When I was in high school, I was placed in an honors English class taught by a guy who was supposed to be a fantastic teacher. At some point, he taught a bit of poetry and had us write some poems of our own. I never liked school but, at that point, I thought school couldn’t get any better. At around the same time, our school literary journal was published, and some of my poems were included. It was spring, we were writing poems in English class, I’d read “Little Gidding” by T.S. Eliot for the first time (still my all-time favorite), and a few of my poems were accepted for the school literary journal.
Life was
good until the teacher in question called me up to his desk one day and said (shaking his head and scowling as he did),
in a voice loud enough for the whole class to hear, that I should stop writing
poems because, “Frankly, Miss Kenny, you can’t write poetry.” He went on to
rave about poems written by a boy who was a senior. “Now, if you could write
like Gene, it would be worth your time.” Talk about bursting the proverbial
bubble!
Fortunately,
I was born stubborn and knew I’d never give up writing poems. Years later,
while I was working as a part-time consultant for the state’s Gifted and
Talented Program, I was sent to a nearby school to conduct in-service training
in creative writing for the teachers. As fate would have it, the principal of
the school was my old high school English teacher. Seeing him again produced
the same wretched feeling I had every day when I walked into his classroom. He
pretended not to know me and only attended one of the in-service sessions. On
the last day of the residency, I left copies of three of my books on his desk.
One was inscribed, “For Mr. __________, who told me I couldn’t write poetry.”
As poetry
editor of Tiferet since 2006, it's
been my "job" to choose the most engaging, and sometimes the most theme-appropriate, poems submitted for
inclusion in the journal. The volume of poems we receive is huge (often several
hundred poets submit 3-6 poems each), and individual comments are just too
time-intensive to be possible. We use Submittables, which offers a form decline
note, which isn't my preferred form of reply. I've tried to word the note in a way that doesn't say the poems aren't
good but, rather, just not suited to our current publication needs. I always
presume sincerity on the parts of the poets and wouldn't want to hurt anyone feelings; and I always feel uncomfortable saying "no" to writers, especially
those whom I know and whose work I respect and admire. Of course, I've had my
own share of rejected poetry submissions too. My favorite was one I received
many years ago that was a terse and definitive, “Nope,” written by hand on a
slip of coffee-stained scrap paper. It was, all else notwithstanding,
to the point, and it teetered on the balance point of even-handed and harsh.
On the amusing side of rejections, did
you know that e. e. cummings’ 70 Poems
was rejected by 14 publishers? He renamed it No Thanks and made a poem of the publishers' names:
In 1912, before Robert Frost had established his reputation as a poet, he sent some of his poems to Ellery Sedgwick, editor of The Atlantic Monthly. He received the following reply, "We are sorry that we have no place in The Atlantic Monthly for your vigorous verse." Frost's submission included his now-famous "Birches" and "The Road Not Taken."
In
1944, poet T.S. Eliot was working
at Faber & Faber and wrote a rejection of Animal Farm to George Orwell, “… we have no conviction (and I am
sure none of other directors would have) that this is the right point of view
from which to criticise the political situation at the present time … Your pigs
are far more intelligent than the other animals, and therefore the best
qualified to run the farm—in fact, there couldn’t have been an animal farm at
all without them: so that what was needed, (someone might argue), was not more
communism but more public-spirited pigs.” The work was rejected by at least
four publishers before publication in 1945.
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I thought
it might be interesting to ask some of my poet friends about the most
interesting, funniest, oddest, or most eye-opening poetry put-downs they’ve
received. Their responses follow.
And ... there's a related prompt at the end.
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The
funniest—and also the strangest—rejection I ever received came in the late
seventies, and I believe it was from the editor of the Virginia Quarterly Review. He lambasted me for sexually explicit
poems that were pornographic and disgusting They had no place in a journal like
theirs and he asked me never to submit poems again. I was totally baffled since
anyone who has read my poetry knows that I do not write the kind of poem he
descried. I thought maybe he got me mixed up with someone else but more than
forty years later, I'm still wondering what he saw in my poems, although I read
and re-read them and couldn't find anything.
—Maria
Mazziotti Gillan
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Years ago I
submitted to a journal my baseball poem, “Pisoni,” about an unknown rookie who
substituted for Mickey Mantle in center field the very first time my father
brought me to Yankee Stadium. The poem described how disappointed I was to not
be able to see my hero play that day. A few weeks later I received a form
rejection slip from the journal along with a handwritten message:
We will not publish poems with ethnic slurs!
