Rejection

For the past year, I've been beginning to send out poetry manuscripts to literary magazines large and small. Being in an MFA program has been the start of this. It seems (though hyperbolic) that everyone around me is getting published. I teeter between sincerely not worrying when it will happen (only that it will happen if and when it was meant to happen) and tearing my hair out wondering if I am ridiculous for getting a professional writing degree when only a select few ever make their livings by their pens. Before I began teaching--honestly teaching a classroom of college students--I never particularly wanted to teach. Now I think: yes, I could.

I must have sent out poems to dozens of magazines, and have gotten nothing but rejections. But oh, the rejections! Some of them have been so complimentary that I can't imagine being much more pleased if they were acceptances. The latest non-form rejection notice is handwritten from the poetry editor of the Iowa Review. (He said he especially enjoyed "Little Boy Blue," a poem I've gotten much teasing about!) The rejection before that was a printed notice with an added handwritten note from the editor of the Atlanta Review. They want to see more of my work.

My work. My work! For the first time, I begin to think that I can seriously write, that people who write can see me as a writer. I never took up writing for this reason. I wrote because it came naturally to me. I liked doing it. I liked reading my things aloud to an audience. I never thought of myself as a storyteller. It's not so much a story I'm telling, as a textual image I try to paint. I once described poetry to a friend as "a fine way of wiping dirt from the window." I still think that's a good description. Or, as Dr. Havird said, (at least, this is how I remember it) poetry is a way of gardening one's way back to Eden.

I'd rather keep biting at the apple, keep straying among the weeds and bracken. The exhiliration of that first bite, the wild grass, the mixture of fear (I might get lost) and wonder (even nature red in tooth and claw is beautiful) is a fairer prospect than cultured, biblical paradise.