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 it's broken in multiple different places. This makes it harder to repair. One rarely does this to one's ego. But admitting to writing poetry is the first step in admitting you might not be such a serious person. If one were to ensure they were broken and take steps to break oneself down even further, there is a way. Take the additional step of publishing that poetry. If one wanted to destroy one’s sense of oneself as a serious person? One more break– that's going to require open reduction and internal fixation of your ego? This tortured metaphor would come up later in therapy. Simple: submitting those poems as a collection or individually to a series of poetry competitions.
But make sure, and this isn't hard because there are a lot of aspiring poets who are deeply unserious people, to lose.
Remember to read the rejection letters as if they contain any seeds of acknowledgment of your value as a poet. I promise you they do not. Nothing is so gentle as a rejection from finalist status in a poetry competition. It will be polite. This is a deeply personal experience. It's not a fictional character. It's me. It's me. It's me. And it hurts. Here is a poetry contest rejection letter:
“Thank you for sending your poetry for consideration in the 2023 Florida Review Editor's Prize. There were many excellent submissions this year in all prize categories. Unfortunately, your submission was not selected as a winner or finalist.”
It is unfortunate. It is so sad. I wanted to win, and I didn't. And it's cool of me to pretend I don't care. But I do care. I care a lot, or I wouldn't have submitted it in the first place.
“We appreciate your patience in hearing from us. We continue to believe in our deliberative process, which involves multiple readings by members of our staff. Please know that your work was given close consideration.”
Did you give it close consideration? I want to believe that's the case. I want to think that you didn't just send that same letter to everybody. Still, you sent that same letter to everybody because he wouldn't take the time to send a letter saying you had close consideration to people for whom you had close consideration and another letter to more vulnerable people for whom no close consideration was rendered!
Do you appreciate my patience? Really? Because I submitted this thing months ago. I have been very patient. I don't think it's true. I don't think you care that I was patient. I know that can't be the case. Because it would be excruciating for you to be very appreciative of all of the dangerous lunatics who think it makes any sense to spend any time creating poetry for a goddamn competition.
“Your poetry made it through our first deliberation rounds and merited close conversation among the editors; we did enjoy reading it, and wish we had better news to share with you today.”
This is a very gracious lie. What were the first deliberation rounds? You didn't tell us if we got through the second deliberation rounds, you didn't tell us if we were a special snowflake. You didn't tell me that I was a special snowflake whose work was really extra special even though I didn't win, and even though I'm not a runner-up, it really hurt you to choose somebody else because I'm so special. I did such a good job; my heart is pure and good, and you love me. Because I know that's not the case. You couldn't possibly think those things. You can be polite, and I can pretend it's true, and you can know it's a lie, but I also know it's a lie, and the reason that I know it's a lie is that, of course, it is. All of us accept these very gracious lies every day so our hearts don't break in every moment, and our avoidance of that is the real problem that drove us to write the very poetry that we quixotically submitted to a poetry competition in the first place.
“The winners and finalists will be announced in the coming weeks on the Florida Review website.”
The only thing I can do? Be a witness to this harrowing situation. Let’s not pretend that politeness has any place in the world of poetry. Poetry has no place in the world of poetry. There is no poetry in the creation of poetry, and there's certainly none in the rejection letter from a poetry competition. The lack of objective standards for what is good and what is not is why this thing exists in the first place. And so having a competition, submitting to a competitor, and admitting that competition is a competition about our hearts and hopes and dreams and their brokenness, which is the very reason we did the thing in the first place, that's the magic.
I'm not cool; I am sometimes a loser, and that tension, that built-in brokenness, is why we did any of this in the first place. You don't have to be patient with me. I don't have to be patient with you, I have to write a short article it. I wrote a bunch of poetry and submitted it to many poetry competitions and lost. Because I'm not a very good poet. I am an OK enough writer. It was never about being good enough. There's no point in being good at the thing at which there is no objective good; it is only the process of doing and having done and hoping, against hope, that someday, someone would love anything about you. And so I am willing to try, knowing I will fail.
My advice to poetry competition letter writers is to write a rejection in the form of a poem. Write one for every poet. I know it's not a worthwhile use of your time, but neither were our submissions to a poetry competition.
There should be a poetry competition where everybody submits a poem, and every rejection letter is a poem and one wins the contest. This will be based on nothing. Still, the actual output of the poetry competition is the rejection letters as poems for the poems submitted to the poetry competition. Because that's the only rational response in a world of poetic, polite rejection letters to poetry competitions, is to create a work of art about rejection.
Owen Muir is the award-losing author of two poetry collections:
and
As well as a bunch of unremarkable music too:
I’ve gone down the hole of negative self-talk before, but at the time I was a real practicing artist. It was not a sideline for the pleasures of self-expression. Income? This line of work required another source of income and/or pandering to create what sells.; a truly stomach-turning thought for someone who feels there’s power in their art. Another blow to self-esteem is the requirement to spend 1/2 your time on marketing, and marketing includes building your “brand”, and doing so means building a Curriculum Vitae that lists exhibits and won competitions. From the perspective of many artists, having an MD isn’t a useful brand, it means art is both a sideline and implies the luxury of adequate income.
I too cope with bipolar and the darkness it imposes too often. I had to quit the arts and choose a practical path that’s better for my mental health. The problem is ultimately not the rejections but the disorder itself and how it prevents the ego from staying strong enough to bear a life in the arts.
I once wrote a novella that was summarily rejected from multiple novella contests. The only reason for writers to submit to novella contests was that novellas (at that time) were considered unpublishable. To this day, novellas are considered remnants of failed book writing projects, regardless of whether that’s true. The ultimate unserious act of trying to write a book and then giving up and wrapping the plot halfway through. In my case it was a 2/3 reduction in words to a 90,000 word novel. I thought what remained after the culling of verbiage was punchy and strong and moving. After the rejections I added the 60,000 removed words back in and sent it to literary agents and publishers for rejection.