Welcome to the first edition of Rejected! These are poems rejected by journals, in chronological order by response date from earliest to most recent. So, if you are keeping track, this series is the diametrical opposite of my series Pub Crawl, where I am sharing poems published in journals in the same kind of chronological order. As with my other series, there will be personal notes and craft notes. Roll your eyes as much as you like—that’s what Rejected! is all about!
Investiture
Like a soldier I wait, or a suppliant,
for an order or an incantation,
something ritual—
reveille or matins—
permitting me to begin.
Couldn't poetry come unbidden,
like the swellings and secretions of puberty,
releasing me from choice,
and binding me to the familiar
pulse of a natural rhythm?
Rejection History
AGNI 01/20/95
Another Chicago Magazine 03/24/95
The Boston Phoenix 04/03/95
Georgia Review 06/02/95
Poetry 09/11/95
APR 01/17/98
Diagram 04/27/06
H_NGM_N 05/05/06
Diagram 07/14/06 (submitted it a second time by mistake!)
Rattle 12/01/22
Note: Some of these submissions included versions of “Investiture” different than the one shared here.
Current publication status: Not published in a journal, anthology, or book
Notes
So. Yeah. This. This is so old that the earliest draft of it is a Unix Executable File, which is how my old WordPerfect files show up in a Mac file directory. Fortunately, you can recover them by dragging them into TextEdit.
I wrote my first “grown-ass” poem in December 1991—The first draft of that poem will be shared in an upcoming edition of Poems Found in Notebooks. I made the turn from fiction to poetry because I wanted a way to dispense with characters, plots, and all they entail, and find a way to speak more directly in my own voice. Yeah, yeah, speaker not the same as poet—yada, blah, etcetera—but that’s how I thought of it at the time.
Problem was—Writing poems was hard! I mean, stories kind of poured out of me, but they took too long and did not really accomplish what I wanted to accomplish, whatever that was. Poetry seemed to be the way to go, but I spent a lot of time with my pen poised in mid-air over my Gregg ruled steno book. Very “Send in the Clowns.” Or as Joe Biden would say, “That’s not hyperbole.”
So I sort of developed this genre of poems about the impossibility of writing poems. “Investiture” was the start of that. There are quite a few others—as I was just reminded when I opened several different documents called “Investiture.doc” on my computer.
☞☞☞Here comes the craft stuff☞☞☞
While this poem is in a different vein from the deviant filth I’ve been posting these past several weeks, it is still quite clearly a Michael Broder poem, and shares some craft elements with the homoerotic poems you may have read in recent posts.
First off and second off: You’ve got the first-person speaker and the impeccable gift for music and rhythm. Seriously. I must’ve sprained my shoulder patting myself on the back over the internal rhyme of “for an order or an incantation.” Or the alliteration of “soldier” and “suppliant.” Or the sheer freshness of “reveille” and “matins”—Whoa!
I jest…but not really. I think this poem—and again, roll your eyes all you like—is a pretty amazing little confection from a late arrival who had written, like, one other poem since he was 16 years old!
☞☞☞Here comes the close reading stuff☞☞☞
Yeah, yeah, I know, I know—like the swellings and secretions of puberty is cringeworthytothemax! What’s the old saying, “You can get some of the poetry right some of the time”?
On the other hand, Susan Sontag does say, in her essay “On Style” (in her classic volume Against Interpretation and Other Essays), that “the greatest art seems secreted, not constructed.”
But as awful as that line is, it’s the beginning of a trope that became very important in my early work. It’s actually more like three sub-tropes rolled into one; namely:
the conflation of poetry and sexuality as creative processes;
the ritualization of sexuality and creativity; and
the conflation in my own experience of ritualized creativity and ritualized sexuality.
If you stick with Beachcomber Mike, you will soon encounter a poem with the following climactic stanza:
Here in the dark, the Heliconian Muses thrust the vatic staff down my throat and I assume my poetic mantle.
Hamana-hamana-hamana whaba-whaba-whaaattttt?
[Actually, those lines are from a poem called “Batman in Berlin,” which is one of the four poems SOLICITED from me by Daniel Nester for the winter 2000 issue of his pioneering online poetry journal La Petite Zine, so you should be seeing it in relatively short order in Pub Crawl #4.]
So here’s where the doctorate in classics comes in. Those lines above are a reference to a scene in the Ancient Greek epic poem Theogony (The Birth of the Gods), in which the 8th-century BCE poet Hesiod, speaking in the first person, recounts his own scene of poetic investiture at the hands of the Muses:
And one day they taught Hesiod glorious song while he was shepherding his lambs under holy Helicon, and this word first the goddesses said to me—the Muses of Olympus, daughters of Zeus who holds the aegis: “Shepherds of the wilderness, wretched things of shame, mere bellies, we know how to speak many false things as though they were true; but we know, when we will, to utter true things.”
So said the ready-voiced daughters of great Zeus, and they plucked and gave me a rod, a shoot of sturdy laurel, a marvelous thing, and breathed into me a divine voice to celebrate things that shall be and things there were aforetime; and they bade me sing of the race of the blessed gods that are eternally, but ever to sing of themselves both first and last.
—From Hesiod, Homeric Hymns, Epic Cycle, Homerica. Translated by H.G. Evelyn-White. Loeb Classical Library Volume 57. London: William Heinemann, 1914.
Okay, so, as I often say at about this point in a Beachcomber Mike post, this is getting to be a bit long and involved for a Substack post, especially one about my own work! So I won’t delve at length into poetry as seminal secretion, or the emergence of the individual poetic imagination as a kind of pubescence, or the rhythms of poetry as akin to masturbation, etc. Nor will I go into how that set of ideas morphs, in my own development as a poet, into a related but somewhat different set of ideas about the genesis of poetry being rather more erotic and sexual than simply masturbatory—and anyway, that would take us away from Hesiod’s Theogony and deep into Plato’s Symposium. Maybe there will be a time and a place for all of that. But not here, and not now.
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When in law school (35 years ago) I was getting these really wonderful rejection letters from top law firms that recognized my lack of career drive long before I did. I took their condescending comfort dribble and did a pastiche extolling my virtues like a movie poster with selective quotes. Eventually I found work doing less harm in the world. But what can possibly be less harmful than writing poetry?
Is it not masochistic to list rejections? Untrained interns shuffle through the slush pile and their thumbs-down response has little meaning. All kinds of reasons can result in a no. You send in a beautiful poem about a bridge, not realizing that the magazine had already published four poems about bridges that year. Or the previous year they got careless and accepted enough work to fill the magazine for two years and decided not accept anything this year. And so forth.