What I Learned in Grad School — Blackbird Archive

← v15n2, Fall 2016

What I Learned in Grad School

Sometimes, in grad school, we’d sit around talking about who was publishing what where. This always ended bitterly. Bitter feelings all around. Once, a rival poet (we were all suddenly rivals) confessed he had a secret font. He called it the “Publish Me” font. He claimed that every time he submitted poems in this font, they got accepted. Of course we asked him the name of this font, but he smugly declined to share.

humor work art

Beth Ann Fennelly

Beth Ann Fennelly’s third book of poetry, Unmentionables , will be published by W. W. Norton in 2008. Her previous collections are Tender Hooks (Norton, 2004) and Open House (Zoo Press, 2001), winner of the Kenyon Review Prize in Poetry. Fennelly is an assistant professor at the University of Mississippi and lives in Oxford, Mississippi.