It's almost a rite of passage for small press poets (and are there any other in great enough numbers to qualify as a species?) The older, more experienced poets boast about the amount of it they have had to endure. It proves, to paraphrase somebody or other, their testicular fortitude........

CONTINUED.......

 
It's almost a rite of passage for small press poets (and are there any other in great enough numbers to qualify as a species?) The older, more experienced poets boast about the amount of it they have had to endure. It proves, to paraphrase somebody or other, their testicular fortitude. And sometimes it seems testicular fortitude is a more important accessory for the poet than very much of anything, including a knowledge of poetry.
 
What am I talking about? Why, rejection of course, and since I finished my new chapbook SKID ROAD BALLADS AND UNION SONGS, I've been gearing myself up rather nervously for another bout of it.
 
I don't mind admitting (well, in a way I mind), that I'm not good at being rejected. And the construction of that sentence tells you why, because it's not me being rejected when my poetry gets sniffily returned by an editor; it's the poem, or the poems. There are probably a lot of other factors contributing to the homeward flight of my work as well--I know this, because I am also an editor; my "blogzine", as I awkwardly call it, THE BEATNIK, publishes Beat, post-Beat and contemporary poetry from around the world--but logic is not a helpful tool when you apply it to yourself. And I'm more in the Kerouac than the Bukowski mould. Three or four rejections can put me off writing for months.
 
That is no exaggeration either; it has happened. The no-thank-yous and you-must-be-jokings pile up and you (I) start to think, I must be useless at this. Or if you are in a more robust frame of mind--which happens from time to time even with the most sensitive soul--you think, "Well, it's obviously a closed shop, the chances of me getting in are zero. These editors wouldn't know a decent poet if he crept up behind them and let off a foghorn in their ear." And the existence, real or imaginary, of a conspiracy of people already in the game, endlessly publishing each other--"clasping assholes", Buk called it--makes poetry look almost as unromantic as local government.
 
The question of whether or not you're any good at writing is one you'll have to answer for yourself. It's not, I would suggest, that hard to do it competently; almost everybody does. It's pretty near impossible to do it wonderfully well-- but the people who achieve beyond the former are usually those uppity so-and-sos who aim for the latter.
 
As for the question of the magazines operating a closed shop--for a start there are a LOT of magazines, in print and on the internet, so any statement anybody makes about them is likely to be inaccurate. I have knowledge of a fair few, however, including my own, and I can semi-confidently refute any notion of a conspiracy (I can now: the first editor who returns SKID ROAD will be accused of all kinds of nefarious activity designed explicitly to disadvantage me). Some poets, but only a very few, get into the magazines because of their reputations. I published one such, in the print version of BLUE FREDERICK. The poems he sent were only average, but a] rejecting him would have been unthinkable because he was so well-liked, and b] having him in the magazine made it easier to advertise, except to those who were hip enough to see his name on the flier and groan, "Not him again."
 
Two things, I think, REALLY dictate what appears in a magazine, be it dedicated to poetry, prose, painting or rabbit-hutch design, when circulation isn't an issue. The first is the taste of the editor, and the second is the work that's actually submitted.
 
Everyone knows what good poetry is, right? Everyone knows, and almost nobody agrees. My grounding in poetry came with the Beats; it reached back into Modernism, Baudelaire and Rimbaud, Japanese haiku, T'ang Dynasty China. Anybody who sends poetry to the Beatnik is going to have it judged with Kerouac and Ezra Pound and Basho and Li Po (among others) used as reference points. I don't know, but it seems a lot of American editors, middle-aged and older, use WC Williams and perhaps Wallace Stevens; a good proportion of the younger editors seem to start with Buk or Huffstickler and progress from there. If you send one of those a sweet bucolic rhymer they may use it in place of toilet paper.
 
Which is a crude joke, but probably not far from the truth. The taste limitations of the editor make it absolutely necessary for you to get a copy of the magazine, or find it on the internet, before you submit. (Perhaps editors should be compelled, in what journalists call "the interests of full disclosure", to declare who their favourite poets are, as I have done--would we really want to waste our energies on someone who preferred, I don't know, Paul Simon to Bob Dylan?) And the fact that taste, rather than some objective view of The Poem (as academics call it), plays such a large part in dictating what is published--and the fact that writers know it--also limits, mercifully, the number of submissions an editor has to sort through. Only a real idiot sends poetry out on spec. And the law of averages commands that only a proportion of the poetry actually received by an editor is going to be publishable. So the same names are quite likely to appear again and again. Poets are like homing pigeons; they have a habit of returning to the places where they are warm and well-fed.
 