This
stunned me for I had no idea what they were referring to until I unfolded my
returned poem and saw the editor had circled my line “…but I really wanted to
see The Mick in center field” and I realized he misinterpreted my use of the
popular nickname for Mantle as an ethnic slur against people of Irish descent.
I guess the
editor was not a Yankee fan!
—Ed Romond
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Although so
many poets advise us to save all of our rejections, I broke the rules and threw one
out. This was 15 or so years ago when submissions were still done by snail mail
often with multiple copies of the same poem and stamped/self-addressed return
envelopes. I am grateful very few places still make us go through all of that.
Most of the time I did save the rejections. I even had a labelled file folder
for easier storage.
At the
time, I was circulating a chapbook and spending a considerable amount of money
to enter contest after contest or to pay submission fees. I don’t think my
income, strictly from publishing poems, will ever exceed my expenses. The
chapbook was a series of poems primarily focused on my late husband’s final
illness. The working title was, The Magic
of Dead Things, taken from a line in one of the poems.
Since I
threw out the rejection letter, I no longer remember the name of the publisher
or who wrote the letter, though I recall it was a man. My recollection of the
content of the letter, however, remains quite accurate. It read something like,
“There is nothing “magical” about this collection. In fact most of the poems
seem dead.” It went on for several more sentences in the same vein. The author plainly had a keen
sense of humor along with an empathetic sense of how a submitter might respond
to such a note. Even if the poems sucked, is that a note one would send to a
grieving widow? Had the sender even looked at the poems I wondered? I read the
letter a couple of times to convince myself that someone would both write and
mail a note like that.
Throwing
the letter out seemed the only logical thing to do in the moment and was quite
cathartic. Of course, there is a happy ending. The chapbook went on to be a
finalist in three contests and was published with the title Repairs. The poem from which I took the
line for the earlier title has been widely anthologized. I do not regret
discarding the note. I do regret forgetting who sent it, because I would not
want to give that publisher the opportunity to print my work ever again.
Perhaps that publisher has gone out of business.
—Jessica
deKoninck
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Although I’ve had many rejections
over the years—in fact, two just today—and I used to wallpaper my bedroom with
rejections, I don’t have any that gave me a real belly laugh. I did receive an
odd one that sort of made me tilt my head at it like the Deutsche Grammophon
dog. It opened with “I don’t have a good reason for not taking” the poem in
question. Which made me think, “Okay, then don’t not take it.” The rejection
went on to say that the editor, who normally makes suggestions, felt he
couldn’t provide any because it would violate the spirit of the poem. The tone
of the rejection left me feeling like a parent asking a child why they did
something rather stupid and they just respond, “I don’t know.”
—Michael T. Young
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Note to Readers: Mike Young (above)
reminded me of a rather infamous rejection letter from Arthur C. Fifield to poet, novelist, and playwright Gertrude Stein in which he mocked what would later become her first published
book Three Lives. Here it is.
(Thanks, Michael!)
“Dear Madam,
I am only one, only one, only one. Only
one being, one at the same time. Not two, not three, only one. Only one life to
live, only sixty minutes in one hour. Only one pair of eyes. Only one brain.
Only one being. Being only one, having only one pair of eyes, having only one
time, having only one life, I cannot read your M.S. three or four times. Not
even one time. Only one look, only one look is enough. Hardly one copy would
sell here. Hardly one. Hardly one.
Many
thanks. I am returning the M.S. by registered post. Only one M.S. by one post.”
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I was in a
workshop years ago at the 92nd street Y with a famous poet whom I shall not
name. I came to the group two weeks late, so they had bonded. A
woman from the suburbs shared a poem about her garden in CT, and the whole
group descended on her in the most mean-spirited way. I was stunned and oddly
speechless, especially when the big name poet joined in. It was clear to me
that the group was trying to impress the leader, and they were miming her
behavior. The next week, I mentioned my discomfort, and told
them without naming him, that Galway Kinnell had said in a workshop
that if you don't like the poem, keep your mouth shut. You'll do damage
to the poet. But if you like the poem, say whatever you want, because the
criticism will help. The woman who had launched the criticism the
previous week said how she'd felt terrible about starting what had happened,
but the workshop leader immediately took issue with what I'd said. She
indicated that we should all be free to say whatever we wanted. I knew
then that I was in for a wild ride. Later, I brought in a poem that was
about a deer hunt, obviously a metaphor, but based on an experience I'd been
told about in detail. The whole group went after them poem and insisted
that I had been on that hunt. I'm not sure how that had come up. I
listened mildly amused until the workshop leader asked if I had been on the
hunt, none of this relevant to the poem, itself. When I replied I had
not, she launched into a spiel to the rest of the class on the power of
imagination. I realized she'd set a tone for the group to go after
writers, and even she was not able to bring them into focus. She'd
created a monster, and I went home laughing. I had learned a great deal
about what not to do in leading a
workshop. More important, I had learned to trust my own instincts when
listening to critique.
