Rejection
Today reginaclarejane posted a fantastic poem about rejection slips, the kind received by a poet after submitting their work to be published. However, the poem could easily cover the rejection slip received by any writer after submitting their work to be published. They are painful things. A note, letter, slip of paper, e-mail sent to you telling you that your poem or poetry is just not what they are looking for. That your work just doesn't have what they want for their...whatever. It is a depressing thing to receive. And what is possibly more depressing is watching others get published instead of you. For me the worst one was Goblin Fruit. I had worked on a few suiting poems, ones that I thought would work. I had shown them to a few select friends. (where in this world can a person find a good poetry critic that can help improve your writing?? It really is the eternal question) And then I had sent it on. The rejection e-mail I received suggested that I try submitting the poems to a different journal, and also slightly critiqued my poetry, not so much as to improve them, but rather enough to say in a slanted way, this is not what we wanted, and you obviously did not do much work on these. Ugh, I hated it. And then I went and read their new publication chock full of all those people who had been selected. How dreadful, but the poetry that was featured was delightful and did give me some good ideas on poems.
So far I have been published once. And that was in a very new literary journal, that from what I can tell is not well known. It was their first publication, and I could tell that they really wanted poems to publish so that they could well actually publish their first issue. And I could tell from what their website said exactly what kind of poem they wanted. And what did you know, I had just such a poem. One that had been experimentally done, one that truthfully was created by a scrambler online and then had been tweaked by me. In short it was not a good sample of my writing, and it was not something I took a great amount of pride in writing. Having it published was like my first experience at going to a concert. I went to see Yanni with a guy I didn't really like. The music was good, but I didn't really feel it was a "real" concert. Thus was my first publication, I was published, but I kind of felt like it wasn't a "real" publication.
So goes the constant attempt to be published, a strange dream of pseudo-fame. It is almost like attaching a title to your name, "Ah yes, this is so and so and they are published." Ok maybe not quite, maybe it is rather an achievement, something that says, "Look, I have not been wasting my life scribbling words on a page, there is substance there and the rest of the world sees it too!" Ah well, forgive my ramblings, they are the cries of a writer struggling to be heard.
So far I have been published once. And that was in a very new literary journal, that from what I can tell is not well known. It was their first publication, and I could tell that they really wanted poems to publish so that they could well actually publish their first issue. And I could tell from what their website said exactly what kind of poem they wanted. And what did you know, I had just such a poem. One that had been experimentally done, one that truthfully was created by a scrambler online and then had been tweaked by me. In short it was not a good sample of my writing, and it was not something I took a great amount of pride in writing. Having it published was like my first experience at going to a concert. I went to see Yanni with a guy I didn't really like. The music was good, but I didn't really feel it was a "real" concert. Thus was my first publication, I was published, but I kind of felt like it wasn't a "real" publication.
So goes the constant attempt to be published, a strange dream of pseudo-fame. It is almost like attaching a title to your name, "Ah yes, this is so and so and they are published." Ok maybe not quite, maybe it is rather an achievement, something that says, "Look, I have not been wasting my life scribbling words on a page, there is substance there and the rest of the world sees it too!" Ah well, forgive my ramblings, they are the cries of a writer struggling to be heard.