A poem is never finished, only abandoned.
– Paul Valery
Once every year or so, I abandon a few poems in the inboxes of some literary journals. After few months, those journals politely tap me on the shoulder, litter in hand like soiled tissues, “um sir… sir…. I think you dropped these.” I look around like a guilty child, I pretend I don’t know what they’re talking about, and scurry away from the scene of the crime. Or at least that’s how the publishing process feels. I keep abandoning my poems and people keep telling me don’t leave your shit on my sidewalk.
I don’t do this often enough to be hardened or stung by the sense of rejection (ok, maybe it stings a little). In the past two years, I’ve sent seventeen poems to four different journals. One of the journals rejected me within a day or two… that seemed decisive, like a door slamming or an exclamation point… they could have at least told me I was pretty. Two of them never wrote back – I think their policy is if you don’t hear from us, assume it’s a no. The other (I’ve tried twice) politely rejects me after a reasonable (and not embarrassingly short) amount of time.
When I write, I don’t think about getting published. But, after a while, the toil stacks and tallies up and I start to wonder about purpose and human connection and why I spend any time writing. And so I try, but not too hard. And I when I get rejected, I care, but not too much. And then I get back to it until it piles up again. I used to have a bunch of my poems “published” on this blog, but when I read that some journals won’t accept them if they’ve been published (even on a personal blog) I took them all down. And quite honestly, I hate self-publishing.
I can’t explain why I’d like to be published. I think when I read poems, I say to myself, I’d like to be able to do that – whatever that is. I think I’d like to be able to help others feel or see or hear what I feel, see, and hear when I read something good or clever or resonant. I’ve always been a sharer… and aside from being charming and having impeccable taste in music (kidding – kinda), I’m not sure I have any other talents to share with the world. That said, I struggle with the ego that’s required to be an artist – a word I cringe to use when I talk about my own work. I struggle with the notion that what I have to say is worth someone else’s time (wrote the guy with over 500 blog posts). I want and don’t want the validation. In some ways, I have this voice that says “you see the world differently than others or maybe you see it the same but can find different ways of showing it.” The literary journals tell me otherwise. “umm sir, you seem to have left this turd on our sidewalk. Kindly pick it up.”
In terms of being a published poet, I acknowledge that I have more than a few things working against me. First, I don’t read enough. I read, but not enough. Secondly, my attention span is crap. I can’t stick with an idea long enough to make it go where I’d like it to go. I will wrestle with an idea and get up and walk around ten different times, do laundry, wipe the counters, watch a squirrel, before I either give up or beat it into submission. Thirdly, I lack discipline, craft, and knowledge. I don’t write every day – I should. I don’t know how to organize anything. I feel like I need a filing system (passable, bad, putrid) and I should probably date my poetry… (you know, a nice meal and a good pinot noir – sorry couldn’t resist). I suspect real writers have a process: like every day at 7:07 they pour wine or coffee (depending on am or pm) and write – and every other Tuesday they submit their work for publication. I suspect other writers have this constant output of new material. The collections of poetry that I’m currently reading are each over 200 pages long with at least 150 poems in them. I doubt I have much more than 100 poems total. Real writers seem to write all the time. If I’m lucky, I write a new poem every two or three weeks. Instead, I have a lot of little notes scribbled on the notepad on my phone, I have all of these blog posts, but very few of these things get turned into poems. Finally, I get bogged down in my own revisions (which is why I should date my poems). By the time I think I’m ready to submit some poems for publication, I go looking through what’s “finished” and then I either cringe or tweak… and more often than not, I shoot my work down before ever sending it off.
One of my resolutions for the year was to get better at all of this. More specifically, I told myself I’d get published this year. I don’t really know how to do any of this, but I suspect it means writing more and getting out of my own way when it comes to submitting. I was planning on abandoning some poems today – then I sabotaged myself in the rereading and picked up my own trash.