—Priscilla
Orr
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As shown in
Adele's story, those early rejections have a long life in our memory. Today,
getting a rejection for a poem or manuscript has become part of the writer's
life. Online submissions and the large number of submissions received by
publishers have also made the process impersonal. Using a submission tool such
as Submittables, all I see is a gentle "Declined" message in my
inbox.
But that
was not the case in the first rejection that has stayed with me. My sophomore
English teacher was fresh from college, good looking, funny and energetic. He
taught the assigned curriculum ("Julius Caesar," Great Expectations, an American
literature anthology etc.) but he recognized
that I was reading much deeper into the canon on my own outside class and that
I liked to write. He told me to come in after school if I wanted to talk
about the books I was reading. He loaned me his college copy of The Great
Gatsby (filled with his notes) which I read over a weekend so that I could discuss
it with him Monday after school. He was my first literary mentor. He made me
want to become an English teacher.
When he
assigned the class to write a short story, I was determined to impress him. I
had been reading Faulkner and wrote a story titled "The Fish" that
clearly was influenced by Faulkner's "The Bear." I did several
rewrites and typed it out on my manual typewriter with two fingers. When he
returned our stories, mine had a circled "B-" grade and one comment:
"We can't have sentence fragments in 10th grade." That was it.
Faulkner and Hemingway had sentence fragments. He knew that. I was
crushed. I never went in after school to talk with him again.
I did
become an English teacher and I always tried to keep that comment (which had
probably had been written quickly late one night after having read a pile of
terrible sophomore stories) in mind so that I didn't hastily scrawl something
on a paper that would have a long-lived negative effect.
—Ken
Ronkowitz
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I made the
mistake of asking for comments from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts
(back before they re-branded themselves the Mid Atlantic Arts Council). I
forgot that every one tries to be cute and witty, so the remarks were: Heavy
on the irony, overt and obvious, a mix of wit and cliché, obviously a student
poet, and then one kind remark about a poem one of the judges thought was good.
I never applied for a grant again, except in 1998 (lost that year, too), but I
used the “Remarks" on the back of my book, In Praise We Enter. I found out the name of every judge eventually.
Some were my "friends." I learned not to ask for the judge's remarks.
Also, my wife Emily sent some of my poems out to a friend (I didn't know she'd
sent them and she didn't know he was my friend) who rejected them fairly
quickly and then wrote me a rather strange email that began "You know I
love your poems..." I hadn't sent them so I was first baffled, then the
critique pissed me off. He published a grad student of mine, so that's nice. I
use the A. A. mantra: go where it's warm. A lot of magazines have a gauntlet of
interns and it's a lot like trying to get into studio 54 circa 1977. You get in
because you're wearing blue and you don't get in because you're wearing blue.
Who knows? A few mags actually insisted I send and then rejected me which is
kind of like asking someone to come to your party, then meeting them at the
door and saying: “Sorry, we don't want your kind round here." My work is
not suitable for most magazines. I think most zines are promoting a measured,
sort of ambiguous middle class lyric of about a half to one page, with lots of
dangling modifiers. I wish ’em well.
—Joe Weil
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Some time after submitting to an artsy
New York magazine I received my poems back in their
self-addressed-stamped-envelope. There was no acceptance or rejection letter.
The only response was a circle around my New Jersey address and the question,
“Do you know Dave Roskos?”
I assumed this was the opening to a
conversation or perhaps a professional relationship with an editor at a hipster
New York publication, so I submitted more poems with the answer that I did
indeed know Dave Roskos. Those poems were returned with the standard, “We
regret to inform you…” response.
(Note: Dave Rostkos is a NJ poet who
has published and edited Big Hammer
journal for many years; he is also the founding publisher of Iniquity
Books/Vendetta Press.)
—Tony
Gruenewald
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Maybe
15 years ago I signed up for a week of poetry workshops in another state. Each
poet was to bring several poems that she or he felt could be improved by
sharing with the group and our relatively famous leader. I brought poems at
several stages of completion.
