Today I took some time to ponder the often mysterious process of publishing my work.
Over the last five years, the poems in the list below stand out due to the number of rejections they received, from a low of nine to a high of twenty-one.
- After the Migraine languished under the weight of 9 rejections until the Cumberland River Review threw it a line.
- “Brooks Avenue Notebook:” 10 rejections before finding a home in San Pedro River Review’s Fall 2018 print issue.
- The Reflection of Visible Wavelengths: also10 rejections before A-Minor saw its value.
- A Life in Reverse racked up 11 “nos,” but the editors at Seven Circle Press rescued it from the slush pile.
- Smoke also received 11 “not quite right for us” messages, before Tab Journal said yes.
- Dispatch from a Warming Planet, after 13 rejections, landed at at Seven Circle Press.
- Cubic Zirconia’s brilliance went undetected 13 times, but MORIA finally said “yes.”
- Maybe it was the name, but Guerilla frightened off journals 17 times until Gargoyle took a chance on it.
- Earth Hum revolved 18 times, but The Inflectionist Review put a stop to that when they accepted the poem for Issue 15.
- At 19 rejections, Geography became one of my most widely-traveled poems, arriving, at last, at Verse Daily.
- And finally, the winner, or loser, depending on how you look at it, is “Dreamstate,” which received 21 rejections before it woke up at Slant.
Does it seem like it poems are taking longer to be accepted? Or is that just my imagination? This is why I keep my very useful spreadsheet. I can see that the more I send my work out, the more it’s accepted for publication. It’s a simple numbers game.
Except when it isn’t. Sometimes it seems that certain poems need a rest of anywhere from a few weeks to a year or more. Perhaps the world needs to catch up with that poem, or something is off about it that I just don’t see, won’t see until much later.
I’d love to hear from you about this process. Is there a poem or other piece of writing that you’ve sent out repeatedly, only to have it return? What helps you keep the faith? And is there a poem you finally stopped trying to publish?
