Poetry Motivation - May 2005
A Successful Poet Is A Failure
Oxymoron? I guess you might call it that, if that were the end of the entire column here, but there's a few more details involved.
How can success equal failure? You would have to take a completely different viewpoint of failure. You write a poetic masterpiece, send it to your favorite target publication and get rejected. Would you consider that failing or succeeding? Well, if you are an optimist vs. a pessimist, you will take that failure as a lesson learned, go back and review your poem from the editor's viewpoint. Would you publish it as is, or should some changes be made, minor or major?
After you decide on what changes to make, you mail it back in, only to receive another rejection notice. Now it's time to throw in the towel, right?
Not on your life, even if it gets rejected over and over and over, a successful poet will keep submitting it through all of those failure until they get to the bottom line...
Success and publication. There is nothing more successful than refusing to accept failure. So, if you understand that, you will remember to........WRITE ON!