On the occasion of my latest rejection: a brief note to the editor
First, the backstory.
As some of you may know, I’m a writer. I write all kinds of things, but my particular passion is poetry. I’ve been at it a long time, and I feel like I’m pretty good at it. Not all readers agree, of course, but if it were unanimous it probably wouldn’t be art, huh?
Anyway, I went to Iowa State and got my MA in English with a concentration in creative writing. I published as much as I could and wrote relentlessly. Later, I even got to teach creative writing on occasion. But in the early ’90s I pretty much walked away from it. I still wrote, but I quit submitting. Gave up.
Why? Well, I got sick of the rejections. Sort of. Specifically, I got sick of being rejected by a publication, then picking up the next issue to see what they accepted. And seeing the same bland, safe, homogenous pablum that I saw in every other magazine. I once asserted that you take all the poems from any given magazine, strip away the names, and let a good reader try and figure out how many different writers were responsible. Odds are that said reader couldn’t really tell that it wasn’t all by the same (mediocre) writer. Never tested that theory, but I’d still like to someday.
See, the problem is that we have this thing called the Writers Workshop at the University of Iowa (not Iowa State, where I went – the one in Iowa City). In theory the WW is a good idea. Major university putting some resources into cultivating great writers, that’s a worthy idea. And it’s certainly had its share of success stories, including Robert Bly, T. Coraghessan Boyle, Raymond Carver (did not graduate), Rita Dove, John Irving, Tracy Kidder, W.P. Kinsella, Philip Levine, Flannery O’Connor, Jane Smiley, Tennessee Williams and Charles Wright. And so I don’t seem bitchy, let me make clear that the last name on that list is, in my opinion, the greatest poet alive and one of the four or five greatest of the last century.
However, that kind of success can breed homogeneity. There’s an Iowa style, to be sure, and over the years it has assumed the same role the famous academies served in Europe – it has become something of a sanctioning body, and is taken as the unquestioned final word on What Is Good®. For fun, hit the Web sites of any American university with any kind of creative writing program and scan the faculty listings – let me know how many you find that have no Iowa grads on the staff.
All of which is a long-winded, overly detailed way of suggesting that poetry in America at the present moment is a bit stale. While there’s “control” and craft aplenty, with tightly wound 30-liners as far as the eye can see (all based on the assumption that still waters must run deep, and never asking whether still waters might occasionally be a sign that there’s nothing much happening below the surface), there’s precious little verve, fire, innovation, and passion.
If you have an IQ in the upper double digits, you know where this next bit going, don’t you? Right. Frankly, my writing isn’t very Iowa-ish. I can write that style, and have in fact written things in that more conventional mode (and have had a lot of these poems accepted for publication). But my style, my ability, my vision – the things about me that seek greatness (because whether I succeed or fail, greatness is the goal, always) inherently challenge convention.
Now I’m back at my attempts to get my work published. Being a poet, I’ll never play stadiums. Hell, if something is read by a thousand people, that’s the poetry equivalent of triple platinum. But I want to get my work in front of the best and widest audience possible because I feel like I have something worthwhile to say. Sadly, this brings me back around the Poetry Establishment…
I recently submitted a few things, including “Archipelago,” to a fairly new journal affiliated with a small state college. I was optimistic. From what I could tell, this place seemed further removed from the oppressive weight of the WW Academy, so I let myself think they might be up for something that was a little more adventurous.
The rejection letter came today. [sigh] I don’t want to snap back out of anger, but I am composing a brief reply to the Managing Rejector. I may of may not send it. But I’m going to write it and get it off my chest.
Here goes.
________________
Dear _______,
First, let me say thanks for the opportunity to submit my work to __________. Further, I appreciate that you took the time to actually comment on my submission personally. These days writers count themselves lucky if they get even a form rejection with no comment at all.
I do feel compelled to offer a couple remarks on your note, because they leave me at something of a loss for how to proceed. “Archipelago” is obviously something very new in form and structure (not only for me – I don’t recall seeing anything like it from any poet). It’s long, sprawling, messy in places, and is brutally intimate and personal in its attempt to make sense of the suicide of a friend. The poem incorporates a lot of “found” elements, including actual e-mails between myself and others who knew Lars, the victim, so your observation that these pieces “read as if they were actual e-mails” tells me they’re accomplishing what I intended, for good or ill.
