Transcript
A (0:00)
Once upon a time, Amazon Music met audiobooks, and listeners everywhere rejoiced. Oh yeah, because now they could listen to one audiobook title a month from an enormous library of popular audiobook titles, including Romantasy, Autobiographies, True Crime, and more. Suddenly, listeners didn't mind sitting in traffic or even missing their flight. Amazon Music Unlimited now includes Audible Download, the Amazon Music app now to start listening Terms apply.
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I'm Major Jackson and this is the Slowdown My first rejections from literary journals were a gut punch. I took the plunge to see how my poems would fare in the big wide world of lit magazines, hopeful that I would find an audience. I had until then only shared my work with friends. I purchased the trade book Poets Market and identify which publications I thought my work best fit. As instructed in the chapter Insider Tips on what Editors Want, I sent only five poems. They were carefully curated to match the tastes of editors at five chosen literary journals. This was in the days before online submissions to write the COVID letter, make out checks for submission fees, stuff the envelopes with poems in a self addressed stamped envelope, then drive to the post office. Took me several hours. When I deposited my palms into the big blue mailbox that first time, I felt the glow of pride and confidence. Several days, not weeks later, the poems were returned with little slips of dismissive remarks Inside doesn't do it for us. Please submit in three years. We deliberated long and hard. Alas, these poems never reached the finish line. Nice sonnets. We don't publish these. Ouch. The swiftness and brevity of responses stung. Maybe. Maybe I wasn't cut out to write poems. It felt personal. The feeling lingered for days. Of course it wasn't personal. Eventually I accepted that my pain was part of the process. All artists experienced the dreaded no thank you many times over. Think of those stories of the visual artist not selected for a group show, or the actor who doesn't get the call back, or the dancer whose tryout was just shy of their peers. The best of them use it to fuel their creative fires. Even after small or great success as an artist, the hurt of falling short in face of what you want never goes away. Some desired achievement is always on the horizon. Today's poem reminds me that artists exist in a culture of rejection and over time, the little illusory nicks to your ego and the weight of commitment to your art either extinguishes your fire or has you recommit even more. Driven by that sheer love of making Film Theory by Zan Forrest Phillips a character I love dies and I am ruined. Things that haven't happened hurt me considerably. Hurt me considerably, and I'll act like nothing happened. Nothing happened, but I expired on the cellular level. Cell death corresponds to an intangible loss. Intangible loss is fiction's cornerstone. I corner fiction for a confession. I'm not real. None of this is. Fiction cannot unplant an image. It can only corrupt it. Film corrupts an image at 24 frames per second. When an image corrupts a body, we call this character. A character wears a body, not the other way around. A body wears shame its own or a director's. Anything that contradicts a director, they cut. A cut is a place where I have been severed from myself. A character is a version severed from itself. A version deceased withers on its person. The Slowdown is a production of American Public Media in partnership with the Poetry Foundation. This project is also supported in part by the National Endowment for the Arts. On the web@arts.gov to get a poem delivered to you daily, go to slowdownshow.org and sign up for our newsletter. Find us on Instagram. Slowdown Show.