fellowship (also barely eligible– I think this year is the final year I can apply, it’s only for poets under the age of 30 and guess who turned 30 in 2022 -_-). My poems were getting nothing but rejections until August, where I had a sudden burst of acceptances (many of which are still forthcoming. Who knows when they’ll come out– maybe tomorrow, maybe next week, maybe next month, maybe next year, maybe never– who knows!).
Poetry is a waiting game, and it’s long. A poem you write today may never be officially published until years later (or, possibly, can come out next week with a lucky quick-turnaround). My poem “Apocalypse Party” is a go-to poem that I’ve been performing since like 2020 and it only was published in Spring of 2022 after receiving many rejections (despite being a poem that seems to be a crowd favorite and one people constantly request me to perform).
So anyway here are some of the stats I collected about my submissions this year based on some spreadsheets I [mostly] maintain through the year:
Statistics: (some of these numbers are not numbering, but whatever lol)
Total Submissions: 75
Total Acceptances: 13
Total Rejections: math lol (40?)
Pending: 22
Book: 32 (4 finalist)
Chapbook: 4 (1 winner)
Fellowship: 10 (3 winners) (one of these was just a job and not a fellowship, but i included it because i still applied thru submittable I think. Basically I got to read grants for the Poetry Foundation)
Single Poem: 32 (9 accepted)
Performances total: 34 shows (~3 month)
Honestly, these are pretty good acceptance rates! I’m not mad at all, and I definitely need to submit more this year (which inevitably means get more rejections this year, what a goal lol).
I also wanted to include my favorite books and music this year because it is something I’ve shared annually (not consistently anyway) for a while now. Surprisingly, I found I listened to less music and read fewer books this year than previous years. My Spotify Wrapped hours were smaller than I usually get, and I think I only read like 30 or fewer books total this year. BUT I read more prose this year than I have (including starting [and not finishing yet lol sorry!] Beloved by Toni Morrison). And I was included in a reading group on Style where we read all sorts of genres as well as essays/articles, so that counts in my reading too even if it wasn’t just books. I was also included in a writing group this year, and so another possible explanation is that I was simply preoccupied with writing and other things. Anyway, here are my top 5 albums and books, along with 2 top choices of chapbooks and EPs (again, I love small projects and I want to give them their deserved recognition).
Fav Music Projects:
Renaissance – Beyoncé
Nymph – Shygirl
Hypnos – Ravyn Lenae
Caprisongs – FKA twigs
Iota – Lous and the Yakuza
Save Me – Empress Of (EP)
Raving Dahlia – Sevdaliza (EP)
Fav Reads:
I’m So Fine: A List of Famous Men and What I Was Wearing – Khadijah Queen
Bluest Nude – Ama Codjoe
Gash Atlas – Jessica Lawson
Potted Meat – Steven Dunn (Novel)
Always A Relic Never A Reliquary – Kim Sousa
Black/Under – Ashanti Anderson (chapbook)
Spells of my Name – I.S Jones (chapbook)
END OF NEWSLETTER
Wow, you made it here. Thanks for reading! I think I’ll spare you all from writing anymore about what I have planned for 2023, but I feel particularly ambitious!
The reason for such a long first letter is because it is something I should have done ages ago and am now just playing catch-up.
Okay so what will the next newsletters look like? Answer: whatever I want! Maybe I want to share my stache of tiktoks with cats. Maybe I will give previews on my new music. Maybe I will just advertise events I have coming up (REMEMBER THAT I HOST SLAM NUBA EVERY FINAL FRIDAY AT REDLINE ART GALLERY IN DENVER, CO! EVERY FINAL FRIDAY! WITH MY SISTER ALISHA DJING! IT’S A FUN TIME!). Maybe I’ll write essays! Who knows, but now you have another way of connecting with me and hearing me rant about whatever, in this case, myself.
Okay, no more for now. Until next time friends & spirits, thanks for stopping by The Haunt.
–phaentom[poet] aka Aerik