Building Nothing Out Of Something

Your author entered poetry contests, and lost

Another rejection. I entered 36 poetry contests. It is embarrassing to have done so in the first place. Even having written poetry forced me to acknowledge that I was, in some way, a poet.  This is a foolish thing to be. It's not a serious thing. It does not translate into anything serious. It is the antithesis of seriousness.

Nothing remotely commercial, productized, scaleable, or financially valuable about poetry exists. It is an anti-commercial art form. To take the step of admitting that I was a poet was hard in the first place. It was insulting to look in the mirror and see someone so profoundly unserious that they– staring back, reversed, reminiscent of you that you thought you were– spent any time on my poetry.

To be so absurdly self-serious as to submit that collection of poetry to not one but rather a series of poetry competitions?  It is a kind of compound injury.  When you're building the perfect fracture, taking a bone, and breaking it, the worst way to break it is so that…