Mandarin Duck – Arnot Hill Park
I’ve just been tidying up my email box. Deleting 100 emails on top of the hundreds that I do as they come in, makes me realise how many I get and how much I have let things get out of hand. Recently I red how part of you can be contained in another person (the example in my case being that without Julia I would lose all memory of family addresses and dates. It’s a bit like that with emails. Much of my life is contained within the email system and if I lost access to that I would find aspects of my personality disappearing too.
But enough philosophical rambling . . .
I’m just about to start writing poetry again (having been derailed by my recent arthritis outbreak), and I was looking up an email from an editor. I wanted information about the next submission period but was hooked by his comments on rejecting my previous submission. I thought I had passed the point of being annoyed by rejection, but it appears I’m not. I don’t want to give too much information because it’s not fair to discuss editorial comments in public, but he editor in question said that the poem didn’t make sense on a literal basis.
Duck – Arnot Hill Park
If I was aiming for writing that made sense on a literal basis i would write travel guides or text books. I’d actually have a chance of making money if I did that. But I write poetry, which is supposed to be full of imagination, allusion and layers of meaning. I don’t recall ever reading that it had to make sense. It’s hard enough to write as it is, without needing it to make sense too.
That email is stored two spaces below another that complains the haiku in one of the haibun I submitted “isn’t a haiku at all”. When I look back at it, I see his point. It was written in haste as I struggled to make a deadline and I wasn’t as sharp at editing as I should have been. This comment I have no problem with, just in case you were thinking I was being unfair to editors. It is, after all, the job of the writer to write poetry of such stunning beauty that an editor cannot resist it.
And with that in mind, I am off to write a poem about ducks. I like ducks and they are fun to feed. They aren’t quite as multi-faceted as swans, but if you are writing limericks they are easier to rhyme.
Floating Feathers – Arnot Hill Park
I am glad that you are back to writing again. I trust that editors will come to their senses.
Lavinia definitely hit the nail on the head. I’ve had editorial comments that made immediate sense, some that required thought, and a few that simply might have been put in the wrong envelope. Yup. Discard. Keep writing.
🙂 Persistence, rather than talent, is my main strength. 🙂
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Lavinia has said it.
🙂
The arts are subjective, for sure. Keep on writing, Simon!
The trick is to be like J K Rowling – once you get big enough you can call the shots and write long rambling and (eventually) unreadable books that no editor can turn down or alter. If it hurts to hold it while you’re reading, it’s too long. I gave up reading them once they got too big to hold.
You made me chuckle…
In that case it’s not been a wasted day. 🙂
😉😉
🙂
As I am sure you know, what doesn’t make sense to one editor will make perfect sense to another. Onward!
Very true. I once sent a rejected haibun out again on the day it arrived back with me. Three days later it was accepted. 🙂