REJECTION LETTER

Thought this was an amazing rejection letter for a recent submission to a journal:

Thank you for submitting five poems to __________. We are unable to accept your work for publication this time around. The Poetry Editorial Board responded quite variably and strongly to these poems, admiring their craft and wit and tonal range, but disagreeing no less variably on which they preferred and why. The poems struck a bit like bowling balls, knocking different readers down in each case. Other readers elsewhere may well respond differently, too, and most of the poems will likely find good homes, so you should certainly keep them in circulation.

I couldn't resist writing a poem based on that rejection and sending it back to the journal. I'll keep you posted if they accept it or reject it again.

And, while we're talking about rejection letters, here's another one,a more interesting prose poem than what I sent: 

In some ways, I do like the style and the way the poem flows, but I feel it is too lacking in coherency and too disjointed in its rambling messages to be appreciated by the majority of readers, even if they looked up the meaning of picaresque. On first read, I was annoyed by how stereotypical some of the lines came across - but the title tells us that's deliberate and serves a purpose. I love how we start in media res, just launch in like mid-conversation - and how that's a very 'hero of the story' device. The hints of violence and a distasteful attitude come across in the voice, and the dips into more fanciful and flowery lines are where the hero tries to pull of romanticising himself/flirtations. The repetition and rambling, I feel, function as evidence of the 'hero' being a nobhead/drunk. I'm fond of prose poems, when they're good. This has a clever premise and is fairly entertaining (it matches my personal desire that these types of protagonists be examined and critiqued more in public). The question became, will our readers interpret the title this way or will they regard the poem as featuring too many stereotypes and be put off by it...? The team voted not to take the risk. But it's a decent poem.