Poetry Submissions

Did you know I write poems sometimes? I bet you did not! Why did you not know that I write poems? Because, unless you are one of a very few trusted people, I have kept this secret closer than the name of my grade school crush.

When I started writing poetry, I was embarrassed. Were my poems going to be too sappy or hackneyed? Would they be too plain or too obtuse? There were a hundred imaginary readers in my head, and they were all looking at each other and rolling their eyes, just like those mean girls in that one grad class I took at Duke.

 I was so fearful of rejection from an audience that didn’t even exist that my first poems rejected themselves. They were boring and impersonal. I wrote about cold coffee at the office, monkeys in a desert, watching Natalie Portman win an Oscar.

 But then I kept practicing, and now I have about twenty poems that I can say, with relative confidence, are not horrible. So I picked three and sent them off to two different literary journals for rejection. In the first packet, I even had a typo, so that is a surefire rejection there!

But tell me: would it be unfair to count this as two rejections? If I send these three poems off to more journals, will each rejection count toward my tally? Or should I consider it one rejection if I’m sending the same packet multiple places? What do you think?

UPDATE: I received my first rejection within 12 hours of submission. I’m pleased to report that, instead of feeling bummed and deflated, I felt motivated. I have at least 51 more rejections to go! I am realizing, however, that if I count rejections of the same poems to multiple journals, then my whole project will just be about poetry submission. In the spirit of this project, I will therefore have to come up with a way to cluster such rejections. Any suggestions?