Submission - Feb 21 2023

 

Submission

Feb 21 2023

What do I make

of all the rejection slips?

The boilerplate

with a few polite sentences

that leave me questioning

if I was ever really read.

And now, on-line;

as if not even worth

the price of a stamp.

I know I'm too easily

demoralized and depressed.

But in this

feel aggrieved as well.

Find myself indulging

in the warm pee of victimhood

self-pity

injustice,

unbecoming as they are.

Along with vaguely paranoid thoughts,

persecuted

by the incestuous “they”;

the all-knowing arbiters,

guardians

of the academic gates.

So what to make?

Paper airplanes?

Wallpaper?    ... placemats?    ... origami cranes?

Tinder

kindling

feeding the flames?

Or from now on

refuse to submit.

The purity

of the poet

who writes for its own sake.

The inner nihilist

I've tried to suppress.

Who knows

that nothing matters anyway.

That there is no posterity

even for the greats.

And that in the end

nothing lasts

and there's no escaping death.

Stephen Marche's The Fine Art of Failure was published in today's Atlantic (https://www.theatlantic.com/culture/archive/2023/02/writing-creative-careers-success-failure-rejection-persistence/673122/). It's reassuring to read about famous writers who were repeatedly rejected. It seems that persistence is as crucial as talent.

I don't make a living at this, and I can't be bothered to submit. (Although I did a few times very early on. Even had a smidgen of success.) Especially since my poetry probably doesn't pass either the academic or avant garde sniff test. Can I claim some kind of artistic purity in this? Probably not. It's much more laziness and a thin skin. Nevertheless, even if I'm never read, the writing is still a compulsion. And even if I'm never read, I still write for a hypothetical reader, not just myself: like everyone but the diarist, I write to be heard.

My inner nihilist isn't so inner. And as I've written before, there is much to be said for nihilism. Its essential humility. Its acknowledgement of one's insignificance. Its antidote to self-importance. Its gift of an amused detachment from the presumed seriousness of life.