I submitted some poems to Saw Palm, the lit mag of the University of South Florida, the other day.

Over the last few years, as I have dutifully picked up my annual copy of the Poet’s Market, I have watched as publications, big and small, started accepting electronic submissions. Then more and more started indicating that they preferred email to hard copies or, at least, that they made no distinction.

Saw Palm has gone one step further and uses a content management system from Submishmash to handle submissions.

It makes perfect sense and I’m sure if I drilled down far enough, I’d see a lot more publications using this or similar systems.

I can now log onto Saw Palm watch the water boil, which is to say, obsessively check and see if my work has been accepted or not (I’ve got no reason to think I’ll get any sort of answer in less than two months, but that hasn’t stopped me from checking once today already).

As a writer, I am deeply tied to the paper and to the work’s appearance on paper (this blog notwithstanding), but I am very happy to have this new way to send in my work. The last four poems that were accepted for publication were all submitted electronically and my day job basically consists of sitting at  a computer all day (with brief interludes on the phone and the infrequent road trip), so I am no luddite – my occasional anachronisms notwithstanding.

Frankly, it makes it easier for me to send my stuff out to do it this way (and I can do it from the office). Certainly, if the good folks at Saw Palm give me the slightest encouragement, I’ll be sure to send them new material next year.