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 Writing that post made me think about how the term "rejected" has been replaced by "declined" by some publishers.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.
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