Lessons from Miss Moore
In his blog, Charles writes about recently receiving a bunch of rejections. It prompted me to think about the ungodly number of rejections I have gotten since I first started sending out poems. It can all be so humiliating. That said, you just can't take it too seriously. And I am not saying that Charles is taking it seriously. This is more a general "you."
My poem, "Vespers," was rejected 17 times before it was taken by The Southern Review. That same poem went on to be included in Best American Poetry. My poem, "Sotto Voce," was rejected 38 times. On the 39th time out, it was accepted at Poetry. In fact, 42% of my poems have gone out 18 times or more before being accepted! And I don't simultaneously submit my work. I guess what I am trying to say to anyone reading this is that you have to keep the faith. Write the absolute best poems you can and then believe in them. If you start to not believe, revise them. Or, you can follow Donald Justice's cagey advice: "The trash can is always hungry, and we simply don't feed it enough."
I know poets who give up on poems after sending them out 6 or 7 times. Marianne Moore wouldn't retire a poem until it had been out 40 times. Well, if Marianne Moore can suck it up and send poems out 40 times, then so can I. She has been my model for submitting work for a long time now. I think she is a good model.
posted by C. Dale @ 11:01 PM
9 comments
9 Comments:
Thanks for this post, it's very encouraging. I've been pretty much a slacker at submissions. It's not that I don't want to publish--I just lose confidence when I start the submission process and usually give up before I send anything out. But hey, like you said, if Moore can suck it up, so can I. Appreciate the motivation!
jenni
Thanks for the perspective. I get sort of "Chicken-Littleish" about these things sometimes when I feel like I haven't made any positive progress in a while. I don't like stasis. Well, I don't like moving backwards, either. But you know what I mean.
C. Dale,
I'm curious how you deal with those poems you become attached to, but that hit that "40 no" mark. Do you find yourself saving them for your ms, in general?
Those statistics really are encouraging. But if you don't simultaneously submit and submitted a poem 39 times, I suspect you must have started submitting it before you were born! I also heard a Pulitzer Prize winner say his average was about 10%--ten poems rejected for every one accepted.
On another topic, I can't say I see any correlation between "difficulty" and quality. It seems there are great poets who are difficult (Stevens, Eliot) and great poets (Keats, Whitman) who are "easy." Not to mention that there's plenty of bad difficult poetry and bad easy poetry. James Joyce is another example. While Ulysses epitomizes a difficult masterpiece, Finnegans Wake (except for a few wonderful passages) seems NOT to have stood the test of time. Will John Ashbery's work someday be seen as another Ulysses or another Finnegans Wake?
Hi all, I haven't sent a poem out 40 times yet. I usually get it accepted, or revise it and get it accepted, or throw it away. I am not sure what I would when I hit 40. I would probably rewrite the poem completely or throw it away.
And it isn't that hard to send out poems 39 without simultaneously submitting. It just means poems that come home go back out within 48 hours. That simple. I started submitting poems to journals in 1992. I have published almost 100 poems. I have never simultaneously submitted. I study my markets. I am courteous. Everyone thinks sim subs are the answer. They aren't.
Robert, Whitman was not considered easy when he was first published. Some people thought his work was a sign of madness! You are coloring the past with present day goggles. And Keats was ridiculed for his archaic diction when he was alive. He was actually scorned by some as a doctor who knew nothing about verse.
I like Ashbery but I still wonder if he's, well, the Schoenberg of our time. Whitman may have been considered an incoherent lunatic but I doubt anyone will ever call him the Schoenberg of his time (maybe the Stravinsky, but that's different)! On another subject, I could tell you about my hilarious experience at the Aveda store in Stonestown. The woman kept asking me, "Do I scare you? I scare a lot of people ...."
There is absolutely NOTHING scary about Aveda! Do tell.
Fine words, C. Dale. All of it requires sincerity. Believing in one self, yes, but hardest is knowing, sensing that what one is doing is right. This degree of self-honesty is most difficult to achieve. We tend to be our own worst critics.
Alberto
The Aveda Woman was not really scary, though she was dressed in vampire fashion with multiple piercings. In fact she was so nice she got me to stay in the store for 30 minutes trying various scents, even though I'm usually the typical "guy" who gets in and out of a store in 30 seconds. But when she held a vial of some scent toward my nose, I couldn't smell anything so I took it from her to hold it closer, and she misinterpreted my gesture as "Get back, Satan Girl, get back!" We straightened it out, though, as she guided me to my "personal scent" of sandalwood and ilang-ilang.
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