According to news reports, Gregory Pardlo is a 46-year-old man who appears to be enrolled both in Columbia’s MFA in Creative Non-fiction Program and CUNY’s PhD in English. He already has a master’s degree in Poetry from NYU. These degrees may sound impressive but they speak to me of a search for financial support for creative work in a world not rife with opportunity for a middle aged poet. When Pardlo tried to sell his second book of poetry to a mainstream publisher in 2010, the manuscript was rejected by all of them. Instead, it found a home at Four Way Books, a small press in New York “dedicated to producing and promoting excellent literary publications and to creating opportunities for writers of merit,” according to their web site. The publisher issued the book in 2014 and it was listed on Slate’s list of Overlooked Books of 2014. This means that Jonathan Farmer, the editor-in-chief and poetry editor of At Length, an online “venue for ambitious, in-depth writing, music, photography, and art that are open to possibilities shorter forms preclude,” recommended Pardlo’s book Digest, saying,
“Gregory Pardlo is a genuine New York poet, one whose associative poems crowd with sound and intellect, varied cultures, shared histories, with high and low and home—or at least the hope of it . . . . At its best, Digest registers our indebtedness in intricate pleasures that never let us pull free.” Still, the book sold only 1500 copies and face it, you’ve never heard of Gregory Pardlo—at least you hadn’t until April 20, 2015—and probably even now . . .
But he won the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry for 2015. This bestows a great deal of prestige and attention—Four Way Books announced it would print 5000 more copies of the book—and a handy $10,000 prize.
The point, for the rest of us, is that the pathway to success and acknowledgement involves a great deal of rejection. I’ve seen this time and again. By far, my most externally successful students—that it to say, my best published students—are the ones getting the most rejections. There is a direct ratio between rejections and success.
There are really two things you need to do to be a successful writer:
1) Write. Regularly. Daily. One way or another, write all the time. This includes reading, daydreaming, note taking, editing, and a lot of putting down words—good, bad, indifferent—on the page.
2) Submit. All the time. This includes finishing, proofreading and getting the work out of your computer and onto someone else’s! Collect rejections. Stephen King did it. James Joyce did it. Your favorite writer did it. Your friend who seems to be getting so much more work published than you did it.
It’s the secret to success: writing and rejection. That’s why, at the Book Writing World, we celebrate rejections. It means you are creating work and getting it out there, and only when you are out there will you ever be seen.
It’s quite amazing how similar the writing and music worlds are. A musician needs to practice every day as a way of life; but he/she really needs to step into high gear before an upcoming audition–an audition being the equivalent of sending a manuscript off in hopes of publication. It’s a rare musician who gets the first job he auditions for. But as in writing, one cannot give up. The next audition must be taken, and the next. If comments from those auditions are heeded, improvements made, and practice continued, that next audition just may be the one. There is a violinist in the SF Symphony who auditioned 11 times (or more, I’m not sure of the exact number) and finally won the job! Practice does makes perfect–or certainly perfect enough.