Launched by the Academy of American Poets in April 1996, National Poetry Month is a special occasion that celebrates poets’ integral role in our culture and that poetry matters. Over the years, it has become the largest literary celebration in the world, with tens of millions of readers, students, K–12 teachers, librarians, booksellers, literary events curators, publishers, families, and—of course—poets, marking poetry’s important place in our lives.
An earlier post here was about the new use of the term "uncurated" in making poetrt submissions. Writing that post made me think about how the term "rejected" has been replaced by "declined" by some publishers. Do you feel any better about having a submission "declined" rather than "rejected"?
How do you feel about those templated decline emails that you get from journals and publishers? They are almost always a "compliment sandwich," with the decline slipped between two slices of of positivity. "Thank you for the opportunity to read your work" - then something about how many submissions they received and how hard it was to select the few poems they are using or the winner of that contest - "We hope you'll consider submitting in the future" - and paying a fee again to do so.
Anyone who has been through their teen years has experienced enough rejection for a lifetime. But writers invite rejection when they share their work with publishers. I think poets have more opportunities than writers in other genres because they can constantly be sending out a poem or a few poems to multiple publishers.
I was reading about some famous examples of novels that were rejected many times before being accepted and turned out to be classics. Sometimes a novel just needs to find the right editor.
Here is the tale of a novel that is in the literary canon (and often read in those teenage years in schools), but that found many rejections before being published.
William Golding finished his novel, Lord of the Flies, sent it out, and had it returned 21 times. When it went to Faber and Faber, it was initially marked for rejection. The reader (not an editor, of course) assigned to it called the work “absurd,” “dull,” and “pointless.” But a young editor at the firm named Charles Monteith, needing something to read on the train, grabbed it off the slush pile and realized its potential.
Lord of the Flies tells the story of a group of preadolescent boys stranded on a desert island after their plane is shot down while evacuating them from Britain during a fictional war. The submitted manuscript was changed quite a bit in the editing process, and the revised version went on to be a staple of high school reading lists, and William Golding went from a pile of rejections to winning the Nobel Prize in Literature.
It’s the equinox today, and it is also the birthday of the Roman poet Ovid, born Publius Ovidius Naso in what is now Sulmo, Italy (43 B.C.). He became a famous, beloved poet in Rome, privy to the inner circles of the court.
He published erotic poems, including his Ars Amatoria (The Art of Love) in 2 A.D., which instructed people on the arts of seduction and lovemaking. He wrote Metamorphoses in 8 A.D., for which he is best remembered today. It traces Greek and Roman mythology through the lens of humans’ metamorphoses into other objects — plants, stones, stars, and animals. It was a major inspiration to Shakespeare and many others.
Here is an odd thing about his life: In 8 A.D., he was exiled, and even today, nobody knows why.
In his writing after this, he talks about Emperor Augustus’ anger toward him, and he alludes to having seen something he shouldn’t have seen, but nothing more specific. Whatever the reason, Ovid was sent to Tomi, in what is now Romania, and he was isolated and lonely, longing for his beloved Rome. But even after Augustus died, the next emperor, Tiberius, did not allow Ovid back, and he died in Tomi after about 10 years in exile.
His Art of Love is less erotic and more instructional than you might expect. There is an English translation at poetryintranslation.com. It has very practical chapters, such as: How to Find Her Book, Search while you’re out Walking, Or at the Theatre, Or at the Races, or the Circus, Triumphs are Good too! and There’s always the Dinner-Table, And Finally There’s the Beach. Yes, these are translations, but they seem quite modern and practical!
Our idea of what is erotic two thousand years after Ovid has changed. less sensual, more sexual. Still, many of his passages are quite playful on the ideas of sex.
Not bad advice, Ovid.
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In logic, there are discussions of the "Liar Paradox." If a poet writes, "This sentence is false," it creates a loop where truth leads to falsehood, which in turn leads back to truth. Hof calls this a "strange loop."
They may not have read the book, but many poets utilize the "strange loop" structure of self-reference and recursion.
Wallace Stevens is perhaps the most notable poet associated with this concept. In poems like "The Comedian as the Letter C," he explores "recursive meta-poetics." His work often features a "supreme fiction" — his term for a poem that tries to step outside of itself to describe the world, only to realize that the description is part of the world it is describing. This creates a loop where the "observer" and the "observed" become indistinguishable.
Postmodernist John Ashbery's poem "Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror" mimics the "tangled hierarchy" of the painting by Parmigianino that it describes. It reflects on the act of reflection itself, with the poet’s voice spiraling through layers of consciousness that often return to the starting point of the gaze.
Randall Jarrell's poem "Eighth Air Force" invokes a poetic version of the liar paradox. By having a character state, "I have lied as I lie now," he creates a logic loop that questions the authenticity of the "I." The statement is true only if it is false, trapping the speaker in a recursive moral knot.
Lyn Hejinian, in her experimental work "My Life," uses a recursive structure to explore the "consciousness of consciousness." The poem is composed of sections that reference each other and their own construction, effectively building a "self" through a linguistic feedback loop.
Follow this blog for all things poetry. To see our past prompts and more than 300 issues, visit our website at poetsonline.org
