Tag: poetry

Revising after Rejection: Re-Seeing, Re-Listening, Re-Hearing

~ Chris Cocca ~ 3 Comments

Like most necessary things, writing is hard.  Communicating mental images or flashes of memory or triggering smells with tools that are, themselves, none of those things, takes work.  Doing so in ways that makes sense not just to you but also to readers takes even more work. 

I submitted some things to a great journal a few months ago.  Even though the work I shared wasn’t ultimately accepted, I’m quite pleased with the feedback.  Having given myself some time and space, I’ve come back to the piece they particularly liked with new eyes and ears.  (Revision is always, literally, re-seeing.  But it’s also re-listening and re-hearing.)

I greatly appreciate what the editor here is saying, and the time he took to say it, and the time he and the rest of the team take thinking deeply on these things:

We are writing with mixed news. While we are not accepting these poems, your submission made it through multiple editorial rounds. We particularly enjoyed “[title redacted]” with its exploration of anxiety and attempts at self-soothing. Our main concern, ultimately, was that there were moments when the piece felt too expository. We’d love to see the entire piece rooted in the wild imagery of the last third of the poem.

We recognize how much talent and skill went in to your submission, but we can only publish a small percentage of the work we receive. In the final round of selections, we start looking for the smallest of reasons–reasons in line with our own personal tastes–to reject a manuscript. This part of the process, we understand, is so very subjective. So we want you to know that while we are not accepting this manuscript, we were pleased with your submission, it was a joy to read, and we hope we’ll see more of your work in the future.

Seeing Poetry, Looking Away

~ Chris Cocca ~ Leave a comment

I think I first became familiar with the work of Stanley Fish in a literature seminar at Yale taught by the late Lana Schwebel.  The course, which focused on the work of John Milton, was cross-listed at the Div School, where I was a student, and the English department. 

One of the other students had just come from Chicago and could not stop talking about Stanley Fish.  Strangely, this student didn’t seem at all familiar with Leo Strauss.  He couldn’t seem to accept that someone had, perhaps, influenced his own academic hero.

Stanley Fish has a very popular piece I like to share from time to time called “How to Recognize a Poem When You See One.”  I haven’t returned to it lately, but, as what Milton called the “winter wild” draws near, and this “the month, and this the happy morn” with it, I think I will add it to my short list of recommended re-reading.

There are few things more frustrating than a poetic image that won’t fully reveal itself to a writer, or one that reveals itself too easily to a reader.  There’s a Milton-inspired poem sitting in another tab on my browser that I just can’t seem to finish.  I love it.  I hate it.  It’s brilliant.  It’s awful.  Maybe it’s not a poem at all.  I wish I could re-see it.  I wish I could un-see (undo) the reasons it exists.  I wish I could delete it.  I know I never will.  It’s terrible.  It’s awful.  It has one or two good images.  It’s intensely personal.  It’s too personal to mean anything to anyone.  It’s too sentimental to mean very much to me.  But there it sits.  There it stays. Maybe it’s a poem. Maybe it’s an epitaph.  Maybe it’s a tombstone.  Maybe some things can just be what they are.  





A Snow Poem, 1989

~ Chris Cocca

A few bits of context for when you find the errant homophone:  I was old enough (9) to know better, and this was something we did in the gifted program.  You can almost hear the laughter of glastnost-era Soviets. 

Whatever, because Roddy Piper was feuding with Rick Rude at the time and that consumed most of my attention.