Milestone: Rejection #600

I just logged individual poem rejection #600, counted since I started submitting work again in November 2024. Musing on whether I was sad about that hefty beast of a number, I have to say I am decidedly not.

First, the math of it. (Note: I engage in simultaneous submissions for most of my work, so we’re not talking unique poem titles in what follows.) Even when I submit multiple poems to a literary journal/magazine, I log each poem individually so that if only one gets accepted, I can easily scan to see where I need to withdraw it from consideration elsewhere. (I know, I know, other systems exist, but I love a good old spreadsheet.) So, I’ve received 600 poem rejections by poem title. The rejection number (600) also doesn’t say how many poems I’ve had accepted in the same time frame (an even 80), or how many individual poem submissions I’ve had to withdraw from consideration because they were accepted/published elsewhere (983). With 457 current active individual title submissions, that’s 2,120 individual (not unique) total poem submissions since November (coming up on almost 6 months). With 80 poems published in that time (a crazy lot), if we pull out the poems I withdrew, that’s a 7% (or 80/1137) acceptance rate, my friends.

I fail literally more than 93% of the time.

It takes a ton of time, and tracking is tedious, but selfishly, I love taking the chance that my work with language may resonate with someone and be chosen for publication (my preferred form of immortality). An accountant would tell me to stop wasting my time, but the act of writing, and occasional acceptance, brings me so much joy that I won’t stop anytime soon if I can help it.

Rejection also gets easier the more you experience it–sort of like building up a callous. And the more I read, the more I am comfortable with that. There are so very many poets, and so many unique styles and different ways of seeing the world, it’s no insult that my work may not register as an editorial team’s particular taste. When one of my poems does resonate well enough to be chosen by an editor or team for their readership, I’m all the more grateful because I know how rare it is to be one of the chosen.