Looking back on 2011 and forward to 2012

Looking back over the past year, I realize it's been a good one. I've had more publications this year than I've ever had in one calendar year, my chapbook was accepted, and I started writing book reviews for various publications. I can attribute this success to one thing: getting over my fear of being rejected by editors.

Sometime in the Spring, I started sending out more than one or two submissions at a time. I've always been petrified of rejections, mostly because I've let myself take an editor's opinion too seriously (after all, it's only one opinion). What really inspired me was team teaching an advanced creative writing course with a colleague and requiring our students to submit work to 5-10 journals by the semester's end. I figured, if these students could do it at the beginning of their careers, why couldn't I? By that time I'd been out of school for over 10 years and had a very short list of publications to my name.

It worked. Now, at the end of the year, I try to have at least 12 submissions out to journals at a time. Once one or two come back, rejected or accepted (the former is the case more often than not), poems go out again. Keeping the door revolving has been good for me: it reminds me that I can't hold on to poems until they're perfect and I can't be too touchy about the decisions of editors.

It's also helped me in another way: to see any rejected poem from an editor's point of view, and to make any revisions that I think are necessary before submitting a poem again. I've even taken this so far as to revise and reorganize my first full-length collection after sending an earlier version to 6 contests and presses. I think it's stronger now; I will probably revise it again after sending it to a few more places.

I love revision. I still hate rejection, but making those notices into learning experiences has helped me immensely. For 2012, I want to study line and syntax in poetry so that I can make my line breaks more interesting and effective. I want to be more courageous and I want to feel uncomfortable in the first drafts of my own poems. I hope I can make these things happen, even if they don't happen until 2013 or after. I want to keep learning and growing, because that's what matters, after all.