Rejection Sunnyside Up

It happens to all of us, poets or otherwise, but more often to poets than to normal people. We get rejected. Someone slams the door in the face of our poems. Someone tells them they don't fit. There's no room at the inn. They're told to try again. They're wished good luck placing themselves elsewhere.

Part of the work of a poet is to put the work out into the world and hope it finds a good home. But before it does, the work usually comes slinking back several times. Nobody likes rejection, but it really shouldn't be a devastating blow. My submission mantra: It takes twenty rejections to get an acceptance. I don't mean of the same poem as I assume that we're all sending out multiple poems and to several different journals. Keeping my mantra in mind, that means that each rejection puts you one step closer to an acceptance.

While I don't like rejection, I generally don't get bummed out by it. There are many good homes out there; I look for another one. Just the other day I was going over my list of submissions. I went back several pages and came across a rejection that, in spite of my mantra, had annoyed me a bit because the editor had asked me to submit—and then rejected all six of the poems I'd sent. I tallied up the fate of those six poems. Here's what it looked like:

Two of the poems were accepted by Ithaca Lit. As a result of that publication, I was invited to be a guest editor for an upcoming issue. That turned out to be a wonderful experience.

Two of the poems were published by Connotation Press. One of those poems, a sestina, was subsequently accepted for a forthcoming anthology, Obsession: Sestinas for the 21st Century, edited by Carolyn Beard Whitlow and Marilyn Krysl, to be published in 2014 by University Press of New England (UPNE).

One of the poems was published by Innisfree Poetry Journal.

The sixth poem appears in the current issue of Rose Red Review and just received a Pushcart Prize nomination.

See what I mean? All six poems found homes elsewhere. Maybe the first editor didn't want or even like them, but some other editors did want and like them. Lesson? You know what the lesson is.

A Home for Rejected Poems

It happens to all of us. Rejection. We send out those poems we slaved over. The ones we like best. That we think are really good. Maybe our best work ever. And then they come back to us like wounded puppies with their tails between their legs.

What shall we do? Give up? No way. Not if you want to get good. If you're a poet, rejection is just part of the game. My rule of thumb for years was: It takes 20 rejections to get an acceptance. Then I could think of each rejection as one step closer to that acceptance. I'm not that patient any longer and I tend to revise after a poem has been turned away half a dozen times. But the rejections still come. One came just today! As if to prove my point. Thanks a lot. You know who you are.

Here's a journal whose editors know that rejection doesn't necessarily mean that a poem is not good: Redheaded Stepchild. The journal bills itself as "a home for poetry that has been rejected elsewhere." They ask that your submission name names, but they do not identify which journal(s) rejected your work. I decided several months ago to give them a try as I liked the journal and found some poems I really liked in the issue I examined. I'm willing to reveal that it was not a major procedure winnowing out which poems to send, to find the few poor souls that had suffered rejection. Most of my poems suffer rejection before finding a home. In fact, it's the rare one that finds a home on its first voyage out.

I'm happy to say that one of my poems, Prunis Persica, appears in the new spring issue. I like this journal because of its concept and also because it limits its selections to 20 poems. Here's who I'm keeping company with these days:
Terry Wright / Alex Grant / Christian Ward / Wendy Vardaman / Carol Potter / Cheryl Townsend / Kate Bernadette Benedict / Joan Wiese Johannes / Lana Hechtman Ayers / Ann Neuser Lederer / Richard Krawiec / Amy King / Pat Riviere-Seel / Alexander Lumans / Mark Decarteret / Thomas P. Levey / Maggie Glover / Kathryn Stripling Byer / Howie Good

Don't let rejection get you down or discourage you. Just wrap up those poems and send them out again. The best revenge is getting published in a better journal.