 I've collected a lot of rejection letters over the years. Most editors like to keep rejections short and to the point. Now and then, an editor will offer a bit of helpful advice. The best advice I ever received from a rejection letter came pretty early on in my writing career and it was just one sentence: "good writing offers the reader a clear window... " This advice works just as well for poetry or prose. The basic idea is that you avoid putting anything between you and the reader that makes it more difficult for them to "get" your message. This doesn't mean you can't write ambiguously, or even mysteriously, but it means you should always write with purpose and always be mindful of your readers. Here are some bad habits that make your "windows" dirty:
If you're writing prose, almost without exception, there are three things the reader must always know: who is on camera, what they are doing, and why they are doing it. Yes, you can blur the lines here for effect or to create suspense, but a little goes a very long way. With poetry the reader needs a good enough grasp on your images, rhythms, and theme to follow all the way through the poem. The good news in all of this is that simply being aware that writing acts as a "window" for reader should help. The even better news is, you can keep coming back to this blog for more tips! Categories All
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 Images in the news and current events move us almost like planetary forces. When we see images like those that are coming out of Israel of rockets bombarding cities, hostages spirited away on motorcycles, fences bulldozes, houses razed, and families brutally slaughtered, we are rightly overwhelmed with emotion. As writers and creators we feel somehow it's our job to respond to earth-shaking events, no matter how morally inexplicable or horrendous they may be. We should feel this way. And it is our our job to respond as artists. But what I want you to consider today is how to respond to mind-shattering current events. And since the topic is so huge and important, I'm only going to make a single suggestion, but it's a pretty important one. Avoid the urge to be "epic." Sure, you can write a 500+ line poem or three-book series on the abduction of Noa Argamani by Hamas terrorists, but the odds greatly favor that your epic will fall flat. I've no doubt that the event will inspire someone to write a successful epic, but it probably isn't me or you. Instead, what we can do is use the image of her abduction, the feeling of it to inspire smaller, heart-first responses. I could cite any number of examples here, but I'm going to just use a single poem. The poem is by Yeats and it's called "Easter, 1916." This poem grapples with many personal and political themes, but it never loses its touch of personal intimacy. Without that touch anything you write about contemporary events will tend to gravitate toward editorializing, then degenerate to opinion, and finally collapse into some form of jingoism. What you bring to the table as an artist is the touch of intimacy the rest of the world seems to often lack. You're the heartbeat, the conscience, and the soul in a world that often seems heartless and soulless. So engage with current events, but do it with artistry. Meanwhile, if you find these blog-posts useful, please consider buying me a spot of coffee through the link below! I could really use it! You can also donate here: PayPal rainlight@hushmail.com And if you'd like some expert help with editing or polishing your poems or you just want a bit of feedback, hit the links below. I look forward to reading your work! Categories All  The most important thing in business is branding. The same goes for celebrities. But what many writers don't realize is: it's also true for poems, stories, and novels. It's obvious if I mention someone like Stephen King or J.K. Rowling, but it's just as true for Lord Byron and Jericho Brown.
When it comes to iconic writers in any genre, you get a picture and a feeling just from the sound of their name. You can also spot a piece of their work in an instant. This is what it takes to really get over the top as any kind of artist. You need to create an immediate association between your name, image, and a particular niche, archetype, or signature style. For most artists this means some degree of self-restraint and submission to audience capture. Mick Jagger at 80 years old just released a new Rolling Stones song and guess what, it sounds like the Rolling Stones sounded in the 1970's because that's what people expect and desire. The Stones and Jagger could play anything at this point, and have done so. Go listen to Super Heavy. But no-one liked Super Heavy, not as much as they liked the Stones, anyway. So how do you do this? And if you're already doing it, how do you do it better? The good new is, there are answers to those questions. The bad news is, they're not a simple answers. If it was easy, we'd have even more celebrities running around than we already do! I'm going to give you the answers over the course of the next few blog posts. So stay tuned. The place to start even if you've already published or posted and have fans and followers is: always do good work. Think of your work as food you're offering to people. If it's burned or bland, why give it to them. They're not starving. The only reason to offer your work is if you feel it's delicious, or deliciously bitter! So, the first step in any brand is: consistent quality. Don't hurry to get your work out; focus on making it taste good. And serving it in the right place at the right time with the right atmosphere. I'll dig in deeper on how to find out what your brand is and how to push it to the front of your creative efforts in my next post! Meanwhile, if you find these blog posts useful, please consider supporting the site. Your contribution is invaluable in allowing me to offer the content. PayPal rainlight@hushmail.com Pick up my 7 Secrets of Poetry guide to help write and polish your poems on your own, for a mere $5.00 right now through the following special link: https://www.buymeacoffee.com/writerdanq/extras And if you'd like some expert help with editing or polishing your poems or you just want a bit of feedback, hit the links below.  Most of us write with at least one poet always on our minds. Some of us have numerous poetic "ghosts" flitting around us as we hammer away at our work. Whether it's Shakespeare, Tupac, Diane (or Dr.) Seuss, some of the voices in our heads aren't our own. Not wholly anyway.
