.

From Under the Slush Pile by Helen Ruggieri   I’d like to offer some suggestions for putting a poetry manuscript together. I have sent out many with varied negative results. PREPARING THE MANUSCRIPT You need about 50 poems to begin with. If the contest asks for 60 don’t worry because there are at least ten pages of junk in the beginning: inside cover, dedication, acknowledgments,* table of contents, and so on. It will be longer if you add arbitrary divisions** for each section. That should give you at least ten pages’ leeway. *ACKNOWLEDGMENT PAGE This is where you list all the places you’ve published the poems in the manuscript. The editors/judges read it to see if you have published in any decent magazines. If your publications consist of Ergo, Argot, poetry.com, etc., don’t use them. Since poetry is not creative nonfiction, my advice here is to make up a list of publications. Use some decent mags like The New Yorker, Ladies Home Journal Go to the local library and get yourself a copy of Poet’s Market. Find some good places, ones with four stars like Hudson Review or The Partisan Review. Chances are one in a million they’ll ever check. Dazzle them. If you win, you can worry about it then. **ARBITRARY DIVISIONS All the winning manuscripts have these sections in their book. Usually you can't make the connection, but the titles sound real good. Again, use your creativity. Naked on a Slovak Bus or My Russian Orange. It doesn’t matter. Be truthful: have you ever looked at these and had them make sense? Of course not. Use big words to dazzle the readers. They’ll blame it on their own ignorance and why shouldn’t they. This is the time to dip into your "poem bank" where you file good lines that have no home in a poem yet. If you don’t have a bank, start one now. ORDERING POEMS Put the best stuff up front. What do I mean by best? Good question. By best, I mean poems that the grad students who read the incoming won’t get. They’ll assume you’re smart and pass you up the food chain. Use big words or words from another language they won’t be familiar with — Serbo-Croatian or Bengalese. Doesn’t matter what you use because no one will know but a few stray Bengalis or Serbs and they don’t usually end up reading poetry manuscripts. TITLING THE MANUSCRIPT The advice for titling is pretty much the same as supplying section titles. A catchy title with big words that few understand off-hand. For example, "Pentiamento Pizza." No one knows what Pentiamento means — maybe pimento in Italian or something and everybody likes pizza so you can’t go wrong and it gives a nice working class cachet. And if it’s, spelled wrong no big deal. How many people do you know with an Italian dictionary nearby? LASTLY Make sure the page numbers and the table of contents match. Academic presses get all bent out of shape about this. Language presses don’t care. GETTING THE MANUSCRIPT IN THE MAIL      MAKING OUT THE CHECK This is the most important part of the entire process. Double the reading fee. It can’t hurt. Do not double the entrance fee for academic presses. They’ve taken vows of poverty and obedience. PACKING THE MANUSCRIPT Use a 9-by-12 envelope and seal it with strapping tape. It will take lots of energy to open the envelope and possible injure some pages and you’ll get bonus points if their energy damages the manuscript. Don’t bother with a SASE for their reply. If you win, they’ll get ahold of you. And if you don’t win, who cares. Good luck out there in manuscript land. Readers may send comments to madhattersreview@gmail.com, Subject line: From Under the Slush Pile. Comments may be published. to top - from under the slush pile

. . Readers may send comments to madhattersreview@gmail.com, Subject line: From Under the Slush Pile. Comments may be published. to top - from under the slush pile

 

DEER HUNTING SEASON IN OUR COUNTY


                 SOME SUGGESTIONS


Deer hunting season has opened in Cattaraugus (yes. that's right) County and orange is the color of choice for outerwear.  Enjoy Where Worlds Collide, another beautifully recycled article by moi.






        

 

                        WHERE WORLDS COLLIDE: THE WHITE TAILED DEER

 

            This is one of the few places in this country where you can walk down the street

carrying a rifle or a shotgun and no one will pay any attention to you.  Deer are our meat.

Hunting along with garage sales make up our underground economy providing opportunities to

 make some untaxed cashmoney.  When the garage sale signs come down around the end of

October, the “welcome hunters" signs go up.

            In Cattaraugus County about 15 percent of the total housing is listed as “seasonal.”

That is, visitors from out of the area have camps back in the hollows or on hillsides off old

logging trails or pipeline routes.  Many of these seasonal residents occupy their dwellings only

during hunting season.  They buy groceries and liquor and eat out and pick up camping goods,

 hunting gear, ammunition, and sundries.  Some  come in groups and hire a book and

bottlewasher; some stay in rooms in private homes or in small motels.  Business at area

bars picks up.  Local churches run special “all you can eat” breakfasts or dinners, box lunches

extra.  There is no doubt that rural areas benefit economically from hunting.  New York State

 Department of Environmental  Conservation figures the state takes in about $690,000,000

from hunters. Divide that by the 62 NYS counties and you’ll see that’s about $11 million.

