Useful as a napkin

What I didn't want was to point inward

In the Valley of the Painted Hills, Mary-Russell Ferrell Colton, 1928

In December 2014, I submitted prose poems to a literary journal for consideration. The publication was founded and edited by a person I knew, having attended the same parties and readings and conferences, and whose work I admired, though we were not friends. This person’s first book won a big-deal award, and their second was published by a prestigious press, too. They’d earned an NEA fellowship, attended the residencies, won a Pushcart Prize—nearly all the decorations and orchid leis a poet could collect. They’d become everything I was not.

Submitting was a Hail Mary to get back on the leaderboard. My curiosity in poetry had been waning, yet here I was, still pushing language around despite riding the brakes. My poems read like that. No illumination, but anesthetization, and the biggest tell was my growing intolerance of lyricism. I’d begun to relate to Plato’s seemingly paranoid suspicions that poetry was leading us away from reason and the truth, and not even the lofty, capital “T” kind. Please—get to the point—was how I’d begun to think. I need you to tell me your literal address and not the color of the leaves on your street if you want me to find you.

In retrospect, my frustration had nothing to do with art. I was defending against my own vulnerability in the shadow of betrayals that life, wearing its hair net and clear plastic gloves and stained apron, had slopped into my bowl like sticky oatmeal as I shuffled my tray along the cafeteria rack. It sounds so depressing, institutional. Sometimes life is like that. I mean this in the most ordinary way, sometimes life is beige and confining and feels like there’s no way out, and when it does, poems are a shiv. So that’s where I found myself, trying to fashion a weapon from a ballpoint pen.

A month later, I got the rejection. I still have the email in my archive, but I hadn’t read it in a decade. In my memory, the editor really stuck it to me, when in fact it’s just a couple of sentences, a smith at the anvil:

Hi Stephanie,

Okay, well you're refusing almost all the gestures and techniques of poetry. Same with the poems in [journal redacted]. What's the intent? You have enough to say to write stories. You have too much to say if you're writing prose poems. Do you want to expand into the larger space of fiction, or do you want to pull back into the precision and economy of poetry? I'm unsure of the aesthetic or the goal. So tell me.

Yours,

[Name Redacted]

I wish you could feel the weight of how this landed, but I’ve said too much for you to get irrationally angry on my behalf. Forget all that context for a paragraph, and channel a shame that comes from somewhere deep. Pretend you were just dropped off at RockHouse Preschool; you’re 3 years old, believing you’re being given up for adoption, placed atop a brown plastic rocking horse to calm down. Now you’re an adult again, and you read this.

I forwarded the rejection to a couple sympathetic poet friends whose opinions I trusted—we agree, they said in solidarity, not worded well, sounds confrontational, adversarial. I ranted. I defended my work. Maybe I am trying something new, pushing boundaries, and what? A fiction writer?! No. Just no.

Then one of my friends quietly asked, “but are the questions generative for you?” Of course not, dude. Too soon.

In some recess of my mind, I knew my rage was proportionate to my fear. I was refusing almost all the gestures and techniques of poetry, but why? I dared to ask myself one morning while making the bed, pulling the white down comforter over the pale pink top sheet that I’d fitted with hospital corners. What if I don’t have to be a poet. What if I never wanted to be one in the first place? I froze. A giant Boston fern hung in the shower in the bathroom then, where it could get sun and bask in steam. Yet even with fastidious pampering and care, several dozen shriveled brown leaves would drop into the porcelain tub daily. When the house was very still, you could almost hear them fall.

I realize I keep telling the same story: I was a poet, then I wasn’t. I’m still trying to explain it like it happened, like I would write it to a close friend, and I haven’t reached that level of transparency because I’ve been denying the story’s lyricism. How ironic. I’ve been telling it too polished, adhering to the genre expectations of a newsletter, or to the garbage religion of algorithms, because I wanted my words to be useful, the way a bicycle pump or a napkin is. What I didn’t want was to point inward, toward the self; or downward, toward suffering; or even outward, toward the periphery of justice. (Who wants to do that? Nope. No. No thanks.) At the same time, I’ve wanted these essays to flow as I write them, not to feel belabored and fussed over, so I’ve been working to let go, let go, and not quite getting it right. Now I’m coming to see that the mistake lies in the commodification of the sacred. I had to get brave enough to be stupid about the soul.

As a coach, when people feel like they’ve failed, the question I ask is always, “what did you learn?” After all, iterations of the self are just adaptations; a million years compressed into the span of a life. Then one day, perhaps a hard truth is delivered with generosity and respect. Even if it takes years, it wakes you up and turns you around.

“Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.”—James Baldwin