So, everything is rosey in the state of the arts, eh? The door is wide open for anybody with the talent to walk through. Or, as I've illustrated, anybody with the blind luck to read the same, think the same and put it down the same, as the few editors who have the money (I don't) to put a book out. But what if, in this game that is allegedly all about individualism, you have the misfortune to be doing something different, even if it is differently old? How are you going to get your stuff read then?
 
The internet is the obvious answer. Governments of all colours and georgraphical positions fear the internet because it is a great democratiser. A Leveller, in the language of the old socialist struggle. If nobody else likes your poetry, you can put it on there. If you can't afford a page of your own, you can use free services like MySpace or Blogger and reach, potentially, an even greater audience. Fifteen minutes work down at the internet cafe or when your boyfriend steps out to buy the evening newspaper, and now the poetry that none of the magazines wanted is talking to the world.
 
I have been using the internet for a similar purpose for quite a while now. Not because nobody likes my poetry (some do, some don't), but as I said earlier in this piece, because I get so neurotic about rejection. Since the retirement of my great mentor poet/ editor Bryn Fortey, I've been posting poetry on my own sites and hoping readers will come to me. And I've had a reasonable amount of success bringing readers in, although as Steve Earle says, "I ain't ever satisfied," and always want more. I'm also beset by the permanent feeling that I'm copping out by not submitting work as energetically as I used to (I still submit occasionally, when the wind is right and I have enough blood in my eyes). Knowing poetry (which I do), is more important than the testicular fortitude I mentioned before, but can you be a decent poet if you have no balls at all?
 
The problem with self-publishing, or vanity publishing, which is really what using the internet to get your stuff directly to the public amounts to, is the hoary old question of quality control. Nobody I've ever known can read a poem they've written right off the bat and tell whether it's any good or not. It might be. It might also be technically inept or ridiculous in some way that will make you cringe when you look at it with a more objective eye six months later. If you don't put your poetry under the nose of an editor or two, you'll have nobody to tell you what the whole world can see so clearly it would be less conspicuous in a revolving bow tie. You could, I realise, rely on your friends to point out the shortcomings of your august efforts, but are your friends poets? Most of mine aren't; some are. But I'd not sure I'd want to subject them to the dangerous task of critiquing my poetry. Remember that footage of Princess Diana covered in body armour walking through a minefield? Perigo! Poet!
 
Some might say quality control isn't important. That I'm being too English even worrying about it. A fuddy-duddy. Undemocratic. Let the people decide for themselves what poetry is. Well, yes, I'm reasonably democratic and I'm all for evolution. But I'm interested in the art of poetry. I SEE it as an art. It's not just, as Tony Harrison says, "chopped-up bits of prose". And the best of it in the last fifty years has almost all come out of the small presses, especially in America. I'd like to keep it that way.

So the message, to myself and to others, is this: rejection my be a hard blow to the gut, but you have to learn to take it. Understand that the editor is working within his or her own limitations of taste and, yes, intelligence; even age, geography. And try to learn something when your work comes back. They may be wrong in their dismissal of it, but they're not ALWAYS wrong. If only it were true, the fragile egotist's credo that every defeat you experience is further proof of the world's stupidity and your genius! Sometimes an editor might not want a poem because somebody else sent a marginally better one. But you can put that right next time.
 
As a poet with a manuscript about to do the rounds, rather than as an editor, however, I have one fervent wish: that editors would stop critiquing poems they return. Since, as we've shown, it's usually just a question of taste when something's rejected--and who knows when it isn't?--the detailed critique has always struck me as a terrifically arrogant thing to do. Show me YOUR best efforts, asshole, then we'll decide who judges who. The rejection itself is hard enough to take; having an editor say your best lines lack surprise or that your line breaks are arbitrary, into the bargain, can almost kill you off for a month or two--if only because you don't live close enough to the editor to make yourself feel better by going around his house and putting shit through his letterbox. He (or she) may be right about the line breaks, of course. But you'll figure that out for yourself soon enough, if you're not a complete idiot.