I've been writing for a long time, and I've been getting rejection letters for a long time, and mostly I've learned to shrug and let them go. But a few rejections do stand out. For instance, there was the time a publisher told me my essays were too well written to print. And the time a publisher told me that men wouldn't read my work.

Yesterday I got a rejection suggesting that I don't have enough emotion in my poems. Now, I have many flaws as a writer, but avoiding feelings is not one of them. So when I write a poem that seems emotionally frozen, you can be sure I'm doing so on purpose, for a reason. Say: to delineate the inarticulacies of grief. Say: to trace what it's like to be a depressed person. A reader may or may not like a poem or a manuscript. But they aren't accidents, and they aren't evasions.

Artists have their preferences and blind spots, and publishers have their preferences and blind spots, and rejections are a reminder of how subjective our work can be. That doesn't keep me from gnashing my teeth over misreadings and misunderstandings. But it's not a bad thing, either, to get a rejection letter that reminds me You are doing hard work. I guess I'll keep doing it.