Chekhov's Mistress
I Guess You are Still Somebody Until Somebody Loves You
Much is made of rejection. I suppose anyone who writes must be at home with rejection, but it’s always nice to be reminded you’re not alone. This post, from the blog of C. Dale Young, the poetry editor of New England Review:
“My poem, ”Vespers,“ was rejected 17 times before it was taken by The Southern Review. That same poem went on to be included in Best American Poetry. My poem, ”Sotto Voce,“ was rejected 38 times. On the 39th time out, it was accepted at Poetry. In fact, 42% of my poems have gone out 18 times or more before being accepted! And I don’t simultaneously submit my work. I guess what I am trying to say to anyone reading this is that you have to keep the faith. Write the absolute best poems you can and then believe in them. If you start to not believe, revise them. Or, you can follow Donald Justice’s cagey advice: ”The trash can is always hungry, and we simply don’t feed it enough.“
I know poets who give up on poems after sending them out 6 or 7 times. Marianne Moore wouldn’t retire a poem until it had been out 40 times. Well, if Marianne Moore can suck it up and send poems out 40 times, then so can I. She has been my model for submitting work for a long time now. I think she is a good model.”
This, Young says in the comments section, without simultaneous submissions.
comments
No CommentsCreative Commons License Deed Attribution-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported
You are free:
- to Share — to copy, distribute and transmit the work
-
Attribution. You must attribute the work in the manner specified by the author or licensor (but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work).
-
No Derivative Works. You may not alter, transform, or build upon this work.
- For any reuse or distribution, you must make clear to others the license terms of this work. The best way to do this is with a link to this web page.
- Any of the above conditions can be waived if you get permission from the copyright holder.
- Nothing in this license impairs or restricts the author's moral rights.
This is a human-readable summary of the Legal Code (the full license):
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/3.0/legalcode
This site employs rank-denial and other anti-spam measures.
Your link here will do nothing for your rankings or traffic. Off-topic comments will be deleted.
Previous entry: Henry Petroski
About this Post
- Posted by: Bud Parr
- Date: January 17, 2005
- Filed Under:
Wise Men Fish Here: Literature
- Comments:0
- Links to this Post: Technorati
