“I submitted this piece to a magazine and it got rejected with the quickest response I have ever seen from a lit mag. This was expected but not fully; this piece practically wrote itself, and it did so eloquently, so I expected it to fare better than some other submissions I've made. It came about when I was writing a Christmas card to my sister, and I realized I had nothing but sad things to say. All I could think of was, "sorry for not spending time with you," and the like. I had already done my skincare that night, so I couldn't cry with my face straight up; I had to look down so that the tears fell instead on my Santa PJ pants. Thus, an idea was born. Through an extended metaphor with my personal acne battle, I wanted to reflect how emotions can bottle up and, if neglected, produce a psycho.”

“I hid these poems away because they are not metaphors. They are so raw and real that it unnerves me. I am usually more cryptic in my writing, so telling the truth scares me.”

“I do not consider myself a poet; I’ve never been one for flowery language or expelling human emotion as clearly and cleverly as poets do. But sometimes my emotions are swirling so much that my version of poetry is the only way to expel it. I included this poem as part of my graduation slideshow on my Instagram because I wanted it out in the world but didn’t think it was good enough. I still don’t know if it is, of course, but I think we should all have the chance to celebrate the big victories. This was how I celebrated mine.”

“I send these three poems because I have sent them out a lot and they have been rejected and I am discouraged because I think they are good ones and, as you will see from my Bio, my poems have been fairly well received since I started writing poetry upon retirement five years ago. Perhaps it is their controversial subject matter, though that would not be true of the Scrooge poem. At any event, these are the poems of mine that I think best fall into your category.”

“This is one of those pieces that I wrote more for me than anyone else and it felt private and also very out of context and stupid at a time. Now I feel like it can fit in here.”

“This was a thought exercise I found too funny to delete and now it is poetry I guess.”

“I often trash this piece because it was an early piece of mine and not in my typical mode of voice, but I think it’s important to still use and acknowledge it because it shows where I came from as a writer compared to now. Moreso, this poem talks about a very common thing, fire, in a strange way and I don’t feel as it lives up to other works on the topic.”

“This piece was much more successful than "Ennui." Four editors mentioned they liked the piece. But I trashed it because I felt this poem could not stand on its own (as it is not meant to stand on its own— I am including it in an honors thesis). And, of course, this is not even to mention the self-consciousness this piece engenders in me because of its strident, confessional tone.”

“I considered this piece a failure after an editor called my writing "maudlin, sentimental, and choked by a syrupy romanticism." While it took me a while to work on this piece, it did not succeed as well as I anticipated. The piece is highly narrative, personal, and confessional. It's hard for me to own up to it because of the negative feedback I received. Ultimately, I trashed it because I thought it had an immature and undeveloped voice.”

TW* sexual violence

“I actually wrote this poem as a catharsis of sorts and later submitted it to a zine as well. After the rejection, I felt that the parallels I made with a dismantled  shrine and an abused  body might have been too generic and could have been framed better. Either way, I tried to reflect back and reshape the piece but was unable to omit anything which is why it has been lost in my ms word app until now.”

“I trashed this piece because it isn’t in my normal style. It’s so literal, so cut and dry, and I thought maybe people would relate to it since there are so many writers in the grind of submitting, but no one has accepted it or really liked it. I do enjoy the staccato of reading it out loud though, so I haven’t given up on it completely.”

“I tried to be nostalgic. In touch with the past and nature. I didn’t love this. It felt like pandering to someone else’s view of my own home. It got rejected somewhere less than 24 hours after I submitted. How can you reject what my home looks like? Writing brings joy. I can’t imagine giving it up. I hate this rollercoaster and I want to get off this ride but I know as soon as I do I’ll just end up buying another ticket again.”

“This has been sitting in my drafts for a few months now. I can’t bring myself to edit it but I love it too much to delete it. You can say I probably don’t even have the will to do anything with it. Sometimes I feel like I have trouble communicating so when the words leave my brain they are incorrect on the page and when you read them you don’t get the full scope of what I meant to say. That’s a whole long rambling way of saying, I’ve gotten too many rejections from other pieces, this one just felt like using someone else’s voice in order to gain approval except what I mean to say is I miss being passionate about things and this is my voice and I hate that it seems like I have to share only pain to be accepted and still end up being rejected. Many writers say they experienced tons of rejection before they made it so it seems like leaving the industry isn’t an option for me either.”

“I sometimes imagine myself reading my poems before a raised platform upon which stand my favourite dead authors. Sometimes they approve of my poems. At others, they either laugh or frown. I vaguely remember Nakahara Chūya leaving the room right after I finished reading this one.”

“They were written recently, during my holidays to recover from depression. The time wasn’t right to put word to paper, and I usually write full manuscripts, with a concept in mind. For those, I didn’t have that. That’s why they’re homeless now and I don’t like that idea.”

“I find this poem rubbish, it's entirely unnecessary to compare a diary entry to a poem so I chewed the paper. I didn't. This was lying somewhere in my notes, typical trash poetry.”

“As with many of my prior writings this poem was written about a boy. I edited it a few times but never could settle on a final draft. I finally just emailed it to myself and forgot it existed. Although it isn’t a personal favorite, it still made me smile when I found it in my cluttered little writing file. The boy might be gone, but the words live on.”

“I simply forgot why I wrote the first poem. It became completely new and distant, sitting silently in my Google Docs. Perhaps the poem was about me talking to myself. Reason for both of the poems: I feel that I wrote too much of the same subject, the same muse. I'm scared that this won't be worthy because of that. My brain automatically said: ‘Repetition. Boring. Short (although my poems are mostly short). These won't make it. These are so ugly.’”

“I trashed this story because my first alpha reader didn't like it and honestly I'm not even sure why I wrote it. It seemed like a fun story in my head, but it might just be a bit too nihilistic.”