rejection notes (sharing a personal essay with Sanjukta)
I’d like to share this personal essay I once wrote after receiving yet another rejection note; more had come and I expect nine out of ten submissions will keep coming. You would understand why it’s melodramatic. But that feeling has not swept me over since. When I do receive one these days, I simply put away the poem, haiku or tanka, rewrite and submit to another editor. A few of these have been accepted and published. Here’s the essay:
Why must rejection wring the mind so?
These words marching onto this blank screen leaked off a bottle of emotions I had dammed. It’s been a week ago since a rejection note sneaked into my inbox—a single line in bold letters; it’s not the first, but the latest of ten I have received so far. Reading the note then, I felt sand in my eyes, pain that brings on tears. First, they stung and then creeping down my cheeks, they felt cold as a blade. I could be bleeding, I thought, but not from an invisible cut on my cheeks–it must be in my shattered heart.
Why must words of rejection wring the mind so? I had long struggled to understand. No matter how cavalier I talk of my writing, rejection feels like death for me at times. It must be during those times when I wrote too hard and too long so much so that an illusion of perfection shrouded me and darkened that fragile cave—my heart—from which I always imagine I write.
From what do words get birthed anyway? This has always been a mystery to me akin to my search for God. But this I believe in, the universe came to be out of nothing because God so decreed it with words.
I am a being out of nothing. Hence, my words leap onto a screen from the void. Why then must rejection affect me so? I and what words I string together as soon as they slip into some kind of form should turn into objects like asteroids, for one, flinging through the universe. I, who worked on it and that which they have birthed into, should no longer bear any of me.
And yet, complex as is my tiny mind, it also bloats with greed and feels as if words it has put into shape become the universe. How dare then, does anyone reject them?
But in the end, I am grateful for each rejection; it shoves me back into place. The eye does not see the self in whole, only in parts; rejection really hurts only in part. As in every object in the universe, other parts of me that have been spared soon take over and begin to birth again.
what doesn’t end? (reflections out of a haiku prompt)
damselflies
and mourning doves
the tireless sweetness
of chickadees
the languorous dusk
what doesn’t end?
even the sun ends
not of itself but on us
but where else
do meanings lie
but on the shades
that shrink or end
or burst open with our eyes
roses laugh
leaving imprints on whorls
their petals take shape
swallows glance
and in swiftness
understand what longings
we hide
our dawns to waxwings
mere duplicates
of first dawns
we cannot know
midday points to zeniths
we alter in each turn
our mindlessness take
somethings to a fly
we end too soon it savors
until in willingness
though yet undone
its life ends
even as it captures
with million eyes
the universe the way
we cannot
because we resist
somethings do end
as simply as each day
reflections out of a haiku prompt on ‘insects’ in the soon-to-come out August issue of Sketchbook
…recalcitrant stars and what to me is this haiku moment?
soft rain at dusk
on white magnolias–
recalcitrant stars
What to me is this haiku moment? For me, soft rain at dusk transports thoughts into a magical dimension where reality merges with the unseen. The eye then blurs and in a blink opens to a patch of the universe often easily called poetic moment, one that frees the mind of fences or the masonry of reason. In this haiku, I slipped from the real–soft rain on white magnolias and invisible stars on a dense gray sky–to a confrontation with the galaxies. The stars as in all Nature exist as themselves outside of me but I with a universe within me siphon them with my emotions; in this haiku, I imagine them protesting to descend and touch, perhaps, even kiss the oh, so alluring open-faced magnolias. And not them but the rain is made to fall on infinitesimal lips they imprint as crystal beads in the petals. The haiku for me is a collision of beauty and our imperfect desires, which I projected to the stars. Hence, it must end with just that moment, that tension I feel between the stars grumbling over Nature’s laws, my own recalcitrance over my finiteness really.
Posted for One Shot Wednesday at the inimitable One Stop Poetry, a gathering place for poets and artists, winner of the 2011 Shorty Award for the Arts. Check us out.
What do you see? (for One Shoot Sunday)
Photo prmpt by James Rainsford
1.
What do you see?
Not the span of my wings I ask not
Or the pin-lock of my beak
My eyes made of gems
Creation shielded you may not covet
If you could a universe
A glimpse of my wings
Such envy it has spawned in hearts like yours
The rufous I bank on in flight
If I perch on a shoulder
You could die in sheer awe of mine–ample
And reddish like the flare of the sun
Unsteady your life as your feet
Had rocked you solid blind to what I see
On my tarsus firm on a twig
2.
Stone from stone
That heart of yours locked in cold
I feel no pity
A head you preened
No sign of polish and spark
In coagulated cells
I squeal I do
Keee-r-r nothing to your hollow ears then
Mortar-filled now as your brain
A soul you wrapped
In manners as translucent as words un-rooted unlike
Mine seed-like but forward in my breast
I winter in forests you burrow
Lifeless in dark cavities imitating iridescent skies
Making it like home but you are wingless
3.
What do you see?
Battlefields you scoured between your agonies
And waning moons?