It's a kind of cognitive alchemy where we read our favorite poets, the words take up a living space in our imaginations and they become part of us, where, in doing so, they change into something new altogether. This process of mingling minds is what poetry's all about, really. It's a soul to soul contact sport. And here's the really interesting thing about it: it doesn't matter who you are, or where your work is presented, if you do a good enough job as an artist, your words will pitch a tent in someone's mind, potentially a lot of someones. So think carefully about what you're offering. If your poems rub people rawly, this can be a very good thing for sparking thought. But if your poems leave people with a sick or miserable feeling, they'll avoid them in the future, unless they are one of the rare types who wants to feel miserable. I'm not saying you have to write happy things all the time; I'm saying: be aware that poems are like songs. They infect people. They're sticky. A great poem sticks even more than a great song. Even a single line such as : "Rage against the dying of the light" or "To be or not to be" can ring for centuries. The voices of poets in your head aren't trying to tell you how to write. They're trying to tell you why we write. If you remember that, you'll make better poems. If you find this poetry tip useful, consider picking up my Seven Secrets of Poetry guide. It's packed with tips and tricks. You can get it through the link below! Also, if you'd like to support the blog, I'd really appreciate your much-needed donation through PayPal rainlight@hushmail.com And if you'd like some expert help with editing or polishing your poems or you just want a bit of feedback, hit the links below.  "Wintering" is Sylvia Plath's triumphant declaration of victory and joy. Victory at having found the world of honesty and truth that she sought her entire life, first as a scientist following in her father's footsteps, then as a poet, searching beyond the gates of self-identity and death for the reality she intuited might exist beneath the world's often superficial surface. Joy is what she found under that surface. The poem is part of her "Bee Sequence" and I suggest you read the whole set of poems sometime. For now, we'll concentrate on just "Wintering," (click picture above) which is the final poem of the sequence. The poem starts with the line: This is the easy time, there is nothing doing. What? I thought this was a Plath poem? How could the writer of "Daddy" and "Lady Lazarus" start a poem this way? Didn't she kill herself? What's going on here? The truth is, Plath found immense joy, creative peace, and unstoppable inspiration in her experiences with the loss of personal identity. It is similar, but not exactly the same as, what reportedly happens to some people who take psychedelic drugs. Plath didn't use psychedelics, but the breakdown of her "ego" and her ties to the world of "mendacity" even for a short period, through her encounters with poetry and nature, revealed an illumination that not only made her poetic name, but changed the entire world, and is still growing. In "Wintering" she enters the cellar of an unnamed aristocrat in a spare house she has rented. This is a symbol of the abyss, the "blackness and silence" of the Yew tree, the All Being of nature. Only now Plath has no fear of the void, she has made a home for herself there. But it is not based on materialistic things or titles such as "Sir So-and So's gin." Instead it is based on an abiding -- perhaps eternal -- connection with the rhythms of nature. She has become Queen of the Bees, just as her father, Otto, was known as King of the Bees, but as Queen she doesn't want to control nature, she simply wants to perpetuate it. She has learned from her encounters with nature to see life, not death, as the impetus of being. She has regained a personal identity, but it is a greater, much wiser and more enduring self-identity than she had as "Ted Hughes's wife." This is how we should remember Plath, because this is the poet she truly was... Her tragic suicide was the result of her inability to stay in this moment of illumination, but she touched it and she left a record to inspire countless generations to come. So in a sense, she did stay rooted in it. This concludes my first blog-post series on Sylvia Plath, but it won't be my last! If you enjoyed the posts, please consider making a small donation to my PayPal, or use the Buy Me A Coffee button to make a donation through my MusicGuru page. I could really use the support right now!! https://www.buymeacoffee.com/writerdanQ Donate via: PayPal: rainlight@hushmail.com CashApp: $writerdan Categories All  Though Plath wrote a number of important poems between "Tulips" and "The Moon and the Yew Tree," these poems still fall