Rejection: It's not you, it's you

I receive a fair number of rejections from editors apologizing that they can’t accept my work right now. Such rejections always raise the same question in me: Well, why the hell can’t you?

Because, see … they can.

Editors can accept or reject anything they want. There’s no law that says my twelve-line poem about my cat can’t be placed in the Such-and-Such Review, and an editor who is physically capable of sending me a rejection is certainly able to plop a poem down on a page.

What editors mean when they say they can’t accept my work is that they won’t. They don’t like it enough. They don’t want to devote space to it. It may not, in fact, be good enough.

I really wish editors would stop pussyfooting around to spare writers’ feelings. A rejection, or a string of rejections, actually provides very useful information for a serious writer. When my work is rejected, I know that it’s not connecting with a particular (and small) real-world audience, and I need to find a different audience or write different work. I don’t get that information when the poem is sitting in my notebook or on my computer desktop. I may also get the indication that it doesn’t work on its own, or in a particular combination. A rejection may be a signal that I need to revise; it’s certainly a signal that I need to write more.

I’ve written the text of rejection notes, and it’s a hard thing to do, but I always tried to avoid the suggestion that I’m not able to accept a piece of writing right now. That same submission won’t be any more acceptable to me in a week, month, or year, unless something radically changes about my submission pool or my aesthetic judgment. If I don’t want work now, I pretty much never want it. It’s a hard truth, but there you go.

Ideally, a rejection note should offer thanks and then articulate a simple no. I like to say, “Although we are not accepting your work, we wish you luck in placing it elsewhere.” Different editors, with different aesthetics, may leap on the work I reject, and I hope they do.

An editor may respond by talking about space issues, of course. I’ve certainly seen long prose pieces that I absolutely loved but that I rejected because of length. Could I have accepted them, though? Absolutely. If the 2016 version of Moby-Dick arrives and I’m smart enough to see that, holy hell, this thing is Moby-Dick!, then I can certainly cancel everything and put it in print. I may have to dump everything else and do some fundraising and shorten my print run, but there’s no reason I can’t publish anything I wish. This is particularly true for online publications, where space for a long story costs the same as space for a small one.

When work grabs us by the neck and compels us to share it with our audiences, we make room. When my rather small poems are rejected, it means that someone has chosen not to make room. A smart writer takes that information and goes back to her desk and tries like crazy to write something better.

Vetting the maybe pile

            “Sorry” only seems to be the hardest word. As it turns out, “Maybe” is much more difficult.

            When choosing work to publish, editors face three varieties. There are works we look at that merit an instant and obvious “no.” There are, on very rare occasions, things we know we can’t possibly live without, and these get an instant (or at least a swift) “yes.” And then there are the maybes.

            In my earlier incarnation as an editor, I was known to be a fast reader. Some submitters loved that; they sent work and I responded to it either immediately or within a few days. Obviously, most of the responses were rejections. I hope it goes without saying that this is because submissions numbered in the thousands and my journal could print only about fifty works in an issue. Because of sheer numbers, the chances are overwhelmingly strong that any submission to a reputable magazine will be rejected.

Although I have always welcomed, and strongly encouraged, simultaneous submissions so that good work would not be tied up as I considered it, my speed ensured a quick response that made the practice a bit unnecessary. (I wish this were still the case! I am quite a slow reader these days—something I am working to turn around.)

What made me so fast was years of reading lots and lots of work, and getting a feel for what stood out. If a poem seemed remarkable to me, someone who read many thousands of individual poems by a large pool of writers each year, I could presume that my journal’s readers, too, would find something of interest there.

To recast that slightly, I should say that I quickly learned to spot a “no,” even among work that was quite moving or proficient. I daresay I rejected more good poems than bad ones over the years; what, after all, is a “bad” poem, anyway? An attempt to say something true in the best language at one’s disposal is hard to classify as bad, even when it falls short—and even when it fails entirely. There is something very honorable in the honest effort.

The journal I edited had a top-down structure that was, and remains, unusual. The main editors read everything, and the promising work went to a larger group for discussion. Many magazines send work up the chain of command, and the problem with this is obvious; interns, students, and volunteer readers are typically less experienced and can therefore be less adept at spotting the better work, most particularly that good work that operates on a quieter level. (In poetry, it’s easy to spot the stellar image that instantly melds with your DNA and changes you; it’s a little harder to see a complex argument unfold and change your thinking—and this is especially difficult in a submission pile.)

As a chief reader, I was able to reject on the spot, and I needed no other opinions to do it. I sent the slip immediately, always with my appreciation, and always with the understanding that I may have missed something (and probably did) by going solo and working rather quickly.

Some of the work I rejected was more than just good-because-creative-expression-is-noble. Some of it was plain old good, as in publishable. I’m always surprised by the sheer volume of publishable work that journals receive. People are writing astonishing and moving things that readers will never see. There’s an embarrassment of riches in the literary world, and rejections are not a strong indicator of whether one’s writing has worth. But editors are putting together a journal that reflects an aesthetic, and in which the entries harmonize and play off of each other. They’ve already accepted pieces that may not work well with a submission. They may have published something similar two issues ago, not that a writer should be expected to know this. Writing is art, but what editors do also approaches that standard; editors are creating something that they, too, want to hold up to readers’ scrutiny.

