The fiction of the audience.

Last night, for this and that reason--fine, okay, because the historian went up to Logan to give a talk about Utah socialists, while I stayed here and went to a reading and reception, and when he got home I felt like I ought to get out of the pool, aka stop being on the internet, to say hello--I didn't write a blog post. I started one, but I hated it and deleted it and here we are, Friday morning.

Postulate 1: Who cares?

Corollary 1.1: Basically, to keep writing, you kind of have to summon up the notion that someone, somewhere, might care, even a little. 

Corollary 1.2: The notion that people keep writing just for themselves--not just occasionally, but day after day, in a way that makes writing itself part of identity--seems like bullshit to me.

So today, while I was at Target for the second time in two days, to get the things I regretted not getting on the first trip, I thought of this topic, which I'm going with for my should-have-been-Thursday post. Because I also spent yesterday sending my work out to literary magazines.

Postulate 2: OMG I have submitted so much work, and the rate of return, outcome-wise, is so terrible!

to wit:

Corollary 2.1: What does this mean? Why send stuff out? There is no rational basis. NIHILISM.

Corollary 2.2: OR in the face of the math (see Venn diagram above), one must simply say, as my friend the poet Jennifer says, 'Rejections mean that I am a working poet.'

Corollary 2.3: OR in the face of the math (see &c &c), one can say, as my friend the poet Wade says, 'I just send out a poem I like every Friday.'

SMALL DIGRESSION: This morning, as I chatted about these potentially soul-saving points of view with the historian, he said, 'So, it's kind of like Stan 'The Man' Musial, who could say, Well, I only get a hit one out of every three pitches. But that doesn't make him a failure, it just makes him a working baseball player. A Hall of Famer! and Karl 'The Mailman' Malone could say, I only make a basket every other time I shoot! But that doesn't make him a failure, it makes him a working basketball player. A Hall of Famer!'

I did have to point out that both Stan 'The Man' Musial and Karl 'The Mailman' Malone have better averages than I do. By a long shot.

MOVING ON: 

In other words:

Postulate 3: Being a writer is a fictive activity.

Corollary 3.1: we imagine readers to whom we have no access, and then we hope for the best.

Corollary 3.2: the messages we get from our readers are sometimes robotic...

Corollary 3.3: ...but on occasion, we get a message from a human and, for a brief moment, feel real.

Let me conclude with two anecdotes from the fictional world of sending writing out for consideration:

Anecdote 1: I sent some poems to a venerable journal. I used their online submission portal. My cover letter was, as it always is, brief and grateful. The response--which is automated--said the following: 

"While we try to respond to submissions within six months, it often takes longer for a manuscript to be read. We ask for your patience as we do read every submission we receive.  

If you haven't heard anything from us within a year, you are welcome to send us a status inquiry. Meantime, we hope you will take comfort in knowing that the longer it takes us to respond, the further up the ranks your submission is likely moving."

Within a year!?! I find this hilarious.

Anecdote 2: Today, I sent some poems to a journal that I have periodically tried, one that I honestly think suits the kinds of poems I write quite perfectly. However, the last time I tried them, I submitted work at about 9:15 p.m., and the following morning, in a reply time-stamped 6:04 a.m., said:

Your manuscript has received a careful reading, but we have decided against holding it for our second round of deliberations.

A careful reading!?! Before I even got out of bed, I laughed really hard. Although the person did go on to compliment one of the poems in the submission in such a way that, if I'm not mistaken, he patronized the whole batch. That could totally just be me.

Sometimes the fictive writer is a little bit oversensitive. But sometimes the fictive reader is a little bit of a jerk.

Straight talk about rejection.

In the last week or so, I've had five rejections or so. I don't actually want to go back and do an accurate count, Rejections of my manuscript, rejections of poems. Today, I sent my manuscript, newly spruced and reordered, into the world five times. On Monday, I will take the other bedraggled rejectees and give them a little medicinal smack, tell them to snap out of it, and send them into the world again, where the great likelihood is that they will be rejected again.

