The Rejected Poet

Every writer has to become accustomed to rejection and in the quirkier world of poetry where taste and preconceived ideas are even more individual than ever, the poet is likely to experience a significant amount of rejection. If a cyclist isn’t a proper bike rider until they’ve fallen off at least once then a poet isn’t a real poet until a few magazines or publishers have declined to use their work. I remember one smallpress poet from the 70’s writing about how he could wallpaper a room with his rejection slips.
That having been said, it did still comes as a surprise to check the website of South magazine and find that I’m not in their next issue having sent them the poem below. I’ve become so lazy in recent years that my only submissions to magazines has become a set of three poems sent to South each Autumn for the next Spring’s edition and they’ve usually selected one of them. On one memorable occasion, they did decide against using The Cathedrals of Liverpool but I subsequently entered the same poem in the old Ottakar’s competition and my faith in it was rewarded when it was adjudged best among the poems entered in the Portsmouth branch. So it is not a matter of whether a poem is objectively any good or not but it will depend on who picks it up and reads it and, in cases like these, first impressions must count for a lot.
South is an unusual poetry magazine, proud of its rotating editorial panel on which a different set of people select the poems for each issue and they do so without knowing the name of the authors. This unique selection process is no doubt very democratic and fair but it can mean that South lacks an editorial identity. For some reason, they nominate a list of ‘reserves’ as if an appearance in South is like being picked for a squad of sports players and poems might be prone to hamstring injuries or doing their metatarsals. However, it is a well-produced magazine and usually contains a handful of accomplished poems among those that don’t quite excite the poetry muscle, which is as much as can be said for the majority of poetry magazines, whether of the highest brow or the lowliest publications for the outpourings of amateurs.
So, it’s not so upsetting that the latest panel of South selectors didn’t like Later. I’m sorry that they didn’t like it but I’m not sorry for giving them the chance of using it. It was the fourth attempt I’d made at using this wonderful opening line over several months, so you can see that I don’t just send out any old thing for publication. I do have stringent quality controls in place but the one and only arbiter in the final decision about my poems is me.
I think there are now maybe six poems towards the next little booklet, the latest having been published in December 2006 and the requisite number being usually about fourteen. So, dear readers, don’t expect a new title until at least 2011. In the meantime, here’s Later, and South’s loss is this website’s gain.

Later

It’s later than you think. This is the past.
These will be famous days one day,
so vivid and spectacular,
the sort of days that monuments
are built in memory of.
Are built because we can’t possess
but, needy to preserve, attempt
to echo what the value is
when touch and time and glances
slip between us in a waterfall of sympathy.

I may not be the first to think
how this breeze that caresses me
brushes your cheek further downwind
or spend the evening hopelessly
amending words inadequate
to conjure you from far away
and spend the night awash with tears
knowing that I must lose you.