That’s quite an injection of funds that stay in rural regions desperate for an infusion of funds.

            Most rural schools gave up and made the first day of deer hunting season a holiday

because absences were so high.  The Monday deer seasons opens, teachers in area high schools

expect to mark time.  However, recent statistics gathered by the State Department of Hunting

have noted a decline in the number of licenses purchased.  The decline began back in the 80s and

continues today.  Researches attribute the decline to lack of family tradition and a decline in

leisure time.

            Cornell University researchers are worried because they see the hunting experience as

one that teaches cultural values.  I am not sure what cultural values they are talking about

because they don’t mention them.  I guess it’s a longing for the past, pure nostalgia.  Remember

when dad went out and shot that deer and we ate venison all winter.  Remember it hung

in the front yard from a tree branch.  Remember that?

            Remember getting up before dawn and going out into the cold darkness with dad.  It’s

killing your first deer;  it’s having blood from the kill rubbed on your forehead, an ancient male

coming-of-age ritual.

            Hunting was a way to get food.  It was for the ancient hunters a way to build loyalty to

the tribe, to teach survival skills to separate the men from the boys.  Sometime during the 19^th

century hunting became a way to make a living.  Buffalo were killed for their tongues and maybe

their skins and the meat lay rotting on the prairie.  The Buffalo hunters were the heroes of the

frontier.  They were romanticized in our folk tales and literature.  They decimated  the herds of

buffalo that roamed the great plains.  Do you want to destroy a people?  Destroy their food

supply.  The native tribes the plains relied on the buffalo for food clothing shelter.  Without the

buffalo, the tribes of the plains had to submit or starve.

            The eastern white tailed deer (odocoileus virginianus) was the staple of life for the Easter

woodland peoples.  Excavations of Hopewell mounds have revealed shoulder blades (use as

hoes), leg bones (awls), and other parts for needles, forks, not to mention the use of hides for

moccasins and clothing.

            The Senecas hunted the white tailed deer.  They too used most parts of the animal for

food, clothing and tools.  In the east the white tailed deer was also hunted almost to extinction in

the decades following the Civil War.  Hungers ravaged the herds, skinned the animals and left

the meat to rot.  The going price was fifty cents a skin.

            In 1888 an observer reported “the deer were hunted with dogs the year round. . . .finally

becoming so scarce that whole winters would go by in many Pennsylvania counties without

anyone seeing a single deer track.”  By the turn of the century it was estimated the deer

population was no more than 350,000 for the entire country according to Mike Sajna/s “Buck

Fever.”

            In the ravaged highlands of the Allegheny Plateau the clear cut areas favored the growth

of browse and deer were reintroduced into the newly created Allegheny National Forest.

            Timbered land was purchased under the auspices of President Calvin Coolidge in 1923. 

the Forest is now about a million acres covering Warren, McKean, Elk and Forest counties in

Pennsylvania, bounded on the west by the Allegheny River and on the north by the New York

state line.

            In Cattaraugus county of the New York side between 1900 and 1935 over 78,000 acres of

farm land was abandoned.  In roughly the same time, the state and municipalities replanted about

20,000 acres with 25 million trees.  Left to themselves in an area of pasture going back to brush

the while tailed deer made an amazing comeback.  Following WORLD War Two deer herds of

forty and fifty were a common sight along the narrow two-lane asphalt roads that served the

county.

            The conservation movement succeeded almost too well.  Now in those same reforested

areas you can look up and see the tips of shrubs and the lowest tree limbs have been nibbled

leaving what foresters call a browse line, a sign of overpopulation.  Come a bad winter, and if you

want a bad winter, this is the place to find it, many deer will starve because herds have outgrown

the food supply.

            What can we do about it?  Wildlife management sometimes extend the hunting season or

add does.  Better a quick death from a bullet than a slow death by starvation, they argue. 

There are too many Bambis and the deer are eating themselves out of habitat.  This, of course,

has nothing to do with the fact that all natural predators have been eliminated from those

reforested areas.  We can’t have wolves or mountain lions eating those cute little deer.

Let’s shoot them.  It’s better for them.  Hunting is good for the forest and good for the ecxonomy

and. of course, good for the deer as well.

