I received a rejection email from The New Yorker the other day for three poems. While it's always hard to get a rejection, you should know that the vast majority of published writers could paper their entire houses with rejection letters. It's a part of the life cycle, and if you're afraid of rejection, afraid of criticism of your work, you have two options: Quit writing or nut up.
On to the next submission!
This is one of the three poems I sent. I am interested in any feedback. Gaman is the Japanese term for "enduring the seemingly unbearable with patience and dignity." A more complete definition can be found
here. I am debating whether or not to explain the definition in a small bit of text at the beginning or end of the poem, and that I wrote this poem shortly after the tsunami in Japan. Your thoughts?
Gaman
A
piano lies
parsed
in the middle of the road.
The
foot traffic is rats and ghosts.
Keys
hold fast to melody
in
their determination to line up
and
stick together.
Middle
C
apostrophied
by
C sharp
and
married to D,
closely
watched by D's dark half-step.
As
if the earth had not been shifted
and
then drowned,
as
if silence was more destructive
than
muddy water,
as
if sound could knit together
fragments
of pavement
and
glass
and
sundered skin.
But
of this fractured instrument
splashed
across two lanes of traffic
in
a town where no cars move
of
their own ignition,
order
is illusory:
the
music you hear
is
just the wind and the rain
moving
debris
across
the guts of a piano.
