Submit to Rejection
If your art is your soul, and everyone keeps throwing your soul in the garbage...
Being rejected is an artform. You ever see those slapping competitions where the very muscly people slap each other on the face real hard and try not to react? Well having your art rejected can feel like that, but just in your emotions. Which is great because actually getting slapped is way way worse.
Like journaling, writing poetry can be very therapeutic and you don’t need to show it to anyone. But sometimes you create something and you might be interested in trying to publish it. I think there’s some good reasons to do that.
Art isn’t art without an audience. It’s a tree making noise as it falls in the forest with no one to hear it. Therefore art’s a conversation. A two-way street. Fame and power and coolness are one-way streets of tyranny and ozymandium.
Publishing tells readers that this work is worthy of a wider platform than LiveJournal or whatever. It’s a quality-filter, albeit flawed.
So you decide to submit your work
and you’re getting your face ready to be slapped. Whenever I start submitting work to be journals and magazines, I tell myself:
Being famous is dumb.
Statistically, no one makes a living off publishing.
Everyone wants to be published, but the supply is bigger than the demand.
Publishing work and making art have almost no skills in common with each other.
[Famous writer] was [this old] and rejected [insane amount of times] before they published their first piece.
Very few people read the things that DO get published.
But after I send work out, what I actually do is:
Check submittable.com obsessively.
Feel personally attacked when my work is declined without comment.
Spiral into a cycle of self-doubt and worthlessness.
Talk about it in therapy.
Submit again, because I am addicted to the high, man!
Practical concerns
The quickest way I have found to be published if no one is asking for your work, or you want more than self-publishing offers you, is through submittable.com.
Here’re the steps:
Find three poems you’ve written before
Edit them (drop away the stuff you don’t like, add more of the stuff you do)
Put them all in one document
Go to submittable.com and set up an account (make your general bio and cover letter like a Tinder profile but for writing)
Use the “Discover” option, filter by “poetry” and “free”
Find a journal you want to submit to
Submit to it, just do it, don’t think too hard! You got this!
Keep doing this process over and over until you get hungry or bored.
After approximately two months to a year (or more), you will likely get one of three kinds of responses:
The hard rejection:
The soft rejection:
Acceptance:
After playing the submission game off and on since 2006, this is what my statistics looked like in 2021 when I said “fuck it, I’m just going to send my work to any journal that I like SOMETHING about.”
Submitted: 78
Form Rejection: 27
Soft Rejection*: 23
Active: 23
Accepted: 5 publications, 6 poems (SAND and Connecticut River Review accepted the same poem :-(, Subnivean (3 poems), FreezeRay (2 poems), New Territory (1 poem)
Submission Costs: ~$176*These range from “please submit again” which might have been form language to “we were impressed by your work and would love it if you submitted again next open submission period.”
I feel like it’s helpful to see this side of things. I have no idea how my numbers compare to anyone else, but I do know that after one or two rejections it can feel pretty cruddy. I got rejected today and I didn’t like it! But I try to submit with the idea that I am not expecting to be published; I am simply preparing my work in a way that I feel it’s WORTH being published.
That’s the hope anyway.
Hey thanks for reading this. Come to More of a Comment Than a Question the live poetry writing workshop on Zoom. Next one is Thursday, January 26th, 8PM US CST. Register at that button up there. Yay!