Announce to the World What Your Poem Is

Remember when you wrote me last week in the midst of some heavy-duty agita?  Your sore throat raged like the fires of hell, you got a flat on the way to work, and while you were agonizing over your chapbook submissions, everybody you knew was posting annoying status updates about their recent publishing successes.

I have been thinking about how to give your note the proper reply.  I’m afraid there’s little I have to offer that will make you feel much better.  First off, Czech throat lozenges are the bomb but if I tried to send you some, Česka Posta would no doubt confiscate them.  And as for fast, friendly tire repair, AAA Premium is worth the extra $79, but who has that kinda money lying around for hypotheticals? So that leaves us with the chapbook angst, and by extension, all general writer-ly angst, and for that my advice to you is a dose of some good old-fashioned tough love.  I have a feeling you won’t like it at all, but I will say it anyway. . .

You are a talented writer.  You know that, I know you know that, and it has been confirmed publicly by, if not awards and publications then by your friends and family who love what you write.  Didn’t your mother put that poem on the refrigerator?  Assembling a chapbook manuscript, or any manuscript for that matter, or any block of words longer than your average email or scribbled note at the bottom of a birthday card is a labor of love.  We put our everything into our words, then send them out into the cold, cruel world and sit back to chew our nails and trawl our social media time-suck of choice.  It is intensely hard to wait on word back from editors who are holding a piece of our hearts and a couple inches of our guts in their hands.

And then there’s how we feel about the competition.

When you feel that Everyone Else is experiencing rabid success, please remember that Everyone Else is only a teeny tiiiiiny fraction of the writing community.  To put it in perspective, the people who got accepted are the ones posting.  All the rest of us who got yet another rejection that day are not posting anything.  We’re too busy scrolling down to the next buzzfeed post.  If we all posted the news of our rejections, or our “No, thank you’s” as I prefer to call them, every time they happened, the interwebs would floweth over.  So, I suggest that every time some crow gets all puffed up a friend of yours has excellent news about being accepted by this, that, or the other press, just look straight into her profile picture and say, “Suck this, Bee-atch” and hold up a copy of the poem that your mom put on her refrigerator.  Or the latest award you won.  Or a good comment from a writing mentor.  Or what you’re working on.  Or your angelic toddler.  Or your middle finger.  I should think that would make you feel better.

Minerva, Sweetie, when you wrote me about your submitting experience, you used the word traumatic.  I wish you didn’t feel like it was traumatic to submit your chapbooks/ poems/ stories/ works of art then wait to hear back from The Deciders.  I wish you felt like it was rewarding.  Exhilarating. A challenging test of courage and fortitude.  Anything but traumatic.

Maybe it was all that pot I smoked in college, but my short-term memory is shot.  Which is actually helpful when I’m submitting.  (And thank the gods of all things good and administrative for Duotrope!  Best $5 a month a writer could ever spend.  Before it came along I was all the time losing track of submissions, forgetting to write them in my little Target notebook.)  After I submit a piece, I forget about it.  – — Okay, I’m lying.  I don’t forget about it, as much as I’d like to, but I do try my very best to put it out of my mind and just keep moving forward with my life.  Which is not hard because my life runs faster than a Czech tram, speeding down Evropska hill.

I remember one of the first conversations I had with one of my favorite editors about dealing with rejection.  I told her that a lot of times when I get rejections, if I am able to simply move the email to my Rejections folder and not get worked up about it , then I know that maybe I never really believed in that piece in the first place.  The only rejections I allow to really get under my skin are the ones for the pieces I really believed in.  And if those pieces get rejected, that makes me work a little harder, either on revising them and trying again, or on making the next piece even better, trying to figure out what didn’t work before.  But here’s the ultimate thing, and Jeffrey Levine, Editor-in-Chief of Tupelo Press, said it better than I could:  “I don’t know any two poets who conceive of a poem in the same way, by which I mean, every time we write a poem we announce to the world what, for us, a poem is.”

That’s from a series he wrote about just what you were asking me about – getting your chapbook ready for submission.  And what he’s saying is that each poet writes the poem that only she can, and the way each editor reads that poem is also an announcement to the world what, for her, a poem is.  So if you get a “No, thank you”,  these editors aren’t saying that what you’ve sent them isn’t poetry, or isn’t ‘good’, they’re just expressing one editor’s tastes.  Don’t ever let one person’s tastes create trauma for you.  I imagine you have enough trauma in your life – your workload, tragedies in the world, family drama, demands on your time, social obligations.  Commitments.  Flat tires.  Aaaahhh.  That’s enough trauma.  Don’t let your writing – or your submitting – be traumatic.  Let it be cathartic and beautiful and therapeutic and grounding and powerful.

For what it’s worth – last time I submitted to one of the big journals, I heard back so fast it gave me whiplash.  Maybe if the ones you submit to don’t get back to you right away, it means your manuscript is under heavy consideration.  Maybe it means their staff is small and they’re plugging away.  Maybe it means the editor is sick or had some horrible life shit handed to her and had to slow down.    So maybe they’re just slowing down.  Tell your agita that it needs to slow the eff down too.  Do some yoga.  Write a poem about it.  Make banana bread.  Turn off Facebook.  Write a poem about it.  Keep writing poems.  Announce to the world what your poem is.

Love,

Emily