Tag Archives: silver lining

The Spirit of T S Eliot

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It is, for a poet, a truth universally acknowledged, that every acceptance is accompanied by a shower of rejection. True to the spirit of T S Eliot, as quoted in a  previous post, I stole that from Jane Austen. She doesn’t need it.

The system with poems in general, and the Japanese forms in particular, is that you send a handful of poems. You may, if you are lucky, get one accepted, sometimes even two or three. Also, if you are lucky, you may be told that some of the others are good too, or (rarely) you may be asked if the editor can keep one for the next issue. Otherwise, you end up with a clutch of rejected poems and no idea why they were rejected. The may be bad, they may be good, but not as good as the one that was selected. Or they may fail for a number of other reasons.

Whatever happens, as happened a few days ago, when one is selected from eight it is an acceptance and a success. The seven rejections count for nothing. Anyway, under my new system they aren’t “rejected” they are merely “not required”.

I’ve just been through the seven returned poems and three of them are already part of a new submission. One of the remaining four, one is not very good when I look again, one of them is a poor match for the new target and two of them are possibly too English (which we have discussed recently).

The next submission will be 10-15 poems and the window closes at the end of the month. I have tried this magazine three times and never had an acceptance. Or, in other words, all 15 are likely to come back. This is good for me – good discipline to try harder targets and to write more, and good for my resilience, as you need to keep being rejected in order to practise your mental toughness and resolve.

As a bonus, most magazines specify ten haiku so, when these come back, I will already have a whole new submission ready to go. There is always a silver lining.

Wilford Suspension Bridge

I searched “pen” to find pictures. I found a couple, but had several results which included the letters “pen” in the middle of words – impressive bit not helpful.

(This was written a few days ago nd left, as events overtook me. I thik I have corrected it to show teh correct chronology, but if I have nissed anything – sorry).

The Week in Restrospect

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It’s strange, looking back, that the posts I’ve written don’t necessarily reflect the week as I remember it. You could be forgiven, after reading the posts, for thinking that I’ve had a week of isolation, food shortages and queues. I suppose I have, but it hasn’t seemed like that.

Despite everything, it’s not been a bad week. Having stocked up on Sunday, I have not had to worry about running short of food.

Whilst waiting for the pharmacy queue to go down we had a ride round and checked out some other queues for reference. I don’t actually remember the queues that well, what I remember is the flowers.

We have a dazzling display of dandelions in the local verges and a few wood celandines, clinging on under trees by the roadside. They seem to be Lesser Celandines when I check them up on the internet, a flower mentioned in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. I have read the book many times but I’d never noticed that before. It is, I’m told, also known as pilewort as it can be used medically to treat haemorrhoids. The leaves are edible in spring and poisonous later in the year. This does not motivate me to sample its culinary uses.

The blossom is coming out too, and spring is well advanced. This is a double-edged sword – I like spring, but it seems to pass so quickly.

We now have a plan for work. I had a letter through the post this morning (I’d had it by email yesterday) detailing the way forward. I am now on official leave of absence and will be fully paid until further notice. At some point I may have to drop to 80% but even so, it’s a lot better than being jobless.

As a result I am still able to treat the lockdown as a bonus holiday, though I do feel a bit guilty about not going in to work.

The new edition of Medal News came out this week, with my article in it. As usual, I read it and thought “could do better”. I often do that with the blog when I look back on past posts, particularly when I see the typos I allow to slip through. Now that I have a few weeks of free time I must get down to planning some more articles. I’d like to think that it entertains and adds to the sum of human knowledge but really it’s just an ego trip.

It won’t make me rich or famous, but it’s nice to be able to tell people about it.

This is in contrast to the results of the National Poetry Competition. I don’t mind not winning, because it’s an unrealistic hope, but I do mind that the winning entry and several others are dreary, unpleasant things. They even have a content warning about them on the Poetry Society website.

To me, that’s wrong. If you honestly believe a poem is good and powerful, and worth the prize, you just print it. No apologies, no link to Samaritans, just print it.

