Reject ed Poets Anonymous

So I'm caving, I've been waiting to have positive things to say till I came back to this blog, and nothing different has happened really. I've had some more rejections from mags. Sometimes I have been unable to face sending more poems out and will simply put the rejections aside, knowing that I should get back on the horse, but the memory of that fall is too fresh in my head. Sometime will pass, and I will send some more poems out. But I've been thinking, maybe part of the reason the rejections feel so bad is that we assume that other people are so successful, we only ever see the success stories, see poets when they have been comissioned, getting paid gigs, are launching a pamphlet or book. We never hear about rejections, only the success, which makes our own failures harder to swallow somehow. Of course it is silly to take reassurance from other people being in the same boat, sort of like not doing your homework at school and feeling so much better when you discover who else hasn't either, but we do.

I wonder why poets don't ever mention rejections from mags etc? It would be reassuring to know that all of this is just the nature of the game. If I could hear about poets I know to be good poets being rejected now and then I think I'd feel better, not take it so personally when I experience the same thing, because the thing with rejection is it makes you quiz your own work, wonder if it isn't good, and it's really easy to think that about myself as it is.

I've been worrying that mentioning my rejections would be sort of exposing myself somehow, that people would suddenly see that my work is no good because of the rejections. Perhaps I think of an Emporers New Clothes situation, once they read all the rejections the things that have passed for poems will be revealed as an empty page. The temptation has been to change the subject, but since I think I would feel better for knowing this is happening to even good writers all the time I've decided it would be braver to fess up, and I hope this makes other people feel better somehow about their own experiences.

The rejections have been odd. Some are the standard slip with no more, but a few of them have come back with handwritten notes on the rejection. E.g

"I was really intrigued by these poems."
"Enjoyed these though, Tomatoes most"
"Enjoyed reading the poems, particularly Picturebook Life"

What I am then doing is sort of trying to decrypt what this actually means. Since they have taken the trouble to write something encouraging sometimes, I can assume (?) that the rejection isn't down to the quality of the work. The editors are sort of acknowledging that there is something good in them. When I used to send work out I was getting comments sometimes telling me that the poems were interesting but needed more work (I was young, and definetely wasn't as controlled in my writing; they had a point.) It was as if they saw something good in the poems and were encouraging me to shape my work more. But in this batch of rejections the comments are less easy to know what to do with. There is the tendency to pessimistically think people are being polite, but I don't think I buy that. Editors are anonymous, they don't know you and have nowt to lose by being abrupt. They are busy, and have to read alot of work and don't want to encourage people to send in more work for them to read if it isn't interesting. So I am left wondering what these sorts of rejections say about my poems, and am left thinking that perhaps these people are not rejecting them because they don't recognise they are good, but because the poems simply don't fit in with the type of work/tone of the magazine in question. I have been trying to tailor work to the magazine, but this is really difficult. Most often my work doesn't seem to fit the tone of any of the magazines. I am interested in what this poses- an option for me as a poet then to change the tone of my work somehow to become more like other people's? This seems to be a possible way to gain more recognition in terms of magazine publication. But there is some part of me that would feel unfulfillled by this, by ceasing to write about the things that seem important to me, and poems I hope are doing something I beleive in somewhere. I wonder how other writers negotiate these problems, wonder why the poems I write I rate above others are never the ones other people like? I suppose writers have to think about these things, and wonder what it says about their own work. I have been thinking about this, but I don't have answers yet.

Sometimes I tend to devalue work that felt easier to write, or that didn't make me feel anything when I read it after. Perhaps the work is tied up with the process, but sometimes there is more to it. Some work seems more acceptable because it has a reference point in terms of what it is like, about, or its tone, and maybe this is the work magazines tend to select because they feel comfortable with it. Some of my work isn't designed to make people feel comfortable, as I have been challenging myself to write about things that I am uncomfortable with, people who have broken the rules, and are sometimes untouchable. I am holding onto the belief sometimes that the work isn't bad, but that maybe it doesn't fit in, and I suppose hoping that someone will see some beauty in amongst all the ugliness, and maybe take a chance.

Writing wise the Marilyn poems are at a stage were they seem mostly finished, there are about a dozen of them I think, and I have been surprised by the tenderness in them towards the male characters. There isn't any judgement, and I didn't expect that. I thought that I thought all these men were bastards, but when I wrote I realised they were just people. Just people who loved someone, but didn't know what to do, didn't always know what to say.