short of what would become her full brilliance. They describe her struggle to place the experiences she had during her hospital stay in context as she returned to the "Mad Men" day to day world of a wife and mother in America in nineteen sixty-one. What this meant mostly was she couldn't mention her loss of personal identity experiences to anyone, or her poetic ambitions. It was time, finally, by everyone's clock for Sylvia to grow up and be a good mother. She may not be an artist, but she had the honor of being married to a great poet, Ted Hughes, who seemed fated to someday sip wine in a castle, which is what he later did as Poet Laureate to Queen Elizabeth II. But when he was still married to Plath, he was gracious enough to assign her "studies" from time to time to write about. Plath's brilliant poem, "The Moon and the Yew Tree" (click her picture above) is the result of one of the "instructions" that Hughes gave to her, after seeing the moon behind a yew tree outside their apartment window. The poem that Plath wrote at his orders explodes with the mystic visions she'd discovered in "Medallion" and "Tulips." She embraces the "nothingness" of Jung's abyss, the "blackness and silence" of the universe and purely embodies this abyss as the source of creative power. The key is that Plath's poetic self now knows that "blackness and silence" are the sources of creative energy in the universe, the unbroken Is-ness that stays true and sacred despite our often phony lives and self-identities. She's able to spin a myth out of the scene as if by sorceric will. The poem shocked Hughes very deeply. As a poet and an enthusiastic reader of Shakespeare and myth, he recognized that Plath had become a true Seer. He also probably realized she'd been making his meals, sewing on his buttons, and typing his poems while he berated her attempts to write and slept around behind her back. He didn't want any of that to change, but the poem said change is coming. In typical Hughes fashion, he simply shrugged off the poem as a practice piece to Plath's face, but we now know, reading over his posthumous criticism of her poetry and his Birthday Letters poems, how much the poem wounded him and rightly so. As powerful as "The Moon and the Yew Tree" is, Plath was just getting started. Having discovered the creative heart of the cosmos and maybe even her place in it, Plath was ready to step fully into her poetic genius, which she does in the poem we'll look at next Monday, "Lady Lazarus." Poem tally as of today: 8-21-23: Poems Written: 345 Poetry Submissions: 51 Rejections: 25 (15 tiered) Acceptances: 0 Poem written today: "Still Houses" If you're enjoying this series of posts on Plath won't you please consider making a small donation to the cause? https://www.buymeacoffee.com/writerdanQ Donate via: PayPal: rainlight@hushmail.com CashApp: $writerdan Categories All  By the time Plath came to write her poem "Tulips," her marriage and personal life were hanging by a thread. Her poem "A Winter Ship" foreshadows the erotic breakup between herself and Hughes, while "Medallion" shows Plath's exile from the literary establishment and her awakening as a mystic. "Tulips" is where Plath's genius really begins to assert itself. I've written a long-ish, very scholarly essay on "Tulips" and I encourage you to read it, but expect to be challenged, as the depth of this poem is considerable. What I want to say about it here is simply this. Consider how Plath uses the texture of "blackness" (and silence) in her early poems and how it begins to emerge after "Black Rook in Rainy Weather." What you'll see is: the notion of black moves from the basic notion of existential death to an idea of limitless creation, a la Jung's abyss. I'm not saying she brushed up on Jung; I'm saying, she stepped into an alchemical truth. Plath needed authenticity. She saw the world around her, whether justly or not, as fake. The titles we give each other, our family connections, the literary establishment, the way we view sex and nature -- the way we view and treat animals. This artifice or mendacity as Tennessee Williams called it in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof drives the world, but it doesn't drive the poet's world. In "Tulips" -- Plath explores what it might be like to cast off everything from family to skin and just drift in the universe as being-ness without a name or particular purpose. What she finds is holiness and spiritual fire. She finds "a peacefulness so big it dazes you" -- and though the tone of the poem is sad, or even somewhat morbid, it is truly a poem of birth. Plath emerges from this poem and experience with a great deal of creative energy and a vision that is suitable for its consumption. Her next great poem, "The Moon and the Yew Tree," marks the point