So it’s very easy to say no to the work that isn’t of highest merit, or the work that doesn’t fit in some way, or the work that is too long to merit the space it would require, or the work that has a format that would not be shown to good advantage in the journal’s own format. It takes less only a couple of minutes, usually, to make this determination, and then a couple more to inform the writer of the decision.

This leaves a small stack, real or virtual, of work that is harder to turn down—work that needs another set of eyes, or work that an editor knows she shouldn’t print (too similar, maybe, to what has come before) but loves and wants to anyway. I call it the maybe pile.

The maybe pile is where an editor spends most of her time. I’ve had days when I’ve done nothing but agonize over a handful of submissions in the maybe pile, weighing feedback, eyeballing options, rereading and rereading again.

Remember how I mentioned the instant yeses that an editor encounters? Well, for me, those were so rare that not every issue included them. Most yeses languish a bit in the maybe pile, where they stand a chance of finding an editor’s favor. It is in the maybe pile that we editors start relationships with writers—and maybe one-sided ones; there are a lot of writers out there who see a cordial rejection slip and don’t realize that I’m a fan of theirs and I’m pulling for them.

Incidentally, the maybe pile is also where those upper-tier rejections are pulled from. Things in the no pile tend to receive a standard rejection. The maybe pile yields more personalized rejections, with editors pointing out a particular title that came close or asking the writer to send again.

Editors have plenty of work. If they ask a writer to send again, they mean it. And if you think about it, a lot of good things in life start out as a maybe. Maybe I’ll take this job, marry that person, adopt this cat, move to this city. Maybes have massive potential—even if this time around they turn out to be a maybe not.

Hard seats, ethereal words: A case for shorter readings

I love going to readings … but I’m also a fan of leaving readings. When reading work, whether as a featured reader or in an open mic, less really is more.

            For the past thirty years or so, I’ve been a pretty avid attendee of readings. In my younger days, I’d happily drive three hours to hear a poet I liked. I’ve always collected those experiences—the time I heard or met so-and-so—and even more importantly, I’ve collected details about an artistic life and the process of creation.

            Through hearing readers live, I’ve been exposed to stories about where a particular poem, essay, or work of fiction came from, and, perhaps more usefully, how the writer positioned himself or herself to receive it when it arrived. I like hearing about writers’ habits—when they write, where, how often, with what. All of my early exposure to writers taught me quite a bit about the many ways I, too, could live a writer’s life.

            But even when I go to great effort to get to a reading, for me, it never fails—when readers overstay their welcome, my eyes glaze over.

            I’m going to go ahead and throw out a number here. Someone who is invited to give an individual reading should plan for no more than thirty-five minutes of material—because thirty-five minutes is as much as I can easily (or happily) process from a seat in the audience.

             What do I mean by thirty-five minutes of material? For a prose writer, that could be a story or two. For a poet or a writer of flash prose, that may be a dozen or more pieces, but it includes the talk between the work—the introductions of individual poems or the light banter that serves as a segue between work. With a five-minute buffer for late arrivals and a brief introduction, an hour can be nicely filled. A Q&A afterwards is part of the culture in some places, and I always enjoy them—at that point, we’ve switched from counting pieces of paper in a writer’s hand and wondering how long we’re going to sit there to a new activity, one that is lively and multipartite.

            Incidentally, the conversation between individual works is a wholly necessary aspect of a reading, especially a poetry reading. It’s just too taxing for the audience if a reader moves from one poem to another without a few words in between to offer a break. I’m the first to admit that some people are better at this than others. Some people have a gift for improvisation, and some are natural comedians. It’s nice, at the very least, when one is pleasant. These small intermissions should offer a break from the work, while stopping short of pulling the audience into a different mood.

            Poetry requires a very specialized form of concentration. We have to keep our wits about us to understand language that is, by its nature, dense. (That’s the main earmark of fine poetry, to me—concentration of language, in which every syllable has been scrutinized and every stress carefully placed.)

            And there’s another type of thought that we draw on to really appreciate a poem—or, more accurately, it’s a cognitive process that is behind thought, in the active sense. We have to hear words in combination and try to understand them in all of their density, but we also have to be attuned to something beyond all of that—some feeling that is evoked, some presence. The poems I like best transport me beyond the words, beyond the room—and we aren’t transported through analysis; we’re transported through sense.

            Readings contain an element of the tantric, in that they transport divine energy through all of those present. But the word “tantric” evokes the idea of tantric sex, misunderstood in our culture to be little more than sex that lasts hours and hours. Trust us Westerners to take something nourishing and simultaneously limit it and super-size it to its most wasteful extreme. Poetry has the capacity to convey these sorts of vibrations and to elevate a listener—but I’m not necessarily in prime condition for a long, sweaty, intense poetry session.