Or spires that sway under a mid-heaven
You strived to pierce to let spurt secrets
The constellations conceive?
Filigreed walls behind you
Await for storms to cease heaving
Whispering luring the darkness
Columns prop up the dome
You unfurled over the stare of an accusing sky
Do you see their spine corroding?
What do you see?
4.
As stone you see
Not twigs that soon arc to meet
A pink horizon
Or a black patch
Where drooping snowdrops
Bloom tufts on your path
You had trudged
On paths crushing crocuses and dandelions
Shredding silken azalea sighs
Eyes on grit you missed
Evergreens flailing in the wind to snag
the first low star
As you stepped into a
carrion’s day like a crow squawking at sky
hopping on a dumpster grinding by
I’m posting this poem for One Shoot Sunday at One Stop Poetry from a picture prompt by James Rainsford. Come join us in this gathering place where a most amazing selection of talented artists and poets share their work while nurturing each other.
trimming the tree/winter full moon
1.
trimming the tree–
a cat’s frame
not a star
2.
winter full moon—
the missing napkin ring
beside the Star
–haiku for jornales friends with my wishes for the most of yours during this Christmas season and the new Year!
The lunar eclipse saluted us first, extravagantly, too, and the winter full moon sails on into our wishes among the constellations, sometimes witnessing for us who cannot see stars skidding through Light Years that will never be visible in our time. The secret in our lives is the moment, the moment lived whether fully or not, aware or not.
The moment I just learned on reading an issue of Poetry (December 2006) is thus the essence of all art. Art must not only capture it but live it for us the way we actually do but can’t fathom–in the hugeness of the universe and Time–until an artist does it for us.
You and I, newbie or master, implanted with the seed to let art blossom must take command–do we have a choice? You and I know we don’t have as it has taken over our souls, the deepset recesses of our being even, as I know from lines you generously leave here. Thank you–if I could but reinvent the word!
last winter in fornt of a dressed-up Vancouver Art Gallery when snow defaulted on Vancouver during the 2010 Winter Olympics
About
autumn wind
wondering about lilies
in a mountain pond
Tell me a writer who really gets a satisfying jornal, in Spanish a daily wage or its equivalent, and I’ll bare a spirit in constant bouts of doubtfulness. Does a writer earn more because of what he writes and how he does it? Or is a writer paid more or less because of who he is? Is it money or honor he expects to receive?
Ahhh … but money as wage, and praise or honor as reward would be too predictable, too common as Job lamented in the Book of Job. It is in these lines that read: “Is not man’s life on earth nothing more than pressed service, his times no better than hired drudgery? Like the slave, sighing for the shade, or the workman with no thought but his wages, months of delusion I have assigned to me, nothing for my own but nights of grief. Lying in bed I wonder, ‘When will it be day?’ Risen I think, ‘How slowly evening comes!’
Restlessly I fret till twilight falls. Swifter than a weaver’s shuttle my days have passed, and vanished, leaving no hope behind. Remember that my life is but a breath, and that my eyes will never again see joy.”
Not money but joy is the ultimate wage as the passage implies. And joy is not hard to earn for it is in everyday life if we have eyes to see, a nose to smell, fingers to touch, ears to hear–a heart beating. This to me, is how a writer earns a daily wage. His wages then take the guise of treasures his heart can transfigure into a universe of thought that taps into other hearts, that causes a swirl in the depth of other souls, or that makes wings to sprout on leaden heels.
Sometimes not joy but rueful, poignant moments are my pick. Take what I earned once: On my walk home in my neighborhood, I caught two clumps of snowdrops–such tiny blossoms smaller than fingertips that do not look up but shyly droop close to black patches on the ground winter has frozen. That afternoon in the frosty wind, they trembled as if ready to turn away and run but how could they? For that poignant moment on seeing the wintry rain beat on the fragile snowdrop–as if pushing it to go home now, go to sleep–I earned my jornal, my daily wage.
Once on summer walk, the crackle of dried leaves just hit me both like the laughter of children and sobs long suppressed. Neither one of them would resolve the dryness, but I recalled how each does bring tears: laughter for joy, sobs for healing that comes with the release of a dammed-up pain. My jornal that day came as two haiku.
Fall has since shortened the day and the heart begins to crave for lost space that it doesn’t even recall which or where. I feel that most treasures have turned into mush so much so I wouldn’t be able to sift them off the ground. Yet I caught the dying day yesterday–so glorious in the gold of autumn it opened a flip side of serene heaven. Blades of grass coated in diadems of rain that carpet the lawns render royal walks poor by imitation. A burst of red maple against an inky blue sky humbled me, a soul bragging about her skill to recreate beauty in words.
I suppose I’m taking Job’s reflections to heart. I’d rather not gloss over each day and look beyond what’s there, right before me, or else fragile as is my breath one day “my eyes may never again see joy” to write. With what then will I compare the eternal joy, the ultimate wage I await?
Yet for now, as other eyes hanker to make the invisible visible, I put a tag on some moments of joy. Like on seeing the snowdrops, I paid myself $200 as my jornal.
What could have been yours?
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