A Pocketful of Rejections
File under Writing.
I was never the guy at the bar who hit on every woman there. I had friends who were like that. Quantity over quality. Sorry, that’s an offensive and pretty disgusting way to look at the dating scene. But I couldn’t deny it “worked” for those guys, who, more often than not, would leave our group of guy friends at some point in the night to go home with a woman in order to chase the excitement of a new “conquest,” a woman interested in being—or a woman willing to be—partner to a brief physical engagement. I can’t rule entirely out my own potential for feeling jealousy or envy, but principally I looked down my nose at their behavior as “sketchy” or “misogynistic.”
Their behavior may have been unsound, maybe even inappropriate, but the logic is mathematically robust: if you try something over and over, even if each chance of success is low, then as long as it’s not zero, every attempt increases the chance at success. Dice, roulette, Bingo, flirting: the more you play, the more likely you’re eventually going to win.
Fair enough. But I never wanted to be that guy at the bar, trolling for quantity. I thought it might be a character flaw, a reputation—a characteristic—I certainly didn’t want for myself.
In my college English classes, I teach about perspective; what may be terrible in one context might be appropriate in another. In the parable of the oak tree and the reed—which I discussed recently with my freshmen—the oak tree mocks the reed for not being able to stand tall, as the tree itself does. Even the smallest breeze sways the reed. It is the epitome of weakness. My students agree: it’s better to be the oak tree. But then, I tell my confident students, a hurricane force wind comes along. The strong oak tree is no match, and is felled. Meanwhile, the reed, low to the ground, bending to the wind, survives. Lesson: sometimes it’s okay to be the reed. Depending on perspective, it might be better to be the thing you think you didn’t want to be. The parable suggests it’s better to be the reed. But I reinforce that both flora “win”—at different times. Sometimes it’s okay to be the oak, sometimes it’s okay to be the reed. It depends on the situation, and on perspective.
Yes, this is a post about writing. And specifically rejection. I submitted a poem in October of 2015, excited about the place I was submitting it, and of course hopeful the lit mag would publish it. The rejection came a month later.
Undeterred, I submitted again, to another lit mag I knew would be a good fit. And again. And again. Those, too, elicited rejections. I persisted. In total, I submitted the same poem over a dozen times. All rejections. At that point, I tucked the poem away. I kept submitting other poems to other places, but I left that one off the list.
After over a year, I took a look at it again. I still believed in the poem, still thought it was finished. Knowing the odds, I tried again. And again. And again. And again. By late 2019, it had been rejected 23 times. So I set it aside a second time.
In 2021, after another year of forgetting about that poem stuck in submission purgatory, I found a literary magazine that I had never seen before. They were looking for poems “with a strong sense of versification.” I read almost everything on their site, and immediately wanted to be a part of that magazine. I scoured my own writing archives to see if I had something I could send them. I found my poem again.
On the 24th submission of my poem, over five and a half years after its first submission and rejection, Riddled Heart was accepted by Grand Little Things. And I could not be happier for where the poem now lives—alongside a second poem of mine they also accepted.
In retrospect, the confidence my “sketchy” or “misogynist” friends developed—undeterred flirting with every woman at a bar—would have been good practice for the writing life of rejections. There is an objectification factor. Confidence in self. Belief that the effort will lead to reward. There is the need to jump headfirst into the ethos of quantity being paramount over quality. My poem ended up in the right place, but only because I didn’t give up twenty-three times before.
Get rejected. Move on. Get rejected. Move on. Eventually, the right literary magazine will take you home—er, take your poem.
About the poem:
“Riddled Heart” is a carefully constructed poem. It is comprised of rhyming couplets, but uniquely, the rhyming words share no letters in common (e.g., “high” and “sky” rhyme, but have none of the same letters). Form follows function, or the media is the message. The poem about two lovers realizing they are incompatible is mirrored in the physical structure of the poem itself with words that sound alike—that is, they rhyme—but ultimately share nothing—have no overlap in their spelling.
Read “Riddled Heart” and “Dawn of the Purple Moon” together at Grand Little Things.