One
poem I brought had been sent out in a couple of forms to different journals,
but I was not satisfied with it and thought it could be improved. On the
day I presented it, the poem was torn to shreds by pretty much everyone, with
plenty of suggestions, some of which would have turned it into a very different
poem. I appreciated the input, and did learn about the poem and about other poets'
ways of thinking about poems.
But
when I got home, I found it had been accepted by a decent mag. I started liking
the poem more after opening the acceptance. I also learned something about
workshops.
—John
McDermott
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My favorite
rejection was from a kind editor who said no to my packet, but said he liked
one of my submitted poems best and would consider it again with some revisions.
I put it on my to-do list, where, alas, it sank lower and lower. A few months
later, I received, from the same editor, profuse apologies for the delay. He
said if the poems were still available, he wanted to publish two, including the
one he must have forgotten being open to a revision. I've logged 12 rejections
since January 1, and am now wishing more of those would magically turn into
acceptances, like this one did!
—Tina
Kelley
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I’ve never had a
rejection in poetry or love. Of course, that statement isn’t true,
though I wish it were. I can candidly say the rejections from love hurt more
than the poetry rejections. But since this blog is about poetry rejection,
let me focus on that.
Maybe I’m especially sensitive.
One of the first poems I sent out was to The New Yorker. That poem came back with a formal rejection note. I was so devastated, I didn’t send them another poem for twenty years. Yet that early poem “I Am My Father’s Daughter” was selected by Toi
Derricotte (whom I didn’t know at the time ) as a winner of the
statewide William Carlos William Poetry Prize Contest. That made me realize how
subjective rejection is, and I should not take it so to heart. But I did and
still do.
As founder and editor of the
poetry magazine Lips since 1980, I
find it hard to reject poems and sometimes delay in getting back to
poets in a timely manner because of my own sensitivity concerning rejection.
And because I edit a journal, I rarely send my poems out (though sometimes I
do) and usually wait to be asked to send poems. As for contests, I mostly
enter those that are free (with rare exceptions), so I enter very few contests.
Some of the free contests I’ve entered are those by Poetry Society of
America where I’ve been lucky enough to win a first prize in the Gordon Barber
Award. When I tried the following year, I was rejected and in more recent years
when I did try several of their annual contests, I haven’t won another
first prize. And those years I tried and wasn’t a winner, I swore I
wouldn’t try again but then I sometimes did just because
I’d been lucky once. When my forthcoming manuscript years ago
was announced a finalist in PSA’s Alice di Castignola Award, I was happy but
wished it had been the top winner. That award, however, gave me the courage to
try another manuscript, which didn’t win.
I tell myself I should be
grateful I’ve received three New Jersey Arts Council Fellowships, but that was
not recently. I feel like the legendary Erica of soap opera fame who was
nominated for an Emmy each year and smiled at the cameras as her name wasn’t
announced. At this point, I’ve had 35 Pushcart nominations over the years
without ever having been awarded a Pushcart Prize.
Sometimes I think it’s a
natural thing to keep attempting to get published in a more
established and known magazine such as Poetry.
I did send a poem to Poetry
years ago and it came back with a formal rejection note. That was more than ten
years ago, and I’m thinking I might try sending another poem to the magazine.
Whenever I get a rejection
letter, I react by going to CVS and buying six Kit Kat bars to sooth my
depression. They help a bit. I tell myself that if I write a poem the
poem itself is my prize even if others reject it. Still, I guess I’ll
never get over my sensitivity to rejection whether it’s poetry or love.
—Laura Boss
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When I was in graduate school I had
Frank Lloyd Wright's granddaughter for a teacher in one class in French. For my
final project in that class, I wrote some poems in French.
I can't
remember her exact words anymore (when she returned the paper), but basically
she said I was really good at French, but I probably should give up poetry. Now
I have a French vocabulary of about ten words.
—Renée
Ashley
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Prompt Suggestions:
1. Try
writing a poem about a rejection or poetry put-down that you've received (an
actual submission rejection or a verbal put-down).
2. Take a
second look at e. e. cummings' poem (quoted near the end of this post's intro).
Can you do something equally simple with a related poem of your own?
3. Write a
rejection letter in poem form that would soften the blow if it were ever actually
received by a poet.
4. Write a
really silly rejection note—make humor your goal.
5. Write a
ballad called, "The Ballad of Poetry Rejections."
6. Write a poem about your best and/or worst poetry rejections or put-downs. You might try a form for this such as a sestina or villanelle.
7. Write a sarcastic mini-poem to an editor who rejected your work unkindly.
Example:
Dear Editor,
Roses are red,
violets are blue,
I'd rather be rejected
than published by you!
