A New Day at 3am

This post is gonna be a bit treacly as I’ve been awake since it was very dark. However, this weekend needs to be recorded with a bit of importance attached. Nothing normally happens on my weekends. This was the one a month where I teach poetry however, so it had an element of work and effort attached. I think it’s been my favourite season so far. There were lots of reasons.

The main one undoubtedly remains seeing confidence grow in emerging poets. There was also a new person, who I am very much looking forward to seeing again. If they make three sessions, they will become a regular, and that will be a joy to behold. Normally this is enough to ensure that there’s a sense of satisfaction when I leave the venue. This week, this was only the first thing that granted that feeling.

There was an email on Saturday evening I assumed was not coming.

I will have two photography/poetry hybrid pieces of art displayed at a small art gallery in Art Trail Land starting in a couple of weeks time. This project fell very much in the ‘speculative punt’ area of my remit in September, mostly as an exercise in testing the water in relation to what I’m planning to do with Forest Management and the poetry film project next year.

Three items were submitted, two of which filled the brief 100% and one which didn’t, and the two that did are the ones being exhibited. They also both have a price tag, and the next hurdle to clear is to see if anyone decides to buy them. Selling books is all well and good, but selling art is something else entirely. Normally, this would absolutely be enough to make a normal weekend amazing.

We are, however, only NOW getting to the most surprising bit of the story.

An ‘identikit’ pamphlet was entered into an unexpected submission window earlier in the Summer, by which I mean it was a series of poems that weren’t written together, but felt thematically as if they fitted a heading. The work was, in some cases, more than four years old. It highlighted some major steps forward in my writing ability, plus some pretty significant periods of emotional instability.

It was no surprise therefore when the word ‘rejection’ appeared in an email last night from the publisher. What staggered me however, and what is still a bit unbelievable this morning is the depth, breadth and scope of what was also at least an A4 page worth of objective and completely justifiable observation on the work, more than I’ve been given by anyone after almost seven years of submission.

It’s enough for me to now reschedule my week for some editing.

There’ll be another post on this later in the week (when I’m more awake) discussing the realisation that the validation I crave the most is the variety it is almost impossible to even begin to quantify. Suffice it to say, this wasn’t even the best bit of the email, in the end. That was a single sentence that has done more for my confidence than any single acceptance is probably capable of granting.

It’s no longer notional success that is beginning to matter the most.