Today, I told the historian, 'I'm having kind of a crisis about my poems.'

He hates when I say this. 'Really? I hate to hear you say that.'

'Yeah, you know, like what is poetry for anyway? and maybe my poems are elitist crap. Etcetera. Like that.' Sometimes, it helps to say these thoughts aloud, not to have someone deny them, but just to give them voice, let them take the air, perhaps float away.

In part I am thinking these thoughts because of the rejections. Which, I'm sorry, straight talkers, it's hard not to take it personally. In fact: I'm going to say it is personal, in that the manuscript in its various iterations represents your thinking, your judgment, your poems speaking to each other, and the rejection means, at the least, that none of this moved people when they read it, if they read it, at least not enough to move it forward.

Also, I've been thinking about what Sherman Alexie said about poems about crocuses:

So what did I learn during this poetry siege? Well, none of us ever needs to write another poem about crocuses, or croci, or however you prefer to pluralize it. Trust me, we poets have exhausted the poetic potential of the crocus. If any of you can surprise me with a new kind of crocus poem then I will mail you one hundred dollars.

To my knowledge, I have not yet written a poem about crocuses, or one with crocuses in it. Tulips, yes. Birds galore. I'm just thinking, why so absolutist, Sherman? I fear he may be right, not that I have any stake whatsoever in crocus-centricity, poetry-wise, but I think this may be synecdochic for all poems having to do with the horticultural or the domesticated natural. Which is, truthfully, right up my alley.

To be clear, this is not at all about Sherman Alexie. It's not about any editor, not the ones who have published my work or the many who have not. It's really about the will to go on, and whether I'm finding or making time to write, which is meaningful to me whether or not my work gets published. And I'm not. My time is much too spoken for, which means my relationship with poetry feels attenuated, and the rejections feel more like the truth than the writing does.

'Why crocuses? Or anything? A poem is a form of thought, and the thought takes as its tokens the things we live with, whatever they may be.' I may or may not have said this to the historian as we walked across campus to my next appointment. This is my credo, or at least an interim credo.

There are journals I'm not going to submit to anymore, or awhile. One, where the editor rejected my work literally overnight--literally!--while assuring me that my work was considered carefully. Never again. There's a deadline that I'm going to let pass, because the journal just rejected me. It seems somehow foolish to try that place again so soon.

I plan to find my way to a draft soon. I can see that happening next week. I have pieces I want to work on, and when one wants to work at a draft, one ought to find one's way to that draft. It puts the minor cuts and scrapes, the abrasions of sending one's work out, into a more liveable perspective.

 

 

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A few things I hate.

1. Rejection. I really, really really hate it.
2. Waking up in the morning to find you've been rejected.
3. Forgetting that I shouldn't look at my email first thing in the morning because of the possibility of rejection.
4. The way rejection takes over your day and makes it all about the big echoing NO you heard before you even got out of bed. Before you even drank a glass of water or practically even opened your eyes.

In conclusion: rejection is a stupid day-hogger, shade-thrower, summer-inversion rat bastard of a jerk.

There, I said it.

However, in defense of my day, there were other things that happened (besides being rejected):

1. chat with various kids, both live and digital

2. seeing Spy with my darling aunt Sal, and having it be just as hilarious the second time as the first

3. hearing this song



4. and hearing this song



5. shrimp taco (because I was too rejected to cook)

6. the thought of this:

6. listening to D sing various of the Zelda songs (the Ballad of the Gales? I think?) while he Linked it up and I held the baby

7. doing a really splendid revision of a poem in my manuscript so that I can

8. send it to three presses who are holding open reading periods at the moment.

Talking stuff over with the historian, and then revising that poem is what really helped me turn the corner. Anyway: rejectors, not that I think it was personal or anything--at least not for you--I just want you to know that I improved a poem and therefore you did not win. If you were trying to win. Which, probably you weren't. EVEN SO: rejection is not the boss of me, not today anyway.