However, the real crux of my confusion regards your comment on the suicide note section. You write:
Also, the suicide note was cliché, almost banal; this is a danger with certain subjects and the form did not erase the inherent melodrama.
I admit, I wasn’t trying to erase the melodrama, or anything else for that matter. I was trying to convey, in the rawest form possible, the actuality and fact of the tragedy. This is why I used the actual suicide note. The image accompanying the text on page 11 is a scan of the letter Lars left (written in his native Swedish), and I had it translated by a Swedish friend who was very close to him so as to assure as accurate and contextualized a reading as possible.
Now, I have a hard time assessing your statement that the note is cliché, as this is probably the only one I have ever read closely. (If you have enough experience with suicide notes to make this statement accurately, you have my deepest sympathy – this one was more than I could bear, and I can’t help feeling horrible for anyone who’s had to endure more.) But there’s an obvious tension where the question of how to “write” a suicide note for the poem is concerned. The actual found element, which is as pure and tragic a slice of real life as I have encountered recently, is deemed somehow melodramatic, so I find myself confronting the uneasy possibility that authenticity is not to be found in the authentic, but instead in craft.
That is, as a prisoner of convention, as a man who didn’t “fit” no matter how hard he tried, and who felt driven, in the end, to seek release from the oppression of conformity in the most tragic fashion possible.
I’m not sure what I expect of this exchange – nothing, really. I merely felt compelled to comment on an issue that I, as a writer who feels a passion to reinvent the landscape of my art, see as critically important.
Again, thank you for your time and kind attention, and best of luck with __________.
Sincerely,
Sam Smith
lullaby pit 
I got a few ideas.
Here are two different methods for you to “make it”
1) Move to NYC
2) Become emaciated
4) Pretend to hooked on cheap drugs like Crack, or Meth
3) Pretend to be Gay
4) Fail at everything you do
5) Write a book detailing your struggles, and then make some stuff up for good measure
Title the book “A Million and One little pieces”
6) Watch the sales of your bogus book sell millions of copies while your poetry book sells 100 units.
Or this
1) Get a college teaching job
2) Make the poetry book mandatory reading. Make sure your poetry is written under a different name.
3) Talk about the genius of (your moniker)
I got a few ideas.
Here are two different methods for you to “make it”
1) Move to NYC
2) Become emaciated
4) Pretend to hooked on cheap drugs like Crack, or Meth
3) Pretend to be Gay
4) Fail at everything you do
5) Write a book detailing your struggles, and then make some stuff up for good measure
Title the book “A Million and One little pieces”
6) Watch the sales of your bogus book sell millions of copies while your poetry book sells 100 units.
Or this
1) Get a college teaching job
2) Make the poetry book mandatory reading. Make sure your poetry is written under a different name.
3) Talk about the genius of (your moniker)
So long as you don’t lose your evil streak, you’re going to be a big success in the marketing world.
So long as you don’t lose your evil streak, you’re going to be a big success in the marketing world.
Send it.
Send it.
Well it is a great streak, It might even rival Joe Dimaggio’s hit streak.
Well it is a great streak, It might even rival Joe Dimaggio’s hit streak.
Wow. I like that. A 56-game evil streak.
Wow. I like that. A 56-game evil streak.
Being in Dublin and out of the Iowa loop, I had never heard of Charles Wright until now. I googled him and had a gander at some of his work. Not impressed.
Heaney reackons that you exist and survive as a poet “In your own esteem…uncorroborated by theory,” which I have also found to be the case.
I too did a writing programme, a three year degree at Lancaster University, and I came to Ireland with the dream of becoming a poet, as all I was doing was writing poetry, and my parents are Irish.
I’ve been here two years now and have completely self confirmed and seen through the bullshit of publishing. The fact is that when your work is rejected, it is just one persons opinion, that’s the bottom line, and your poem is the same wether it gets published a billion times over in the most prostigious journals and books, or if it is lying in a locked drawer with only you looking at it.
Publishing, for me, is a state of mind and I have been lucky being in a place full of writers and getting the chance to be around the writer vibe. It’s just a game we play in our own minds, and the poet Paula Meehan said a thing that has stuck with me since I heard it when I first came two two years ago. The setting was the Patrick Kavanagh prize giving for 2004, and the winner was Joe Horgan.
