The Offending Bone
Received a rejection from Agni yesterday. The material I sent was among the best poems written to date, so the news produced a little frustration. The material ventures into a new territory for my style— and as a result now, of course, I question the choices made— rereading the words over and over. Digging to find the weak element in order to remove the chunk of granite. The offending bone buried in secret by the family dog.
Partly this is all due to the fact I stumbled across a phrase in Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita which stung. In the early stages of the book, his narrator comments about his past academic choices, stating: "At first, I planned to take a degree in psychiatry [but] I switched to English literature, where so many frustrated poets end as pipe-smoking teachers in tweeds" (15). Who wants to hear the truth from such a flawed, mentally-scarred character?
In the end, all I can do is bundle the poems up again and resend them out into the world.
Partly this is all due to the fact I stumbled across a phrase in Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita which stung. In the early stages of the book, his narrator comments about his past academic choices, stating: "At first, I planned to take a degree in psychiatry [but] I switched to English literature, where so many frustrated poets end as pipe-smoking teachers in tweeds" (15). Who wants to hear the truth from such a flawed, mentally-scarred character?
In the end, all I can do is bundle the poems up again and resend them out into the world.
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129 / —a broken phrase lies as a broken branch, blossoming even though fractured from the full thought— splintered glass waiting for a broom sweep—•
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