On the question of sometimes being very good, for me at least, that happens when I’m least invested. That is, it feels more like I am allowing myself to be a channel for something very good, than I am creating something very good. I open myself to it, it is there. It is the opening that is the thing to be practiced. And it is very hard.

“If the poems come back with a form letter rejection slip I might understand the rejection but I do not know how to make the poems better.”

Don’t given them such weight. There is nothing about receiving a rejection that necessarily means the poem needs to be made better. (Maybe your poem didn’t have seagulls in it and the editor is envisioning a seagull theme. Maybe the intern reading submissions that day is cranky and just broke up with someone and opened the envelope and thought, “ENNNGH, I hate poetry, it reminds me of my broken heart” and stuffed a rejection slip in the SASE and then went down the street for a latte.)

Right now, go purchase or borrow from the library this marvelous little book: Pushcart’s Complete Rotten Reviews & Rejections Reading and memorizing the absolutely scathing judgments levied against acknowledged major masterpieces of literature will go a long way toward diminishing the deadly “authority” of the potential publisher!

You are ready. You will have, you will have, you will have.

“I almost see the way there but then it is gone. It is a glimpse. Like seeing a brook trout that is long gone by the time you start your back-cast.” Yes. Exactly.