5 Mistakes People Make about Rejections—and what they really mean instead
This article is for: Beginning and Intermediate Poets
Most people who write poetry would be happy to see their poems in print—but not everyone who writes poetry actually submits their poems to magazines and journals.
You may be one of those people. Or perhaps you do send poems off, but not as much as you’d like.
There may be many reasons why you, or someone else, don’t send off your poems. For example, you might not feel that you’re ready yet—that you’re still learning your craft.
However, another reason why might be:
Fear of rejection!
Only one thing is certain about submitting poems to journals and magazines: you will get rejections. And that may make you reluctant to send poems out into the world much, or at all.
But in fact, rejections by editors don’t mean anywhere near as much as you think they do. So in this article, I want to take the sting (and the fear) out of being rejected, by going over:
5 ways that people misunderstand rejections—and how you can learn to love them instead!
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Mistake 1: Rejections are personal
When we get rejected in any field of life, it’s easy to feel it’s a judgement on us.
Poetry is the same—getting a “No” back from a journal can make you feel pretty low, even worthless.
Moreover, this is doubly hard in poetry, because when you submit to a magazine/journal, rejection is by far the most likely outcome.
In fact, most publications accept only about 1-5% of the time—or even less. Just to give you some context, for this calendar year, my acceptance rate currently stands at 2%!
But this tells you what’s really true here.
In poetry, rejection is simply what happens to poems.
And it’s never personal. To find out why this is true, Please Read On!
Mistake 2. Rejection means your poems are bad
When a journal says “No,” it must be because they thought your poems were awful—right?
NO! The reason that most poems and most poets get rejected is due to some very simple mathematics.
Most magazines and journals get hundreds or even thousands more poems than they have room for. So, they simply have to reject most of them.
And this is not because 95% of the poems they get are bad poems! Many, or even most, of those poems that get rejected are poems that have some merit, or are even very good. But they still get rejected.
And the same goes for poets as well as poem: even very good poets still mostly get rejections!
So Truth #2 about Rejections is:
Magazines reject mainly because they get vastly more poems than they can publish.
So a “No” just means the editor had to make decisions somehow!
Mistake 3: Rejection by one journal means other places will also reject you
If editors get vastly more poems than they can publish, and they have to say No to some good ones, how on earth do they make their choices? The answer is:
Like the rest of is, editors use their own personal tastes and preferences to say Yes or No.
The poems that they like or prefer simply have more chance of making it into the magazine. Editors are actually human, after all!
And we all know how variable taste can be. What one person thinks is a marvelous poem, another may consider atrocious.
This is true even for readers who are poetry experts. I am one of three readers for The Poet’s Touchstone, the magazine of the Poetry Society of New Hampshire, and although all three of us are experienced poets, sometimes we have totally opposite opinions on the same poem.
So what this means for you is:
Rejection may just mean that one particular editor didn’t connect with your poems—but another one may love them.
So keep sending them out! One rejection does not mean that the poems are doomed.
Mistake 4: Rejection means the whole publication disliked your work
When you get a rejection, it’s easy to imagine that your poem has been carefully pored over by the whole editorial team and discussed for at least an hour.
This is not usually true!
Most publications have a team of readers who do the first reading and filtering of poems, and most poems are rejected at this stage, after being read by just one reader.
This may seem a bit harsh, but again, magazines/journals just have to get through the poems somehow, and almost no one is being paid for their work, so they don’t have much time!
So it might be the case that, if a poem of yours got past the first reading stage, the main editor would love it!
For you, this means that:
You’re often rejected by just one person’s taste—not the whole editorial team.
For this reason, it’s always worth submitting to the same outlet again, because you might get a different reader the next time—someone who loves your style.
Mistake 5: Rejection means they saw nothing good in your poem
Publications tend to send their rejections back in one big batch, all at the same time, when they’ve made all their decisions.
This means that there’s no distinction between the poems that were rejected immediately, and the poems that made it further through the editorial process.
So, when you get their Thanks but no thanks message after 4 months, you simply can’t tell what happened to your poem:
Perhaps it was rejected on its first reading; or,
Perhaps the first reader liked it, and passed it to the main editor, who also liked it, but not quite enough to choose it.
In the latter case, of course it would be a good idea to send more poems to that place.
So:
Never assume that a rejection means they didn’t like your poem: it’s still possible that they did, maybe even a lot!
You generally just don’t know how far your poem got before they said No
3 ways rejections can be meaningful.
So most of the time, rejections don’t mean a lot. Their main message actually is “Send these poems out again!”
But there a few ways that rejections can say something useful.
1. “Tiered” or “Personal” rejections are almost acceptances
Sometimes, you get a rejection that says nice things.
These can be expressed in different ways, but they all boil down to: “We really liked at least one of your poems, please send us more.”
If you get one of these, it’s almost as good as an acceptance.
It means that your poem(s) went through several readings, and were considered very, very nearly “good enough” for the magazine/journal. It might even mean they were good enough, but they didn’t quite fit with other poems the editors wanted to include.
In other words, the difference between your poem(s) and poems that made it is so small, it barely matters.
So these rejections are a very positive sign. They mean that someone, or more likely several people, thought your poems were great!
And they also mean you should definitely submit to that magazine/journal again and again, until they accept you.
2. Lots of rejections for the same poem may mean it has problems
I do have to concede that at some point, many rejections for the same poem may be trying to tell you something.
If a poem has had dozens of rejections, with no tiered rejections, then maybe it needs a redraft.
It hasn’t worked for a lot of readers, so perhaps it’s not good enough in its current form.
But even this can be positive: it’s giving you useful feedback about the poem. And this article suggests how you can use it.
3. Racking up rejections is the best sign of all
Lastly, I want to finish with the most important point:
If you are getting lots of rejections, it means you are making lots of submissions—which means you are getting closer and closer to lots of acceptances!
So if you’ve got rejections rolling in regularly—one or two a week is what I hope for—it means you’re doing what you need to do to get published!
So that’s why I love my rejections, and why I hope you will too.
Next Steps:
Follow these steps to begin to change how you think about rejections.
Think of a time when you got a rejection and felt bad about it. Either a recent one, or one where you felt particularly bad.
Write down the negative thoughts that you had when this happened.
For example, maybe you thought “I am such a terrible poet. I’ll never get anything published.”
Or, “These poems must be very bad. I should toss them out.”
Write down as many as you can remember—don’t worry, you are going to neutralize all these soon.For each of these negative thoughts, use what you now know about rejections to find some other perspective to replace that thought.
For example, instead of “I am such a terrible poet. I’ll never get anything published,” you might say:
—“Maybe this editor already found the poems she wanted for the next edition and just needed to send back all the ones that were left. Maybe it had nothing to do with me really.”
Or for “These poems must be very bad. I should toss them out”, you might say:
—”I wonder how far these poems got in their reading process? Maybe their first reader just didn’t like them, or was stressed that day, or tired. Maybe they’re actually really good.”Lastly, come up with a positive action to take as a result of this rejection.
For example: —
”I wonder if this journal is actually a good fit for my poems? Maybe I should read it again. If I still think it is, I’ll send some more.”
Or:
—”Perhaps these poems just weren’t right for that editor’s taste—I’d better send them somewhere else to see if they like them1”Actually do the action!