            I was listening to my favorite Golden Oldies radio station, WBRR, and the announcer

asked, “What’s the most dangerous animal in Pennsylvania?”  My first thought was man as the

commercial played giving listeners time to think this over.  The answer?  The white tailed deer.

Approximately 50,000 car-deer accidents are reported each year in New York State.

It’s estimated that five times that total are killed or injured and never reported.  They are tossed

into ditches, stagger off into the fields surrounding  the roads, out of sight, you know.

            Lest you think I only delineate the problem and pass on, I have offered a solution here but

no one takes me seriously, not even me.  Perhaps it’s time for a new cultural tradition.   Hunt

deer with vehicles, no snowmobiles or off-road vehicles, but ordinary cars, Toyotas, Chevy’s,

right on the road.  You don’t need a hunting license if you have a drivers license.   No orange

vests or black and red plaid buffalo jackets.  Not even a gun.  Run them down.  Is a fender more

costly than a gun?  Factor in the outfit, the ammo, the hunting license – evens out.  When you see

a buck tied across the funder or strapped to the roof of a car, do you know if it has been hit by a

bullet or by a car?  This would benefit the local economy.  Someone has to repair all those

fenders and front ends. 

It’s actually pretty easy to hunt with your car.  When you see the “deer crossing” sign,

pay attention.  The deer is a territorial animal, tends to stay in the same one or two mile area and

use the same paths over and over until they become well defined trails following the path of least

resistance.  They walk around bushes shrubs rocks or roots in an ambling, rambling pattern  

that would drive a median stripe painter to suicide.  Put an obstacle in their usual route and

they’ll try to go around it until they find the continuation of the path.  This habitual strolling is

what allows the highway departments to put up those “deer crossing” signs.  All a driver has to

do is look the signs.  There are certain stretches of road that are notorious places for deer kill. 

Seldom will you drive by without seeing a carcass, a set of guts strewn over the road.

            Not only do drivers know where deer can be found, but they can pinpoint the time of day

and the season as well.  Most deer are killed in late spring when they come down to the roadside

to browse on the new grass which is tasty with salt washed off the winter roads.  In the fall they

are so spooked by gunshots they heedlessly run into traffic to get away.  Also fall is the mating

season and deer are on the move.

            The average driver has a one in five chance of hitting a deer and the odds go up

especially if one drives at dawn or dusk when the deer seem to merge with twilight and

materialize out the fog.  Since this timing aligns with peak commuting time that hit is just

waiting to happen when your number comes up.

            Scan the roadsides, especially at night when you’ll see the reflection of their eyes as a

bright red glare.  If you miss the first one don’t worry; there’s usually a second following and

you’ll get that one.

            Perhaps the starving deer will commit suicide by throwing themselves in front of cars.  In

that way drivers will assume the role of absent predators such as wolves and wild cats

winnowing out the weak and depressed.

            Car killed deer are sent to state institutions for use.  So orphanages, old age homes

prisons end up with the meat.  You won’t have to eat it.  Most hunters wil tell you that they eat

their kill.  However, if a hunter tenders a recipe for venison you’ll be amazed at the elaborate

preparations, long cooking times and heavy spices they add to get rid of the gamey taste they

claim to love so much.  There is also some dental danger involved with eating shot venison. 

There may br unexpected bits of bone or bullets.

            A Wall Street Journal writer figured out the cost of venison by adding up the amount

hunters spent and dividing it by the average dressed out deer.  This area of mathematical

endeavor not one of my strong points so I rely on this estimate.  He figures the cost of gun-killed

venison at $31.07 per pound, not counting what the butchers charged to prepare it.  The average

car-struck deer costs the insurance company about $1,100 which figures out to $18.33 per pound. 

So this would save you money. 

            Two of American’s most culturally valued activities - hunting and driving - will be

combines in a new and exciting way.  That will certainly rejuvenate a dying tradition.  Perhaps

the Cornell gurus should consider widening the narrow range of cultural values they are trying to

save.  In Pennsylvania who keeps better statistics on hunters – 91 % were males; 97% were

white.

            If we add car hunting maybe more women and ethnic minorities will join the hunt.  A

deer crushed fender will be a status symbol, those dowdy hunting outfits will get some style. 

Teenagers might try hunting on motorcycles, evening the odds a bit.

            All irony aside the moment hunting became a way to make a living or a sport the cultural

value disappeared.  It’s like saying that because the number of golfers is declining, we’re losing

traditional cultural value.

            If I had to eat, I would kill a deer.  It they were nibbling my cashcrop, I would kill a deer. 

Would I go out in the cold November woods filled with armed white males between the ages of

21 and 44 to shoot at one?  Not a chance, sport.