not under warranty

Bad rejection: We are mailing back most of your manuscript because our office’s paper shredder shuddered and stopped working after the first handful of pages were fed into it.

loose sheets

I haven’t got a manuscript. I have only a pile of poems.

paying for it

By the time he got his manuscript accepted, he figured he’d spent enough on entry and reading fees to have self-published the book in a first edition hardback of 1000 copies.

technical drawing

A manuscript page so heavily marked with lines and arrows he mistook it at first for a schematic or map.

second to last

He sent his manuscript with twenty bucks only to find out he was runner-up for The Last Unpublished Poet on Earth Prize.

publicide

The poem seemed to have some life while it was passed around in typescript, while under consideration, and as yet subject to revision. But once the poem was published that was the last seen of it.

sacrilege change

[Charles] Lamb then came to Oxbridge perhaps a hundred years ago. Certainly he wrote an essay—the name escapes me—about the manuscript of one of Milton’s poems which he saw here. It was Lycidas perhaps, and Lamb wrote how it shocked him to think it possible that any word in Lycidas could have been different from what it is. To think of Milton changing words in that poem seemed to him a sort of sacrilege. This led me to remember what I could of Lycidas and to amuse myself with guessing which word it could have been that Milton had altered, and why. —Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own (1929)

no taxation without publication

The poetry tax: poetry manuscript contest fees.