WHO'S REJECTED THE AUTHOR

Call it a personality flaw.

I never worked very hard at the whole submission process, something that many of my fellow writers have held in deep disdain from time to time. Starting back in the late Fall of 2001, I put some fairly serious effort into submitting to poetry journals and lit quarterlies. I took a break from the sumbitchin-- sorry-- submission biz around Thanksgiving time (which is when the majority of the lit mags go into hibernation (not to say deep freeze) and stop accepting submissions), 2003. When I should have gotten back into it, in February and March of 2004, I had other stuff going, and that's my story and I'm sticking to it. Part of that had to do with writing what I think may be the last of The Architect's Sketch. Ironically, I feel too tender about those stories to be sending them off for rejection. After that, frankly, I gave up without really meaning to. In the mean time, I've continued writing, convinced myself I wasn't writing enough, took a trip to California, wrote a poem about San Francisco, and otherwise more usefully engaged myself. So the below reflects a flurry of activity, over the course of a few years, when I worked hard at getting rejected, and the results, I think, speak for themselves!

As any reader of my work is likely aware, I have a long-running trifle with the bastard who runs The Pedestal, for various reasons. He rejected Where Nothing Ever Happens when I submitted to a call for 9/11 oriented poems. He also had me on his list of people to send a spam to whenever he got one of his own rotten fucking pieces of shit published in some goddamned rotten piece of shit journal. He's a prick. I forget his name. (By the way, the real reason for all the invective here is not bitterness; I'm convinced that this is the kind of guy who Googles his rag now and again, and the thought tickles me that he might run across this description of himself from time to time.)

In the early Fall of 2003, I received this, via e-mail, under the heading YOUR SITE:

" . . . is amateurish and your poetry is worse. Christ, youre the biggest crybaby Ive ever seen! Im going to report you to Geocities, who will remove your site for making bad comments about good people. You suck!"

I don't know who to assign it to, because the author (sic) used a web-based, reply-proof hider so's to hide his/her identity. (I'm guessing that the author isn't sure about the whole he-she thing.) By the way: report me to Geocities? Stand in line. PS: if yer gonna complain about poetry, LEARN GRAMMAR. Dumbass.

The online source used to send said spam, Optimum Online (www.optonline.com) offers spam blockers and supposedly prime e-mail security. Even more ironically, it offered this horoscope for my sign: "Your immunity doesn't last into the new week, but you're still very hard to catch. If caught, play a clean game instead of fighting dirty. You take pity on those that fail to see the situation's humor." Oh. Hm. NOW I feel better.

See the humor? Hey, I just had a thought: maybe it was Jackie Malone? Nah . . .

A few years ago I entered the poetry contest sponsored by The Mississippi Review. I didn't even get an honorable mention. That didn't suprise me much. Many years ago, in college, when I first began pursuing this damned business of poeting, the rag was reccommended to me by Robert Grey, poetry-guru-at-large at UNCC, as part of the path to publication. (The wisdom was then, as it is now, that publication in a dozen or so academic-type quarterlies was required before anything really big started happening.) He handed me a copy there in his office. I read a couple of entries, and it was all I could do not to say "You're kidding me, right?" Suffice it to say that their prevailing notion of what poetry is or should be differs vastly from mine.

The same thing happened with The Atlanta Review. I pretend to enjoy thinking that they rejected me because I submitted the poem Atlanta, but I doubt they ever even read what I sent them. Having sampled what they selected as the winners of the contest, I doubt they ever read anything. That's not sour grapes. The crap they picked sucked that year.

Of course, I can't be a member of The Academy. But that's mainly because I never paid them their 45 bucks. They've rejected me for the Whitman Prize, twice, fifteen years apart, but they have a legitimate excuse: they pick a different judge every year. I imagine they do that so that jerks like me can't blame them for rejection.

Lately, I've been concentrating on getting rejected by on-line rags-- can you call it a rag when there's no paper involved?-- one, notably, called Typo. Ah, the irony of being rejected by something called, of all things, Typo, on top of which I was rejected overnight. This is the true magic of the internet. At least I can say this for these guys: they're zippy. Following their rejection of An American in Denny's and Upon the Death of my Grandfather After a Long Illness in Gainesville, Florida, I sent a one word response query: "Why?" This came back the next day:

"Jim,
"We're busy folks and are unable to provide editoral comments for the writers we reject. The poems you sent us, we felt, weren't up to par with the standards we've set for TYPO. We do thank you for submitting and invite you to send some more work anytime in the future.
yrs,
Adam
TYPO"

The "unable to provide editorial comments" is standard publishing business-ese for "we don't bother to read 95% of what comes in." The Wifey's take on the matter is that my stuff, by and large, is 65% longer than the stuff they have published on the Typo page. So I sent them Anyways. Since I'm a schmuck and I can't help myself, I also sent In the Dim Hills of Pennsylvania and A Quick Note Concerning Three Days of Wretched Weather. This time the rejection took a couple of weeks, and the note seemed a little less cooked, so maybe my first assessment was a tad too harsh. Still the "standards set for Typo," from what I can tell by reading their inclusions, can best be summed up with a single word: mawkish.

In the midst of all this, I heard back on a submission to another online publication Adam is connected with, StorySouth, and, in a serendipitous turn of events, I mistakenly identified Jake Adam York, the poetry editor for storySouth, as the same guy who edits poetry at Typo, who is Adam Clay. This is proof positive that I don't belong in this damned business anyways. I sent the poem Sunrise in the Urban South, which (Jake) Adam (York) rejected-- in the nicest possible way-- as not in their line, and the short story Americans, which I have yet to hear back on, but which will most likely be rejected, since it's the weakest of the entries in my ongoing potential yet-to-be-coming-soon-as-a-major-motion-picture series The Architect's Sketch, and also has references to the urban South that require a particular knowledge of my home town to pick up on. I am also hereby deleting a negative comment about Mr. Clay, which wasn't fair in the first place, funny though it may have been.

