Feedback!

Not the crazy electric guitar kind.

Today I received a rejection letter (yes, it's that time of year when they flock to my mail box), and the editor had commented on a poem, noting what didn't work for him.

How often does that happen?

I'll take some time to think about it and take another look at that last stanza.

***

That poem is part of a series, most of which I will now probably never publish. And I'm willing to make that trade.

The series centers on the idea of "outside the capital," the fact that a lot of times we the people know what's going on months before the elected leaders in D.C. begin to get a clue. I wrote a lot of poems last fall. I even finished some of them, and one was published.

But after the November election, those poems have lost relevency. For now. For a good long while, I hope. And it's a trade I'm happy to make. For me, a good real life trumps a poem any day and every day.

***

But this is a poem I can work on. I probably won't send the same poem back to the same editor (and given the little rules I have, I probably won't send to this editor for another year).

Do you ever get feedback on the work that you submit?