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Byline Magazine

July/August 1988

The Eureka Effect

"We are sorry to inform you. Thank you for your submission. However . . . Unfortunately . . . We regret." These are some of the most familiar words in a freelance writer's vocabulary. They are a sampling of the beginning of each rejection letter one on my poems received.

Because I liked this particular poem about a woman falling in love with an Adonis statue, I spent many hours over the course of four years shuffling words, inserting and deleting lines each time an editor returned it. Yet because I only liked the poem (not loved it) I never expected it to sell.

But rewrite I did, and after the nineteenth version was rejected I gave the poem one last hard look, before retiring it from editorial circulation. I knew the poem wasn't good enough because it wasn't memorable. It didn't have the "gimmick" as one editor told me, to make it entertaining. On top of that, it was maudlin. So I pruned the overgrowth, cutting it to half the original length. But . . . it still wasn't complete. I needed a last stanza. I needed that gimmick.

So I placed the poem in the back of my mind. Then one day, after having been showed with the sweet grass from an energetic lawn mowing, I rested in a lounge chair, smelling the fresh cut lawn, and in my lethargy I saw myself in the scene of the poem, between the ancient pillars, under the skin-browning sun, and I dozed into a dreamy, non-thinking limbo, when -- "Eureka!" I exclaimed aloud rising form my slumber. And like Archimedes upon discovering the principle of specific gravity for determining the purity of gold, I found my gimmick. I grabbed the nearby pen and pad and scribbled the lines of the last stanza exactly as they appeared on the twentieth version that sold to Amazing Stories.

It was the memorable last stanza that finally brought a letter of acceptance (and a check for $27) for the poem I least expected to sell. And that was my first professional sale.

-JJM

To read the poem:

MAKE-BELIEVE GREEK LOVER