At this juncture, two long held out (to me) truisms of publishing appear to be ringing fairly true: first, if you want to get into a mag, you have to wear the bastards down. Second, people in the poetry publishing biz are fond of silly games. (Jake) Adam (York), for instance, couldn't come out and say that I missed their publishing schedule, but rather hinted that they'd be glad to consider more of my stuff IN THE FALLLLL. One of the other high-powered mags, the name of which escapes me for the moment, has an open sumbitchin-- sorry, I just couldn't resist that one-- an open submission policy, but claims that they only read submissions recieved between certain months, and that they throw the rest away. (Another thing occurs to me, which I also already knew but kinda pretended that I'd forgotten: there's a more than healthy streak of sado-masochism in this part of the publishing world. And like the old joke goes, what a pure sadist does to a pure masochist is: nothing.)

Most recently I got rejected by an on-line rag called Poet's Canvas that advertises in the back of Poetry Magazine (see below), and I should have known better. This is one of those arty rags that claim to publish both the famous and the great un-washed, and I was enthusiastic about it because a couple of the poems available in the on-line version (two out of the dozen listed in the contents were available on-line; standard teaser, and, again, I should have known better) I quite liked. (The fiction they had up there was not my cup of tea, although that's a line call.) The standard rejection form the editor sent gave no indication that I was in any way a member of their club. How dare I? To be fair, the form did invite me to come be rejected again. Sour grapes? Sure. But hey, you be the judge: the three poems they rejected are Rope Swinging, Vagrant, and Never Been to Paris. I was going to include the text of the rejection form here, but I, er, um, kinda, y'know, deleted it a little. I was miffed. The editor there, one L.A. Schuler, in a chance correspondence following the above described e-mail fiasco, was extremely kind and courteous, even recommending another online journal, Can We Have Our Ball Back, as someplace I might consider submitting to. Which goes to show a) my nearly unbroken record of being completely unfair remains nearly unbroken, and 2. it's silly to take this rejection business as personally as I do.

(Just because I LOVE it when my own dire predictions come back and bite me on the ass, I'm reminding my dear readers of the previous missive posted here regarding that particular rag:"The next next entry will probably be regarding the Poet's Canvas, to which I made my most recent submissions. None of the things I submitted is anything you have seen, since they stipulate that they will not-- NOT-- publish anyhting that has been published on the internet, and I'm not 100% sure that they wouldn't consider this humble little wart on the World Wide Web "self-publishing." The supreme irony to their rejection will be that they are one of the few on-line poetry rags whose content I have liked pretty much across the board. So it's like that girl you stared at across the room at the high school dance, the one you just hoped would come up and ask you to dance: when they reject me, it's gonna hurt." Owwwww . . .)

So I checked it out; from what I saw, Can We Have Our Ball Back will have nothing to do with me; it's all abstract lust and misery. So, what the hell; I sent them Atlanta and the Internet Poetry Workshop Poem, which they will reject out of hand, no question about it. I haven't a hope in hell. Schuler described the thing as a "non-traditional e-zine." Perhaps I should take some solace if it turns out I don't belong there. A musician friend of mine once summed up the perils of pursuing artistic success rather neatly: "What if you were to suddenly see yourself on VH1 . . ?"

A quick PS here: Can We Have Our Ball Back has turned into a singles site featuring love poems, to what end I can't be bothered to fathom.

Speaking of such things, I will not be seeing myself in the annals of Tarpaulin Sky, which presented me with one of the kindest, warmest, fuzziest rejections yet. They sought to ensure me that this was no judgement on my work, nor the quality thereof, and in addition to pleading that the orifice would remain open to my judgements and/or suggestions, pointed out that they have, on their site, links to many other sites where I might have better luck. They rejected Internet Poetry Workshop Poem, Dramatized for Your Convenience, and Modern Era, so, frankly, who could blame them? (Especially in that order.)

The next entry won't be Poetry Magazine. I've decided that, since they haven't bothered to tell me they've rejected me, probably because they never reject people important enough to be told they've been rejected there, that they have not, in fact, rejected me. Therefore-- and pay attention, academics-- forever and in perpetuity, I have a piece under consideration at Poetry magazine!

The next entry is Exquisite Corpse, even though I have not heard back from them, either. Why, you ask? Do I have less respect for this organ than I do for Poetry? Not a whit. I did, however, go back to their submissions guidelines page, after submitting a piece to them, to discover that I had violated pretty much every single guideline for submissions that they have. (And they have alot of them, and they're largely sensible and helpful.) So, although I have not been specifically rejected by them (which is to say I have not heard from them), I hereby consider myself rejected by the fine folks at Exquisite Corpse.

As expected, this page did continue to grow-- hell, burgeon, despite the slight lulls that came during the holiday seasons-- as long as I was willing to send my little pieces of mirth out to be snubbed. I can best sum up the experience as . . . Well, it's like taking a Greyhound bus through the mountains: gut-wrenching and boring at the same time. When I stopped working at being rejected it was more out of inertia than anything else. I just kind of forgot to go out and get rejected. (Which doesn't sound like a half bad impulse, frankly.) And that's not to say I won't go out and try to get rejected some more. But at the time of this last writing (February, 2005), it's the wrong time of year for getting rejected, and it seems a better idea to go run around in my car out under the clear Winter sun and enjoy the light breezes and 64 degrees of a lovely day in North Carolina.

CAVEAT: If the author has forgotten or failed to mention any persons or publications, he humbly apologizes.