The Surprising Reason Why My Poem Was Rejected From a Publication

Sometimes it has nothing to do with writing quality or with breaking the rules

Sieran Lane
New Writers Welcome
6 min readOct 5, 2022

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A green-eyed, orange ginger cat, peeking up with a surprised expression.
Photo courtesy of alsadykov on DepositPhotos. Author has standard license to use this photo for commercial purposes.

Rejections are scary.

Especially if you already deal with anxiety and perfectionism.

Maybe you’re attentive to detail and abide well by submission guidelines. So when you get a rejection, it stuns you like a thunderclap.

But sometimes, the rejection was not because you broke a rule or even because you lack writing skills.

It could be for a reason that you would never have imagined.

My Poem and the Confusing Rejection

I wrote a poem about the joy and excitement I feel when I’m inspired. During these moments, my mind is brimming with ideas, but I can hardly concentrate on anything. The only thing I can concentrate on are the feelings themselves. So I expressed these feelings in poetic form.

As usual, I took tons of time to edit and polish my poem and double-checked the submission guidelines to see if I missed anything. So I was dumbfounded when I got a rejection the next day…

This was the first time I got rejected by a pub on Medium since I pay close attention to the submission…

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Sieran Lane
New Writers Welcome

A queer trans writer and therapist. I help fiction writers complete their novels. Let's connect! https://sieranlane.ghost.io