Good rejections
There's something lovely about the standard rejection letter by Rattle that keeps me trying. I know that when Light rejects me, the poems have been read anonymously, and this tells me that (by some kind of objective measure) the poems aren't working quite as well as I wish. This is informative and useful in a way that getting other kind of rejections isn't. There's something awesome about getting a rejection from a magazine you truly love (like the Hudson Review) because you know you've overcome your petty fear of rejection and lovingly sent your best poems where you want them to go.
But there are places that have managed to irk me with particularly curt rejections. (I've written off submitting to those places.) Does this happen to you, too? Don't you think even mass rejection emails could be handled in an either delicate or a mildly informative fashion? (How hard would it be to have two tiers of rejections: one with "keep submitting to us, please," and one without?)
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