On Poems That Won’t Let Go of Us Just Yet
My relationship with rejection has been shaped by cats.
Eighteen months ago, the use of the word “relationship” in this context would have sounded like a joke. At least to anyone who knew what I was going through. I would stare at email responses to submissions like they were unidentified flying objects secretly armed with lethal laser rifles, and leave them unopened for days. I would spend hours editing poems, and then miss submission deadlines—on purpose. Life had become a bumper car ride over the preceding years, and at that point in time, each rejection landed like yet another blow I did not need.
We rarely know what we need until it stumbles into our days. Or saunters, as one stray black cat eventually did, when she brought her palm-sized kittens to our backyard. It is not an uncommon belief amongst my people, the wood-knockers and nazar-wearers, that a black cat prophesies mishaps—lost keys, broken toes, cracked screens, jammed toasters, more rejected poems, etc., etc. But a couple of meows and one bowl of cat food later, we were hers.
We soon became the caretakers of several little felines: Athos (the scourge of dormice), Salt-Pepper (everybody’s godmother), Persimmons (the cuddle-plushie), and Smokey (the resident coloratura soprano). Though they did not spend all of their time in our backyard. The cats would frequently leave and return after a few days—or not at all, in the case of Aramis and Porthos, who have, we hope, found new homes. Just like published poems do when they leave the privacy of notebooks and word processing documents, and discover new places to belong in the wider world.
Just as Aramis and Porthos are similar to published poems (in that they are of the world now), the cats who return to us are not that different from rejected poems. What is striking, though, is that we never take the cats’ return as a sign that they are somehow inadequate, or that we are failing as caretakers. We understand that their return can be the result of multiple factors. Perhaps they were not ready to face the world yet; perhaps they were different from the cats already residing in the places they explored—or these places had enough cats to deal with and could not welcome more. It could be that our cats didn’t catch anyone’s attention, or they did, but no one ended up loving them enough to give them a home. They may have been too noisy for one potential destination, too late for another. Perhaps they came back just because. Their return, in other words, is never a failure, but an opportunity to look after them for a little while longer. And if returning cats deserve all the positive attention we can give them, why should “returning” poems be any different?
Nowadays, when poems return, I sit with them, acknowledging that my continued ability to play (around) with them—even if I ultimately decide that they have already received all the edits they need—is, in fact, a privilege. I send them out willingly when the time comes, acknowledging that most of them will come back looking for more time, more love, or just some rest before they head out again. I send them out convinced that they will return not as “rejects,” but as beloved creatures who have made their way back to me.