A rattlesnake poem
That an editor interpreted as something else
I have a few thoughts about today’s poem, but I’ve already influenced you enough with the title above. So here’s the poem without further asides. Read on after if you like.
Little Damascus
Dusty dog day
gravel gritting like teeth
trail winding who cares where
river murmuring
No harsher judge
than rattling brush
hot fist for a gut — snake
bright in the mind —
Its wedge head held high,
the forked tongue of reproof says
something knows who you are
when you don’t
Whenever a beginning writer asks my advice about publishing in literary magazines, I usually share a couple of stories to illustrate the vagaries of the business.
First, I point out that my first breakthrough — landing an essay in The Kenyon Review — was a fluke. Oh sure, I worked hard on that piece, revised it probably fifty times before sending it out (maybe more), and believed it could stand on its own merit. But I later learned that the visiting editor who chose it had a personal connection to my Montana hometown — he was Amish and had ties to Amish communities in north Idaho and northwest Montana. He went to bat for me with editors who had a New England bias, like the editor who wrote sneeringly to Norman Maclean, after turning down his story collection, that there were trees in his stories. The takeaway? The essay couldn’t stand on its own merits, in fact. It needed an advocate.
Furthermore, there was just something about that piece that resonated with that editor. I sent him probably a dozen essays at other journals over the years. Nearly all of those essays were set in Montana, but he turned them all down, usually with a kind personal note, but sometimes with a note of frustration in his reply. He passed on the essay that I’ll share tomorrow, and that is one of my personal favorites, with a devastating line about how it didn’t raise his blood pressure one decimal point. (Judge for yourself!) There was just something about that firefighting essay that he loved, and everything else fell short of the mark.
So you need a thick skin as a writer. You need to believe in your own sensibility enough to laugh when work that meets your personal standard fails to thrill someone else. Control what you can control, because a lot of decisions in publishing make no sense at all. You’ll drive yourself mad trying to split those moving goalposts.
Which leads me to my second story, and the epilogue to today’s poem. After about twenty rejections at top-tier and mid-tier journals, this one landed at Beloit Poetry Journal, a very selective venue. Normally you don’t discuss the meaning of a poem with an editor, but somehow it came out that she thought my title alluded to recent news (this was 2008) about violence in Israel and Palestine. No, I said, I was referring to Saul’s conversion on the road to Damascus, comparing that to the sudden insight that comes on a wilderness trail, when a rattler snaps you out of reverie. There was something rueful about her reply, and I think she might have taken the acceptance back if it hadn’t been a done deal.
So this one might never have seen print if it hadn’t been misunderstood.
Now, we could debate whether a poem ought to be limited to a single reading, and I’m not going to say that it should. But I inherited a Romantic sensibility from my mentor, Ted Kooser, and I believe that a poem is a form of communication. As a wilderness ranger, I often had thoughts that I wanted to translate into verse, so they could detonate in a similar way for a reader, who might have their own personal associations, but would at least share in my original epiphany. This, to me, is still what makes writing so alluring — not that it can mean anything to anyone, but that I can take something from my life and frame it in such a way that it becomes meaningful to a stranger, whose life merges with my own through that telepathic bond across the years.
So I’m still not sure about this poem. It feels like another fluke rather than a result of carefully honing my craft. Maybe it’s too obscure to really conjure the trail and the snake. Maybe it achieves a level of abstraction that makes it universal in ways I didn’t intend. Maybe the poem wriggled out of my control and took on its own life, the way good art ought to do.
How does it land with you?
Snakes are metaphorically associated with rebirth and transformation. This resonated with me as I read the poem.
I'll be honest, the vague "something else" made me think the editor read it sexually, and so I went into reading it with that bias, which, I don't think I'd have found had I not read your sub-line, because really it's not there. Or wasn't there. Until my head put it there! :)
I have also only rarely placed my work without some kind of connection (whether I knew it or not) to an editor. Once it was that the editor was also Floridian. Once that the editor was also a Latin nerd who'd learned the same lines of Catullus from the same textbook. More than once a piece was published because the editor actually read it, instead of it being lost in the slush pile, because a mutual acquaintance was willing to call their attention to it. And I have equally capricious stories of denial and betrayal. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
The publishing world is by no means fair, just, or even really meaningful. The meaningful moments emerge almost at random, as when another contributor to the same issue reads your story in their contributor's copy (the only "payment" either of you received) and goes to lengths to find you online just so they can tell you how much they enjoyed your writing. Or when, at a Creative Capital artists' workshop, someone you've never met knows your name, and knows you're "good." Or when, at a workshop for a completely different art form, someone who was expecting something else finds themselves entranced by the way you use words -- a moment of genuine appreciation.
The traditional models of publishing are all garbage. We have something to say, and we want to connect. The rest is noise.