If, on the other hand it’s simply miserable and fashionable, don’t print it. I suppose that makes me sound like a bit of a dinosaur, even a bit of a bitter dinosaur, and totally out of touch with modern poetry. Well, if that’s the case I won’t deny it.

And that is the real story of the week. Even a natural disaster can have a silver lining.

 

Rejection, Rejection, Rejection…

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No, it’s not a semantic device, the title is, so far, an accurate representation of the week so far.

With two more submissions still waiting for replies, it could get worse yet.

On the back of last week’s rejection, I had another yesterday. I then rewrote things, as suggested, and resubmitted them (I had the afternoon free because Julia is on jury duty). The rewrites were rejected.

Then today I had another batch returned.This is an new record for efficient editing – it took approximately 36 hours from sending the poems to getting a rejection.

Four rejections, Three in a week. It’s not doing much for my figures, but it’s not doing me any harm either. I’ve been doing quite well and maybe it’s time for a bit of introspection.

Something has happened over the last year and I find myself strangely serene in the face of adversity.

The first thing, I think, is to remember that it’s my work that’s being rejected, not me.

The second thing is to remember that it’s just words. Nobody died in the making of that poem, no trees were felled and nobody was force fed on salad. There will be plenty more words to work with tomorrow and even if the supply dries up, I must have half a million of them floating round in my blog by now so I could always reuse some of them.

Third – editors are human, and like all of us they have thoughts on what is a good poem. Their view is always going to prevail because it’s their magazine. If you want to be the one calling the shots, either become exceedingly good as a poet, or start your own magazine.

Fourth – in my case, based on past experience, I thought that this time I would target the top magazines and see how I measured up. Some of these magazines publish 1% of the poems they get sent every year. It’s hardly surprising that there’s a lot of rejection flying about. I’d rather be rejected by one of the better magazines than be accepted by something with lower standards. Though, obviously, I’d rather be published than rejected.

Five – every cloud has a silver lining. After thinking I was short of decent poems I now find I have quite a lot of spare ones floating about. Within the next week they will be back on offer, using my recycling strategy. I also have an idea for an article on coping with rejection.

 

Bad start to the week

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It’s been a bad start to the week. For one thing, I was confined to bed for most of yesterday with a bad case of man flu and self-pity. I resorted to viewing soup as food, so you can guess how bad this was. As a result I started Monday morning with a bad back from too much time on a mattress that really needs replacing.

At the centre we found three things.

One, broken paper chains and other evidence of something happening at the weekend. As usual, we get left to tidy up. Julia soon had half the group standing on chairs with sellotape to mend the chains as the other half stood by to catch falling bodies.

Two, a card from one of the group thanking us for the time they have spent here. At that point the man flu made my eyes a bit watery, but it soon passed.

Three, an email from Australia calling me  “very unprofessional and disrespectful of both copyright and intellectual property rights”. That cheered me up, I love a good fight. I had to check the meaning of intellectual property rights as I wasn’t sure where they differ from copyright. In this context I’m not sure they do, so the depravity of my crime was immediately reduced by half.

So – “unprofessional and disrespectful”? I have other traits too, and the reply I framed in my mind certainly showcased my talent for “rudeness” and “sarcasm”.

You see, one of the group has copied an article from the web. They have typed it out, not used cut and paste, and they have worked hard on it. I’m not sure how it got on our website, but I don’t think they even realise that there is such a thing as copyright.

We’re a team and if you cut one of us, we all bleed, so I didn’t hold back.

Then I thought, this person (I’ll say “person” so I don’t upset anyone with my language) probably doesn’t realise that they are being rude, and certainly don’t know that they are abusing a person with learning difficulties, so is it fair for me to give them a hard time?

Having recovered my manners and sense of balance, I’m now feeling better about the day. It’s not been a good start, but there’s a silver lining to every cloud, even an insulting antipodean cloud. As I’ve often told my kids, you shouldn’t let the rudeness of others dictate the way you behave.

I am now going to write a polite reply telling them to contact the farmer. You see, it’s possible to be irritating even when you’re being polite.

Part II of the day’s doings, with pictures, will appear later.