Yesterday I received a rejection email from a journal where I had submitted some poems. Last week, I got a rejection email from a different journal. I had forgotten about the one from a week ago – by which I mean to say I hadn’t even logged the submission on my spreadsheet. I didn’t remember submitting to them or which poems I had sent. I opened up and reread the rejected poems. Yeah, I probably would have rejected them too. I read more of my poems – the ones cluttering the poetry folder on my computer. I’m underwhelmed by most of them.
Perhaps I’m being hard on myself.
Every so often, I go back to things I’ve written and look for one really good poem. In this type of seeking, I’m usually disappointed. This is when I feel like I need to pull out some old favorites from other poets and reread them (Dunn, Kenyon, Hoagland, Haas, Oliver, Collins, etc. etc.). But again, I struggle. I can’t seem to take the magic dust of their phrasing or lines or clever observations and breath it into my own work. This is when I begin to think I don’t know how to read. I begin to think I need to spend more time answering the question – why does this appeal to me – what about it hits me? As though those writers and their poems might contain some secret formula that if I just tried hard enough or studied long enough, I might unlock. It sometimes involves a lot of staring off into distances. I think of my grandfather – a crazy old man tracking the daily lottery numbers certain there’s a pattern to be discovered. This seems to be the alchemy of our lives… our obsessions with trying to turn lead into gold.
And that’s the poem I’ll write this morning (and also be disappointed with). My grandfather’s kitchen table. The flypaper on the light above. Stacks of yellow legal pads covered in blue or black or red ink notes: the sequence of lottery numbers dating back weeks and months. Juxtaposed with my own minor obsessions – copying and reading poems trying to discover some magical formula as though one day I might hit it big.