More Rejection?
...or rather not winning a contest. This one Speakeasy, judged by Jane Hirshfield who says this about Rebecca Aronson the winner: “What I admire about these poems is the quiet clarity of both their vision and their writing, and the precision of compassionate presentation. These poems observe and note down with a musical and mental calligraphy subtly yet distinctively their own. They do not insist or demand, only offer, yet the pressure of the imprinting image leaves its mark."
Make me want to read her poems. After I surrender the self-doubt and deflation that come every time another one of these crossed the electronic or mailbox threshold. It's all subjective, I tell myself. There is room for many, multiple voices. The "not good enough" has to turn into "keep trying." If, as Wendell Berry says in his essay "Damage" the work of writing is what we do, how we live, that there is no separation between the work and the life.
"If I live in my subject, then writing about it cannot 'free' me of it or 'get it out of my system.' When I am finished writing, I can only return to what I have been writing about."
Accept loss forever. Acceptance is all.
