HUDSON

Looking at a rejection slip

Last week, I received the following e-mail:

Hello!

Thank you so much for your submission to this year’s issue of _____. Unfortunately, it isn’t the right fit for us this year. We all enjoyed reading your piece and we hope that you will submit again to next year’s edition. We received so many submissions for the issue and we had to make hard choices about what we could publish.

We are planning to open submissions even earlier this year - timed to the Halloween high tourist season - so please stay tuned for more information soon.

We appreciate you sharing your work. We hope you can find a home for it elsewhere.
Thank you again!

I decided to redact the name of the literary journal I submitted to. But there it is: your average rejection slip, or in this case, e-mail. One of countless I have received, typical of the countless I will receive in the future. Positive, of course; in fact, I would suspect that this was as polite a rejection e-mail as I have ever received. Not too blunt, not soulless, but rather encouraging. Nobody wants to right the rejection slip that causes a person to give up on their writing, or themselves.

This is the poem that was rejected:

HUDSON

We had gone to Cold Spring

for ice cream.

We were sitting on a bench with our ice cream

looking out at Hudson River.

Suddenly

I saw a boat sailing up the river.

It was very small

so small that I thought it was a toy boat.

But there it was

in the middle of the river.

And there appeared to be a boy

piloting the sailboat.

He could not have been older than ten

a small boy in a small boat sailing up the Hudson.

Why was this boy captaining a boat on the Hudson River alone

was I imagining this?

I did not ask my partner if they saw the boat

and no one else thought this was out of the ordinary

I would have given anything at the age of ten

to sail up the Hudson and this boy is doing it

By the time the boat was out of sight

our ice cream was finished and we left

It was good ice cream.

This poem is essentially based on a true story. My wife and I had gone to Cold Spring, NY to walk around and peruse the business and the restaurants on the main strip. If you go under the Metro North tracks you will end up near the shores on the Hudson River. There are other restaurants in that area, a small park nest to a pier along the Hudson, and Moo Moo’s Creamery which was the reason I suggested a day in Cold Spring. So, once we go the ice cream, and we sat down on a bench in the park near the pier to look out on the Hudson, I saw this.

It looked in the distance to be a toy boat, but it was not. It appeared to be a small sailboat, with a boy piloting it. I saw no evidence of anyone guiding it from the opposite shore or in the park near us or on the pier. There it was, as sailboat piloted by a boy, by himself, no adult supervision, as if he was a well-to-do Tom Sawyer.

I was transfixed. The idea of being out on any boat when I was a child seemed to be crazy, and here was some kid experiencing the complete freedom of the water, all by himself. I had to snap the picture to make sure I had some record of this. That picture, along with the thoughts the experience produced, led me to writing that poem … which was rejected when i submitted it.

Now I know that you should never let a rejection slip bother you, at least not for longer than a moment. Every author on earth will receive more rejections of work than acceptance. And sometimes, you have to make sure the little green monster called envy remains hidden if you read about contemporaries having their works seemingly accepted non-stop. Of course, they are not; they get rejected enough times on their own, they simply do not boast about such rejections.

I guess the reason it irked me so much is that I thought I had found the right publication for the poem, and I had allowed hope to build up inside of me. The rejection e-mail obviously punctured those hopes. They had enough poems that they considered more in line with the topic they were pressing. I will never know how many poems they did receive for consideration, and the only way to know what poems they did accept is to pick up the next copy of the journal, which I just might do. If I am not on their mailing list after submitting my work, I believe I know a bookstore that carries them.

The irony of all this is, the poem can never be submitted to a literary journal again, because it has been published … on this Substack. In the world of literary journals and their requirements, this is now considered a published piece. It will not appear in a literary journal unless they accept reprints. It is here for all posterity, to whoever has mad it this far in this article. Congratulations to you!

Of course, I will keep writing, I will keep submitting to literary journals, and I will keep receiving rejection slips. And who knows, the occasional poem may slip through, having tricked the gatekeepers into looking the other way.

I guess it’s one way to be sure your work is published.