| On Writing & Rejection |
[Feb. 20th, 2008|11:36 pm] |
| [ | Tags | | | 2 cents, poetry/worldview | ] |
| [ | music |
| | i will follow you into the dark * amanda palmer covering death cab for cutie | ] |
Today I received a very nice rejection from the journal Forklift, OH. With relief.
I don't know if I will ever understand the game that follows creativity. Let's say you're a poet. You write & revise, write & revise, read it aloud, get advice from a friend, write & revise, throw out the middle, fix a bit of syntax & shazaam - you've got a poem you're proud of. Of course, the whole aforementioned process can take months, depending on how you work, depending on the width & depth. Depending on all the interior & exterior factors things tend to depend upon. So then, la-dee-dee-dah, what do you do with your capital P poem? Show it to the parents? Put it under your pillow? Put it in a drawer? Make a little zine? Or submit it to one of the thousands of literary journals? Or maybe submit it to four or five or twenty-five?
Because what does it mean, in 2008 and onwards, in the world of MFA's, if you are not being published, if you never do publish? If you don't publish & you're any good, if you're in anyway notable and/or scandalous, then when you're dead they'll call you An Outsider Artist & find all those terrible poems you never finished and you'll be in some god-awful anthology where there'll be no stylistic or thematic similarity, the only similarity will be that you, the poet, are dead, and they, the other poets, are dead too.
If you pick up any publication that prints poems, from any college rag to the APR, you'll read a bunch of mediocre poems. And maybe, if you're blessed, you'll read one beautiful one.. a poem like Doty's "The Embrace," or something by Frank Stanford, or Anne Carson, or Robert Hayden, or Roethke... you'll read something crafted not by academic exertion but by a need for expression, something terrible in its urgency, something that skips & frets & winks & has to be....
I should have never started submitting to journals, not before I was prepared to be entirely honest with myself. I've done it thus far in a slap-dash way; I submitted to Forklift, OH because my friends Betsy & Matthew (wonderful friends, whose work I respect & enjoy) had been published in the journal, & I supposed that was as good a reason as any. Unfortunately, I submitted before reading a full issue of the journal, which I have at this point done, after picking up a copy at AWP a number of weeks ago. And at this point in time, I would not choose to submit to this journal -- my work doesn't quite jive. My voice isn't... well... wacky enough? I can venture to guess that the poems I sent took themselves too seriously, too darkly. But it would've meant something very strange to me had my work been accepted. I have work out currently at two journals, but this rejection brought with it such a sense of relief that I believe I won't be submitting again for a long time. I'm just not eager enough to be part of the game. |
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