Subjective, in my opinion

by Neal Whitman, Poetry Prof

Sonja: Boris, Let me show you how absurd your position is. Let’s say there is no God, and each man is free to do exactly as he chooses. What prevents you from murdering somebody?

Boris: Murder’s immoral.

Sonja: Immorality is subjective.

Boris: Yes, but subjectivity is objective.

Sonja: Not in a rational scheme of perception.

Boris: Perception is irrational. It implies imminence.

Sonja: But judgment of any system of phenomena exists in any rational, metaphysical or epistemological contradiction to an abstracted empirical concept such as being, or to be, or to occur in the thing itself, or of the thing itself.

Boris: Yeah, I’ve said that many times.

From Love and Death, written and directed by Woody Allen

We have all heard the old saw that there are two kinds of people: those who put people into two groups and those who don’t. Well, this month’s piece is for two groups of poets: those who have been sent rejections letters and those who have not sent out their poems. I think that covers all poets. Can we talk? I keep a folder labeled “subjections.” No, not in a “folder” with “files” on my computer’s “desktop,” but in a manila folder in my metal file drawer under the desk in my study. It is a thick folder filed behind a much thinner folder labeled, “acceptances.”

I use the label, “subjections,” for the file where I save all my rejection letters in two senses of the word, first, as in…

“Why do I subject myself to this humiliation?”

Stop right there. Think about the word we use for the poem we send to a journal. It is a “submission,” from the Latin, submittere, the infinitive for the act of lowering oneself.

Is it “lowering” to send your work to strangers… and then be turned down? Well, it does help that this is a stranger! So, I did not brood when a journal editor wrote, “We have received a large volume of submissions. Unfortunately, your poem was not chosen for our annual anthology.” What I did immediately was to send off the same poem to another journal, whose editor took it right away.

Isn’t  cognitive dissonance a good thing?  On one hand, when I get a “subjection” from a editor at  XYZ Community College, I can write it off as in “For Gosh sakes! Don’t they know I got a Big Ten education and an Ivy League degree?”

On the other hand, when I got my “We regret to inform you…” letter from The New Yorker, I was able to say to myself, “Well, what did I expect? They get 90,000 poems a year! Their news arrived one week after I mailed it out, which means that the intern stuffed their form letter in my SASE as soon as he (or she) opened my submission. The verb, read, does not even apply here.”

Yes. Cognitive dissonance. A good thing.

Oh, a word about those SASEs. On March 26 my postal delivery person left me a little brown envelope asking for 3 cents postage due. YUP. It had been almost a year since I mailed in my submssion to this journal and last May 8 the first class postage went up. Their undated  form letter had been photocopied for so many generations that it was barely legible.

Now… a second use of the word, subjection:

“Come on! Isn’t this all so subjective?”

Obvious, but at least acknowledged by an editor who informed me, “Thank you for your submission… I am sorry to say that your poems were not accepted for publication… However, this is a particularly subjective business, and I always appreciate the opportunity to read new work. Please feel free to submit again in the future, and thanks again for thinking of us.”

As a connoisseur of how it is framed, I can report that last one was one of the nicest. And, you know what? While some letters are a bit terse, not one has been as biting as what one editor put on the sidebar on his submission guidelines webpage along with other bits and quips. There he posted what an unnamed English professor from an unnamed university wrote on top of a student’s term paper: “I am returning this otherwise good typing paper to you because someone has printed gibberish all over it and put your name on top.” Now that would be humiliating!

But, back to subjectivity. I sent the three poems this last journal editor turned down to other journals and each poem got published. The subjectivity of it all is evident when, in fact, almost all of my poems that have been subjected have ultimately been published. Mark Haddon, whose poetry book I applauded last month, warns newbies that poetry is “poorly rewarded work which fails more often than it succeeds and is therefore embarked upon by men and women laboring under a sense of almost religious vocation, grandiose self-delusion or some combination of both.” Well, I am not quite ready to admit to all that, but I must say that I am presumptuous. I presume that what I write is worth reading. My poems are not written for my private diary. They are written to be read. In fact, without a reader, the poem is unfinished. Poets of the World: Unite in our willingness to send (yes, submit) our poems to the editors of Getting Something Read and elsewhere. It need not be humiliating. And, it is all so subjective. Plus, sometimes an editor makes good suggestions to move a poem along. Arthur Plotnik, author of The Elements of Editing, put it this way:

You write to communicate to the hearts and minds of others what’s burning inside you. And we edit to let the fire show through the smoke.

Postscript: On March 31, I got two email subjections. Editor A wrote that “Although we will not be publishing your submission this time, we found it interesting.” Editor B wrote a bit more: “Many thanks for these poems, which I read with interest (but) they read as slightly over written, slightly overdone. A little less and they would have been perfect…. I would be pleased to read more of your work later.” I would love to hear from some of you: Which do you like less? A template letter (as in Editor A) or a close-but-no-cigar letter (as in Editor B)? Last word for now: I want to thank journal editors who offer to edit poems, not just give ‘em a thumbs up or down. I am grateful when they “save” a poem with their suggestions and publish my re-write.

Tagged as: Neal Whitman, Poetry Prof.