When celebrating an acceptance or wallowing in self-doubt after a rejection, I always try to remember that the poetry world is packed with the ironies of differing editorial tastes. For example, there are many tales of prize-winning poems that had previously failed to find a home despite numerous attempts to place them.
My own favourite experience was a terrific review of my pamphlet, Inventing Truth, in an extremely well-regarded journal. The piece praised and highlighted a poem that had been rejected by that very magazine a year earlier. Now, which of those views of my work do I prefer to think was right...?!
DISPLACED They called her aloof, impractical, clumsy, plain. It was, they
say, difficult for her not to fall in love.In spite, that is, of the first
coughs...
I had the opposite - a reviewer dispraising a poem that had been in the mag he was deputy editor of. I assume he either didn't know his own mind or had no actual say in what they printed.
ReplyDeleteThat certainly tops mine, Sheenagh!
Delete