The silver lining of rejection

I received feedback on a poetry collection that I submitted for consideration to a small publisher that I’m a big fan of.

It was very detailed feedback, and I know it was kindly meant. It’s full of platitudes, while ultimately explaining that my work just isn’t for them:

What your poems show me, and it's something that I experience myself, is that the way we voice and imagine our poems is kind of beyond our control - we can fiddle around the edges and acquire greater experience and skill, but ultimately, we write the way we write - take it or leave it! 

The team has clearly decided to ‘leave it’, but the criticism, intended to be constructive, continues:

In your 'wrong ice cream' poem, we are taken into a familiar family setting and recognise the litany of icy products on display, but then you torque the emotions into something much darker, and we get the synaesthesia effect of emotional humiliation being spoken in the language of tasting.

(My ‘wrong ice cream’ poem has, I’m pleased to say, just won me £150 with Wildfire Words.) But the feedback goes on:

You do something similar in the next one - so we are given very vivid and surreal images that stand for the pains of childhood - rather deliciously dark - that hallmark domestic noir of yours.

'The better to eat you with' reads like a poem that's eating itself, its parenthetical asides and qualifications, its going down the rabbit-hole to the 'before the beginning' origins of fairy tale, and the way it surfaces just in time to avoid being digested in the, almost sinister, moment the narrator hands this form of trauma on. I love the endrhymes in 'Cradle Song' - winceyette, vignette, motet - and the way your rhyme scheme holds each verse in its place - perhaps my favourite poem here. I land on the word 'malison' (a new one to me, thank you!) - 'the singularity/ of androcentry' given a very heady mix in this poem of enforced domesticity and inherited loud docility? Behind his back turns out to be a multivalent title whose implications are spelled out across a poem that initially hesitates to do so but finally leans into a rather momentous moment of doubt. 

I mean, it all sounds quite good, to here. So here’s the killer bit:

As I read to the end, I struggle to formulate the reason why these poems still don't quite do it for us. It's clearly a matter of our editorial desiderata and what you produce not being aligned - perhaps a sense that your poems are a little too 'chatty' for us - I can't quite tie the feeling down - there's much to admire both formally and verbally in your poetry - but maybe it's lines like 'You're my oldest friend, after all' that create an overfamiliarity between poet and reader that undermines the seriously deep affective purport of the poems, for me - 'what I wouldn't give not to know again' is very fine and apt, though! It's been a pleasure once more. 

Working in publishing forces you to grow a thick skin, but I felt unusually bruised by these words in spite of the encouraging bits: ‘deliciously dark’, ‘hallmark domestic noir’, ‘much to admire formally and verbally’, etc. Because a rejection is a rejection, after all, and they are hard to swallow.

But, once I’d picked myself up and dusted myself down, I’ve decided to consider its silver lining. I think the nature of this particular rejection has actually done me a big favour in that it has forced me to consider what is truly important to me about poetry itself — and my own writing in particular.

An explanation of the power of poetry that resonates most strongly comes from my personal poetry bible: Reading Poetry (Second Edition)  An Introduction. Furniss, T. & Bath, Michael. (2007) Harlow: Pearson Education Ltd. Early in this tome, the authors explain that poetry ‘achieves its emotional power by working the resources of the language to the limit’ (p11).

William Wordsworth argued that poetry should be written in the ‘language really used by men’. In the preface to Lyrical Ballads, he rejected the ornate, artificial, and dramatic classical styles of the 18th century. He believed poetry should be democratic, accessible, and deeply rooted in the everyday human experience. I don’t think those ideas could be any more salient today, except of course to say that poetry should be written in the ‘language really used by women’; certainly, for me, it must be written in the diction of every day speech and dialogue. I love allusion and intertextuality, combinations of images that lead to something new and intriguing, but I also really struggle with anything too obscure or difficult. I want to know what the poet is talking about, even if the interpretation is uniquely personal. Edward Thomas, another poetry hero of mine, also took natural speech rhythms and turned them inward. The hesitant, searching pauses of someone thinking to themselves, or quietly observing something they have witnessed is part of my own approach.

So I think, for now, I shall indeed continue to write the way I write, ‘chatty’ and ‘over-familiar’ though this editor has found it.

But it has set me thinking about how I do write. Writing a poem is a complex undertaking; too complex to articulate in a short blog post. What is it, exactly, that I prioritise, beyond that notion of ‘voice’?

Sound. White space. Ambiguity. I think they are near the top of the (long) list.

Sound is hugely important to me in poetry. I draw a kind of delight from certain sonic echoes: sometimes unexpected consonant combinations, or dissonance, or slant rhymes. The more playful the better. Often, I couldn’t explain exactly why I am drawn to those sounds, but I think back to my ‘first favourite’ poem which was I saw a Jolly Hunter by Charles Causley. I remember having to learn it by heart in primary school. I loved the repetition and the way the word ‘jolly’ was applied all over the place. Most of all I loved its sense of justice - and the unexpected ‘I’ in the last line.

After sound, I think I’m interested in what white space space ‘says’. Although poetry was, of course, an oral form of literature originally, white space has become part of its currency on the page — and certainly the thing that makes it different from prose. The power of the killer line-break, for example, arrives in double syntax - and it’s one of my favourite poetic games to play. 

Ambiguity is a tool I love to manipulate, particularly the ambiguity that arrives with the use of polysemous words. I want to be made to work hard when I read a poem, to read in ‘slow-motion’. I want to find something new each time I return to a poem. In my years as a literature teacher, the best poems were the ones that still managed to surprise me, even when I’d taught them ten times or more. 

Poetry is a philosophical undertaking: the attempt to make sense of shared human experience, to shape it in order to consider fundamental questions about existence, knowledge, values, reason, and language itself. It’s a big deal. So, for now, I’ll continue to fiddle around the edges and acquire greater experience and skill — and be grateful that this rejection has given me pause for thought.