I am, at the moment, very angry with WordPress, as I just wrote a lovely entry, which WordPress chose to eat. Nom, nom, nom. So not cool. So, let’s try this again, shall we? Ahem …

Today, a rare occurrence: I received a rejection (of the standard “Dear Entrant” sort) for my manuscript which cheered me a great deal. What cheered me was not, of course, the fact that they rejected my manuscript. What cheered me was the reasoning the press gave for their decisions: they stated that the manuscripts they chose were not necessarily the best, but the ones they found most interesting and felt the most drawn to.

I was overjoyed to read this from a press, as it so closely echoes my own ideas about poetry. In my poetry classes, when I have students read their work out loud after in-class writing, they will usually preface their reading with it’s really rough or it isn’t perfect. My response? Good. If it were perfect, it would be boring. Though proficiency certainly has its place, it isn’t simply technical proficiency which makes a poem grab me. In fact, I feel that the most interesting and gripping moments in poetry are places of imperfection, where the artifice breaks down and the art — the portrayal of the real, the raw, the gorgeous and gory truth of what it means to be human — emerges. Perhaps the truly beautiful cannot be said beautifully. Perhaps in these moments the poet lets their guard down, and perhaps in the cracks created by such imperfections, the soul shines through. As Leonard Cohen sings, There is a crack in everything, that’s how the light gets in.

In proficiency, in following the rules, in what’s expected and accepted, in pure mechanical perfection — is there room for that kind of real, raw, revelatory beauty? I often wonder.

It just seems that the imperfect is sometimes simply more interesting. Take, for instance, Gertrude Stein (the feline, not the poet):

Her ears are far too large, her nose hooked, her front legs far too short and her back legs far too long. She has asthma, one eye that never quite opens all the way, an oft-misbehaving digestive system, and a tail bitten bald to the skin. She has an obsession with stealing Cheez-Its and a tendency to announce her woe through a series of meows aimed directly into my eardrum in the wee hours of the night. She has little understanding of the basics of feline behavior — balancing on things, landing when one jumps — and tends to adopt canine behavior, especially when it comes to demanding a game of fetch or eating the stuffing out of her toys. She is, without a doubt, far from a technically-perfect feline specimen. But, after having her, I would never want a perfect cat. Plus, she’s a big fan of Ross White, which is certainly a point in her favor.

Perhaps this — the permission to fail — is an attitude I should adopt in other areas of my life, which are ruled by the daunting and damaging forces of perfectionism. I should certainly take this attitude with my attempt at a no-sugar diet, which has already been foiled several times by Haribo. I must remember to invoke Gertrude Stein (the poet, not the feline): “Sugar is not a vegetable.”