Finally, A Yes!

Last night, just as I was shutting things down to call it a day, I checked in at my email account to see if anything new came in. The only new item was from a poetry journal I had sent a couple of poems to. As is wont to happen these days, I felt that familiar sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach. I asked myself: do you really want to open that now? Self replied: well, no, but now or tomorrow, it's all the same. I really didn't want to go to bed disappointed, but my curiosity got the best of me and I opened the email.

The first thing I noticed was how long the email was compared to the previous rejection emails. So I started from the beginning, kept reading, and learned one of the poems had been selected for publication in this poetry journal. Then, I started crying. Yep. I cry over the Thanks but no thanks emails, and I cry over the Congratulations emails. I am that person.

Funny Delightful Son came in as I was sitting at my desk, still basking in the feeling of having finally received a yes. I told him about the poem being accepted, and he said, "So now you're done with your sabbatical. Mission completed. You can play all you want until you have to go back to work in January." Tempting. Very tempting.

But I'm going to keep working. I have more words that are pestering me to play with them. I can see my chapbook coming together, which I'm finding more and more exciting with each poem I add to it. With each piece I write, I feel the desire to really push myself to explore, experiment, play, and I have several poets sitting next to me so I can examine what they did in their poetry, how what they did might work with what I'm doing. And I have a quote from Dylan Thomas' "Poetic Manifesto" propped up next to the computer, a quote I absolutely love, love, love: "The best craftsmanship always leaves holes and gaps in the works of the poem so that something that is not in the poem can creep, crawl, flash, or thunder in." Yes. This.


Comments

Thryn said…
Wonderful! Congratulations! NOw----on to the book! :)

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