at which Plath forever moves from being a seeker to being a Sibyl -- or, as I've been quietly shouting all along -- a Melissae. But you don't need to know all that! Just be aware that by "dying" to the demands of her persona, Plath was "born" into the great poet we all love. That's what's important! Want a little help polishing or editing your poems? Contact me: writerdan@mail.com OR use the links below. Support the blog through the link below (leads to my "music guru" page) or donate through PayPal to rainlight@hushmail.com I deeply appreciate your help in keeping the blog alive! Poem tally as of today: 8-14-23: Poems Written: 341 Poetry Submissions: 51 Rejections: 25 (15 tiered) Acceptances: 0 Poem written today: "Sky Slip" Categories All  The important things to take away from "Medallion" (linked thru picture) are that it shows Plath's initiation into nature as a mystical experience, and her first notable encounter with immortality. Prior to this poem, Plath's work simmered with a typical scientist's daughter's existentialism. It's quite evident in her poem "Mussel Hunter at Rock Harbor." Also in poems like "Dirge for a Joker" or even her very early political poem, "Bitter Strawberries."
But in this poem, death awakens in the form of a jeweled snake. Stanzas 2-6 read: Inert as a shoelace; dead But pliable still, his jaw Unhinged and his grin crooked, Tongue a rose-colored arrow. Over my hand I hung him. His little vermilion eye Ignited with a glassed flame As I turned him in the light; When I split a rock one time The garnet bits burned like that. Bust dulled his back to ocher The way sun ruins a trout. Yet his belly kept its fire Going under the chainmail, The old jewels smoldering there The dead snake is more alive now than when it was living. In death it has been "perfected." The speaker of the poem has passed now through the "gate with star and moon" -- symbolically -- and has entered a world beyond the ordinary. The "rare, random descent" Plath cried out for in "Black Rook in Rainy Weather" has become the world. But to see the mystical world one must leave behind the "flung brick" of the constructed world, the human world of cities, fathers, fear of death, and ignorance of nature. The speaker of the poem is now more alive, alone in the woods with a dead snake, than she was with the "yardmen" of human society. The poem ends as though the snake is being cast into metal -- becoming a medallion.... Plath has seen beyond death; she has experienced an ego death; she has stepped out of her father's shadow, off the concrete path, and into the wild, witchy world of the ouroboros. From this point on, her poetry would retain this magic that she discovered at Yaddo while her poems and book mss. were being roundly rejected and her husband's star was rising. In between cooking his meals, sewing on his buttons, and typing his poems, Plath also managed to attain a poetic genius that those around her never even knew was possible... This poem was and is her medal, her medallion. This is where it all truly started. Poem tally as of today: 8-7-23: Poems Written: 333 Poetry Submissions: 51 Rejections: 24 (14 tiered) Acceptances: 0 Poem written today: "Gull Wings" Want a little help polishing or editing your poems? Contact me: writerdan@mail.com OR use the links below. Support the blog through the link below (leads to my "music guru" page) or donate through PayPal to rainlight@hushmail.com I deeply appreciate your help in keeping the blog alive! * If you're feeling really ambitious, please look up the Melissae, find all the stuff about bees and seeing past the veil of death through poetry, and consider how this all relates to SP, synchronistically.  When the speaker of the poem in Plath's, "Medallion," picks up the dead snake and looks it in the eye, everything changes. Plath's view of death changes, her view of nature changes, and -- most importantly -- her poetry changes. It would never again be the same. I know this seems like a very strong statement, but I can back it up. First of all, Plath's gesture in taking the dead snake in hand is more than a Freudian castration fantasy and it's more than a throwback to the Biblical rebellion of "Sonnet to Satan." What she's doing in this poem is more, even, than striking a blow for Mother Earth and ecology. Although she's definitely doing that. To fully understand what's going on in the poem, we need to tap deeply into a single word: the title. The first thing to note is that it's a single word. It suggests unity and wholeness. Like the roundness of a medal. I wonder if you are aware that the word "medallion" applies to more than a medal, or a carving in a wall. It actually can also mean a small serving of meat. And this is the aspect of the word that's really important here. Plath's husband, Ted