These Are (Not) Haiku

This manuscript consists of haiku & senryu composed during the MFA program. Each poem was submitted for publication to at least one magazine where it was initially rejected. Many of the poems here were rejected by more than one magazine. Some of the eighty poems forming this manuscript were rejected by as many as four different publications. In reviewing his record of publication during the MFA program, the author realized that a little more than twenty percent of his published poems were originally rejected. Only a few of those poems were revised or altered prior to their subsequent acceptance at other magazines. Their inclusion here is both a record of a kind of failure (an unequivocal failure if the goal were to have published as many haiku & senryu as possible regardless of each poem’s accomplishments as an instance of its own type) but also an acknowledgment of how moveable a feast the notion of poetry of “publishable quality” actually is, at least as far as the cyclical nature of magazine production is concerned. In regarding such a manuscript, there are but two questions for the reader to consider: one, would the eventual publication of any of these poems actually prove its quality as an example of the genre? And two, would the continued rejection of any of these poems actually prove its permanent inadequacy?