Chances are you’ve read William Carlos Williams’s plum-eating poem, but you probably haven’t seen these wicked variations on it.
These links are from an excellent piece by Teresa Nielsen Hayden about publishers’s rejection letters. If you think you might submit a manuscript of any kind anywhere, ever, for any reason, go read it.
- Why Baghdad is stripped bare In an earlier post about the looting of Iraqi museums...
- Plum cake If decent plums are still available where you live, you...
How about a rejection letter sent to Gertrude Stein?
“Having only one life, I cannot read your MS three or four times. Not even one time. Only one look, only one look is enough. Hardly one copy would sell here. Hardly one. Hardly one.”
However, Thank You for Your Interest
I’ve never gotten a rejection letter from a publisher (because I’m not a writer, not because they only send me acceptance letters). My problem is with graduate school rejection letters, specifically the line about there being “many qualified applicants.” I felt that the next part of the sentence should really be “but you were not one of them,” or, “so why on earth would we let you in?” They didn’t say it, but I knew what they meant.
One more thing:
A recent topic of debate in my house has been whether the plum poem is about sex. Maybe pinchy.org readers (afficionados? groupies? followers?) could vote on it.
I was going to say that I don’t think it’s about sex, because if it were, the person who possessed the plums, whatever exactly they might represent, would know they had been taken. But then it occurred to me that the possessor of the plums might not be the person to whom the poem is directed.
Now I don’t know what to think.
Hee, having been a Good English Major (TM) I’m familiar with both. The Williams poem was posted on the fridge at the UCB Stebbins co-op… and my friend Kendra (http://www.livejournal.com/users/kendrad/)actually did her thesis on Kenneth Koch…
Okay, Good English Major: Is the poem about sex or not?
I’ve never thought so?
It’s probably about Jeff’s pants?!
-posted my Cdawg