An acceptance, a publication, and a rejection

Wonder why the rejections are always so much more powerful than acceptances? Maybe it’s that I haven’t yet had an acceptance that I consider unqualified—the journal could be better (obviously, if it includes my work, said the eternally self-depreciating woman), or it was an online journal and so not as prestigious as a print publication (in theory, although I actually don’t believe that). Or I knew somebody at the journal and maybe that influenced the acceptance. Or whatever. I have my chapbook out at a couple of contests and I keep thinking maybe that acceptance would be it—I would be an official poet then! I could get the Official Poet Stamp at the next reading I goto! Or, again, whatever. Apparently I’m in the mood for a label of some kind right now.

I got an acceptance last week—a pretty good regional journal—for an interesting poem. That same day I got my two copies of another journal I’d had a poem accepted in; I read my poem and didn’t like it. Then I read the other poems in the journal and didn’t like them either. Certainly publishing poems in a journal by itself doesn’t make you a poet.

And today I got another rejection, this time for a set of poems the journal had been holding since last August—seven months they held my poems. Conventional wisdom holds that the longer they have your poems, the better the chances they’re considering them seriously, but that certainly hasn’t been my experience. Seems like there are a bunch of journal editors out there with other stuff to do besides look at the submissions—and I can certainly understand that. But there comes a point where it’s just a common courtesy. . . .

Anyhow, I am still waiting for one of the Muses or some other Great Poetry Goddess to come wave a magic wand over my head and declare me official. Maybe that’s the advantage of the MFA, which I don’t have—you’re credentialed. I guess I’ll have to keep writing my own credentials.