Musings on Rejection and Dejection or Drejection

I'm a week and a half away from leaving for three weeks, and I feel as if I'm wandering around in circles. I'm not complaining. I just don't know what to do first. My legs are leaden and my head filled with cotton. I feel strangely dejected despite all the good fortune coming my way.

I pulled a card out of my Poet Tarot deck this morning to see what I had in store this week. I got the Five of Mentors. I consulted the guidebook and learned that key phrases for this card are: disagreement within creative groups, being flexible in my artistic vision, choosing battles wisely.

Here's my advice to you, if you're a writer. Submit your work widely and then chill out. Chill out when you get rejections because you'll probably get a lot. For every ten things I've sent out over the years, I get about eight or nine rejections. Years ago, a literary agent sent a manuscript back to me with the words too sad written on the cover sheet. That was it. Sometimes rejections are wildly entertaining, like the one I got over the weekend from a literary journal named after a body of land with some amount of water around it. This is what it said:

Dear Elizabeth, 

Thank you for sending your work. Unfortunately, "Dreaming of Sex During Acupuncture" is not for us. Good luck with your writing and thank you for your interest in [name of journal]. 

Sincerely, 
the editors 

Doesn't that tickle you? I imagine you're wondering about the title of the piece I sent in, and hopefully you'll read the whole thing one day because I'm sending it back out. I'll keep you posted.




While vacuuming my car this morning, I pulled Frank O'Hara's little Lunch Poems out of the door pocket and opened it up, even as I scraped the dead leaves and grit from the floor. My heart is in my pocket, I read from the poem A Step Away from Them. How perfect is that? My other advice to writers is to read all the time and stash small poetry books in weird places.


Have I told you about my obsession with the Annunciation? Given my estrangement from the Roman Catholic faith, I'm not sure why I find it so compelling, but there's something about a big old angel leaning down to softly tell a virginal woman that she'll be carrying the son of God that knocks me flat. There's all this grace inherent in the gesture, I think. My favorite painting is Fra Angelico's Annunciation, and after visiting Italy for the second time and seeing it, after which I had a disturbing encounter with an epileptic young woman, its significance became all the greater. You honestly can't make that shit up, and I didn't. I did write an essay, though, that was accepted for publication by Slow Trains years and years ago. It was rejected at least five times before being accepted. You can read it if you like.

Anyhoo.



Mary Szybist wrote an entire book of poems about the Annunciation. It's called Incarnadine. Here's one of the poems:

Annunciation Overheard from the Kitchen

I could hear them from the kitchen, speaking as if
something important had happened.

I was washing the pears in cool water, cutting the bruises from them.
From my place at the sink, I could hear

a jet buzz hazily overhead, a vacuum
start up next door, the click,
click between shots.

"Mary, step back from the camera."

There was a softness to his voice
but no fondness, no hurry in it.

There were faint sounds
like walnuts being dropped by crows onto the street,
almost a brush
of windchime from the porch -----

Windows around me everywhere half-open ----

My skin alive with the pitch.

Mary Szybist



Maybe I'm weird, but that just blows my tiny little mother mind.™

Absolution

When I got into my car this morning to move it from the driveway and make space for Sophie's aide's car, I noticed immediately that the interior was trashed. Everything from the dash had been dumped in the front passenger seat, papers were everywhere, the box in-between the two front seats where I store CDs was also open and the contents strewed in the back. My little copy of Frank O'Hara's Lunch Poems that I keep in the compartment on my door was draped over the driver headrest. I don't feel like making metaphor of that. I've felt such unease of late, a sort of restless dread and tamped down anxiety. I could probably list the reasons for these vague feelings, but I won't because I'm also feeling over-exposed and loathe to reveal anything more. Even yesterday I witnessed a terrible breakdown of a Facebook friend that played out online and made me feel old and disconnected from what moves many people these days. When I went for a walk the other day, I stood at the bottom of this old, enormous tree and looked upward to where the branches spread out and laced the sky. I wanted to embrace it, lay my head on it, be absolved.

ANIMALS
                
                
       Have you forgotten what we were like then
       when we were still first rate
       and the day came fat with an apple in its mouth
      
       it's no use worrying about Time
       but we did have a few tricks up our sleeves
       and turned some sharp corners
      
       the whole pasture looked like our meal
       we didn't need speedometers
       we could manage cocktails out of ice and water
      
       I wouldn't want to be faster
       or greener than now if you were with me O you
       were the best of all my days
       
                             
       Frank O'Hara (1950)

Summer Apples

Backyard apple tree, Los Angeles 2012

Poem (at night Chinamen jump)

At night Chinamen jump   

on Asia with a thump

while in our willful way   

we, in secret, play

affectionate games and bruise   

our knees like China’s shoes.

The birds push apples through   

grass the moon turns blue,

these apples roll beneath   

our buttocks like a heath

full of Chinese thrushes   

flushed from China’s bushes.

As we love at night   

birds sing out of sight,

Chinese rhythms beat   

through us in our heat,

the apples and the birds   

move us like soft words,

we couple in the grace   

of that mysterious race.

-- Frank O'Hara

Parenting via Frank O'Hara

When I visited City Lights bookstore last weekend in San Francisco, I wandered through the poetry section in near rapture, up the stairs in the ether and gathered a few books to flip through, those I knew and those I had never heard of, thinking how poetry endures, the toil of it, despite. Frank O'Hara's Lunch Poems is a small book to revel in, and this poem one of my favorites:

Ave Maria


Mothers of America


                               let your kids go to the movies!


get them out of the house so they won't know what you're up to


it's true that fresh air is good for the boy


                                                                but what about the soul


that grows in darkness, embossed by silvery images


and when you grow old as grow old you must
                                                                         they won't hate you


they won't criticize you they won't know


                                      they'll be in some glamorous country


they first saw on a Saturday afternoon or playing hookey


they may even be grateful to you


                                                      for their first sexual experience


which only cost you a quarter


                                            and didn't upset the peaceful home


they will know where candy bars come from
                 
                                                     and gratuitous bags of popcorn


as gratuitous as leaving the movie before it's over


with a pleasant stranger whose apartment is in the 
                                                                       Heaven on Earth Bldg


near the Williamsburg Bridge
                                oh mothers you will have made the little tykes


so happy because if nobody does pick them up in the movies


they won't know the difference
                                       and if somebody does it'll be sheer gravy


and they'll have been truly entertained either way


instead of hanging around the yard


                                                         or up in their room
                                                                                        hating you


prematurely since you won't have done anything horribly
                                                                                         mean yet


except keeping them from the darker joys
                                                               it's unforgivable the latter


so don't blame me if you won't take this advice


                                                                 and the family breaks up


and your children grow old and blind in front of a TV set


                                                                                             seeing


movies you wouldn't let them see when they were young


Frank O'Hara, 1960