Hughes, was very well known as a "muscular" poet, centered on nature, who often assumed the perspective of predators, like jaguars, gar, or foxes. He was an alpha male of a guy. So let's tie that to another quick biographical insight into this poem. It was written at a writer's retreat called Yaddo that was only for the cream of the crop -- and Plath was there as a guest of her husband, who was actually in residence there as a poet. She was a tag-along. A small serving of meat. Now deeply consider this as you read the poem again (click Plath's picture above). The setting is Yaddo. Plath is alone. She finds a dead snake by the gate and picks it up, bonds with it, and in doing so not only gains a "medal" of individuation and poetic purpose, but also learns something about the nature of predation and the heart of nature itself that her nature-poet husband seems to have missed.... These lines are a description of the beginning of what she learned: Over my hand I hung him. His little vermilion eye Ignited with a glassed flame As I turned him in the light; It is at this precise moment that her unique voice and purpose as a poet is truly initiated. But to gain it she has to see through death. Her poetic voice is dependent on seeing through death. It is also at this point when the premonition of her marriage break-up (as shown in "A Winter Ship") starts to prove itself true. But more on all this next Monday*, as I finish up my analysis of this incredible poem. Yes! The poems is worth three blog posts! It's probably worth an entire book! Poem tally as of today: 7-30-23: Poems Written: 325 Poetry Submissions: 51 Rejections: 24 (14 tiered) Acceptances: 0 Poem written today: "Skull Money" Want a little help polishing or editing your poems? Contact me: writerdan@mail.com OR use the links below. * If you're feeling really ambitious, please look up the Melissae, find all the stuff about bees and seeing past the veil of death through poetry, and consider how this all relates to SP, synchronistically. Categories All  Plath's poem "Medallion" marks a powerful turning point in her poetry. Prior to this poem, Plath's encounters with nature describe a seeking, almost childlike vision. In poems like "Black Rook in Rainy Weather" or "Full Fathom Five" we encounter descriptions of nature that are partly naturalistic and partly mythological. This fusion of rational and mystical response is what Plath does best, but before she wrote "Medallion," there was an invisible, but quite firm, barrier between her and the natural world. Plath's father was a biologist who specialized in studying bees. He was affectionately known by his students as "King of the Bees." For Plath, initiation into nature was primarily a scientific affair, but it also carried a mystical, spiritual aspect as her father guided her to see nature with reverence and curiosity. Plath's husband, Ted Hughes, was a "muscular" poet well-known for his poems on nature and animals. What makes "Medallion" so special is that the poem marks the exact moment in Plath's development where she drops her "inherited" patriarchal vision of nature and initiates herself into a personal, more feminine and much more mystical vision of the natural world. This is the poem where she moves away from her father and her husband's view of nature as a setting for competition, dominance, and predation -- and begins to feel herself as an artist connected to the rhythms and mysteries of nature. The first lines make it clear that this is a mystical initiation, a spiritual, magickal encounter: By the gate with star and moon Worked into the peeled orange wood The bronze snake lay in the sun Believe it or not, to an old alchemist such like me, the whole of mystical transformation is laid out in this single stanza. The table is set, the stars are aligned, and we are already at bronze stage. One key element here is that, quite rightly, the bronze state of alchemical process is connected, deeply connected, with death. The message here is not: death is the power that transforms, but rather, death is merely a stage of transformation and not just literal death, but also symbolic death. So here we have a dead snake, exploding with Freudian overtones, in a setting of witchy nature, with a lone speaker, a poet, left to contemplate a world where men have seemingly vanished but left behind an enduring statement. As the lone woman of the woods, an "Eve" so to speak, what does the speaker of the poem do? She picks up the snake. And that's when things start to get really interesting. Click the pic above to read the poem and then come back next Monday to read the rest of my analysis!!! Poem tally as of today: 7-24-23: Poems Written: 318 Poetry Submissions: 51 Rejections: 24 (14 tiered) Acceptances: 0 Poem written today: "Sea Bacon" Categories All |