She said that when poets first start out they will storm the literay citadels they imagine exist and they are excluded from, going over the walls, through the walls and under them. But when they eventually get inside, they realise that there is no “There” to get to. The “There” a writer gets to is an entirely self created place in their own mind, exactly what Heaney says. You exist in your own esteem, not because your poems appear in a certain place or becase such a person says you are. Ultimately everyone has there own yardsticks they measure themselves and their work by.
Much of the publishing game is exactly that. The publisher is often a poet with a business nose whose own work isn’t that great, so they act all serious and start to believe in the rubbish they spout, as if poetry is some kind of quantum linquistics and poets scientists. It’s all about playing a role where he publisher and author bluff it out. For example, say the publisher thinks the authors great and has more talent than him, the last thing he’s going to do is reveal that.
So the authors a normal Joe who doesn’t play the game because he doesn’t need to because he’s talented enough to not be bothered with all that, but it’s going to take him a while to suss out exactly what’s going on and how the game works. You are who you are and the main thing is to just plug away in an upbeat manner as that is all the poet can do, because most “genuine” ones will will write no matter what and their success is a by-product rather than the other way round.
Anyone who’s not having a giggle is usually putting on an act and wearing a mask to hide the real them, often a poet with much less ability than they try and give out they’ve got.
The staright facers with the highly serious registers who run publishing are often jealous tight assed knobs who it’s best laughing at
Being in Dublin and out of the Iowa loop, I had never heard of Charles Wright until now. I googled him and had a gander at some of his work. Not impressed.
Heaney reackons that you exist and survive as a poet “In your own esteem…uncorroborated by theory,” which I have also found to be the case.
I too did a writing programme, a three year degree at Lancaster University, and I came to Ireland with the dream of becoming a poet, as all I was doing was writing poetry, and my parents are Irish.
I’ve been here two years now and have completely self confirmed and seen through the bullshit of publishing. The fact is that when your work is rejected, it is just one persons opinion, that’s the bottom line, and your poem is the same wether it gets published a billion times over in the most prostigious journals and books, or if it is lying in a locked drawer with only you looking at it.
Publishing, for me, is a state of mind and I have been lucky being in a place full of writers and getting the chance to be around the writer vibe. It’s just a game we play in our own minds, and the poet Paula Meehan said a thing that has stuck with me since I heard it when I first came two two years ago. The setting was the Patrick Kavanagh prize giving for 2004, and the winner was Joe Horgan.
She said that when poets first start out they will storm the literay citadels they imagine exist and they are excluded from, going over the walls, through the walls and under them. But when they eventually get inside, they realise that there is no “There” to get to. The “There” a writer gets to is an entirely self created place in their own mind, exactly what Heaney says. You exist in your own esteem, not because your poems appear in a certain place or becase such a person says you are. Ultimately everyone has there own yardsticks they measure themselves and their work by.
Much of the publishing game is exactly that. The publisher is often a poet with a business nose whose own work isn’t that great, so they act all serious and start to believe in the rubbish they spout, as if poetry is some kind of quantum linquistics and poets scientists. It’s all about playing a role where he publisher and author bluff it out. For example, say the publisher thinks the authors great and has more talent than him, the last thing he’s going to do is reveal that.
So the authors a normal Joe who doesn’t play the game because he doesn’t need to because he’s talented enough to not be bothered with all that, but it’s going to take him a while to suss out exactly what’s going on and how the game works. You are who you are and the main thing is to just plug away in an upbeat manner as that is all the poet can do, because most “genuine” ones will will write no matter what and their success is a by-product rather than the other way round.
Anyone who’s not having a giggle is usually putting on an act and wearing a mask to hide the real them, often a poet with much less ability than they try and give out they’ve got.
The staright facers with the highly serious registers who run publishing are often jealous tight assed knobs who it’s best laughing at
Start your own publication… Take ’em by storm!
Start your own publication… Take ’em by storm!
With all my spare money in all my spare time, eh? 🙂
With all my spare money in all my spare time, eh? 🙂
One other thing…
Oh, yeah…. I agree with you on the Charles Wright thing, by the way. I discovered him last year and have been trying to gobble up his stuff as much as possible. His poetry is amazing.
One other thing…
Oh, yeah…. I agree with you on the Charles Wright thing, by the way. I discovered him last year and have been trying to gobble up his stuff as much as possible. His poetry is amazing.
Re: One other thing…
I met him once, too – also a very nice guy.
Re: One other thing…
I met him once, too – also a very nice guy.