            There was a time in our history when people were in condition to hear a long oration. We’d all settle in at the feet of Jonathan Edwards to hear “Sinners at the Hands of an Angry God,” and when he was done, we’d be waving our lighters, begging him to do “Freebird.” There wasn’t going to be anything worth watching on TV for another 215 years or so, and one can only do so much quilting.

            These days we have shorter attention spans, and I suspect that even the most practiced listeners find a brief presentation much more satisfying.

Genre and the writer

            Like a lot of writers, I work in more than one genre. I gravitate toward poetry most of the time, but sometimes the essay draws me.

            Poems and essays are similar—more similar than fiction is to either genre. They both have argument as their spine, each making a case, gentle or strident, for some position. It’s not a typical way to think about poetry, and it’s certainly not the only way, but it’s true—most poems attempt to make some point, and they do it through evidence, often of the quietest sort. Components of the argument can even be tacit.

            There is no thesis to most fiction. Things happen; people feel stuff. In general, though, it’s a different animal than poetry or nonfiction.

            Last night I wrote about an old boyfriend in response to a call for submissions about terrible love stories. The genre was, for me, a no-brainer; a memoir was the only practical way to handle it, since an episodic story about a bad relationship, complete with narrative, would require something out of reach of most contemporary verse—I mean, a ballad might work, or some landlubber equivalent of the sea shanty. “The Ballad of Me and That Ridiculous Jerk I Used to Date” would be a fun novelty, but while I use a lot of humor, I try not to waste my poetry on trifles.

            I could write about that doofus in poetry, of course. For me, such a poem would take the form of a portrait of the guy, or my reaction to some incident during our whatever-the-hell-THAT-was. It could be fun to write a poem from the perspective of the waiter at the sushi restaurant who saw us together in all of our unlikeliness.

            But I don’t always go to the page with a subject in mind. Sometimes I just sit down to write. That, by the way, is when the writing is most interesting, both as a process and in terms of the product.

            Lately I’ve been thinking that my genre selection process is flawed. I realize that I go to poetry when I want to dwell in mystery, and I go to the essay when I think I have some special understanding to articulate. As an essayist, I have it all figured out. As a poet, I just don’t know what to think, and so I let the words duke it out.

            It shouldn’t come as a surprise that I’m a better poet than I am an essayist.

            All writing—even fiction, and including, I suspect, the novel—works better when surprises are in store for the writer. It’s all new to the reader, of course, but I think the writer’s discoveries inform the piece. Astonishment shows.

            There is the writing that we do because we want to write something, and there is the writing that we do because someone expects a piece of writing from us. But the writing that we do because we seek to discover or to understand? That’s the very best stuff. It’s the magician’s hat. It’s the alchemist’s kitchen.

Where do poems come from?

In recent posts, I’ve called for the writer’s personal life to be left off the table in discussions of his or her work. In particular, I questioned our fascination with the idea of risk, and our frequent assertions that poems are good when they “take risks.” (Poems, obviously, “risk” nothing—risk can exist only in the writer, who lives and feels, and the writer’s risk is simply none of our business.)

But let’s make no mistake; I do not see writers as machines and poems as factory widgets. Poems are reflections of their writers. At their very worst, they are still language fashioned toward a purpose—by people who could much more easily have been watching TV or having a good snooze. That’s a righteous pursuit.

At their best, poems are so much more than that. They usually reflect something deeply felt in a writer. They can represent the poet’s intellect at play with an even deeper self. Some people think they’re the result of contact with a superconsciousness—or visitation from a presence beyond us.

People who care about poetry fall along a spectrum somewhere in their beliefs about where poems come from. They may be a result of our intelligence, which is capacious beyond anything suggested by normal daily use. They may be inspired by our subconscious—our dream and fantasy life, our shadow thoughts. Or, at the other end of the continuum from pure human intelligence, they may be gifts we receive from beyond—from a muse, or from God, or from tapping into the collective unconscious.

The way I think of it, poems come from all of these sources. When I’m writing, my intellect is certainly engaged. It can get in the way, too, which is why I sometimes begin with an idea and then engage in freewriting to try to stir up the unexpected. (Sometimes—in the best of times—that original idea dissolves away; having served as a springboard into darker depths, it may have worn out its usefulness.)

I think all serious writers have had the experience of finding a gift on the page—we look at a poem and see a thread running through, whether image or idea, but cohesive, and speaking to us, without us ever consciously putting it there. This may be evidence that poems are the result of mystical visitation, but I think it more accurately signals how expansive the mind is—and how much we know but are not conscious of knowing. Of course it also hints at the beauty and mystery inherent in language, with its words that are exponentially more meaningful in combination with one another than their finite definitions could suggest.

Critics, whether in the workshop or in reviews, have no claim on a poet’s deeper intelligence, or presume that they know anything about a poem’s source. (Interrogating risk is one way that the outsider tries to enter the secret chapel.) But in our conversations about poetry, I do wish we would more frequently acknowledge the sacred, or at least the potential for the sacred.