A Writer's Notebook, Day Eight-Hundred-And--Eighty-Two

 I do not know how to navigate the situation I find myself in regarding publishing.   I have little doubt that I am sending out good work, not because of my own ego, but because I receive a fair amount of affirmation from editors and from others l.  Often, a rejection will include some small mark of praise or encouragement, generally not specific, but on occasion I will receive a comment about a particular poem being striking.  Of course, it must not have met some threshold, for those editors, but that is a matter of taste, and, tend to think, less so about quality.  Were the work not of publishable quality, the responses would likely not include that encouragement.  That is to say, I believe my work is good enough, it just seems unwanted.  I do not know what to say beyond that, or how to reconcile with that kind of realization, or what I am supposed to do.  I don't feel that my poetry is all that outside the mainstream, or is not relevant(my fiction is farther afield, but I recognize that and have focused on poetry, at least for the moment, as a result).  I don't really know if their is some aspect to my poetry that turns off editors, or perhaps it is some manifestation of ill fortune.  I wish I could find a way to sense real progress, and not just to count how long I have been doing the same thing with no change in the results.  

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