THE BEST REJECTION LETTER EVER

Yesterday, I unexpectedly received an email from the editor of a publication I’d submitted three poems to on December 30, 2018. Two of the poems, “Helsinki” and “Carpe Diem” had since made it into my most recent book, In Praise of Manhattan . Although the magazine declined to take the poems, the editor did have something unusually generous to say about the third one. Maybe a touch of guilt helped spur such generosity, but it was unusual these days nonetheless: “We particularly liked ‘Mirror Cells,’ which is both clever and kind, an all too rare combination,” she wrote.

I was mellowed by that comment and the fact that my submission was so long ago. The lateness of the reply considerably softened the initial blow most poets (and most people, for that matter) absorb when they learn that their work’s been rejected. This time, I didn’t experience the usual sequence of shock, hurt, sadness, anger, and resignation I feel when an editor turns me down. Instead, I found myself welcoming the poem as if it were a long lost—and forgotten—friend. Strange as my reaction sounds, I was happy to have it back.

Reading it again after a year and half, I find that I like it more. Perhaps its quiet tone had caused it to fall by the wayside when I was choosing poems for the book. Now, however, I could see it on its own terms as a love poem incorporating science in a way that was new to me. Seeing it again also brought back to me a bright day in the long-ago summer of 2016 and a visit to a fascinatingly conceived exhibit at the Whitney called “Mirror Cells. In placing together pieces composed of such “humble materials” as wood, resin, and ceramic clay—artworks suggesting “strange invented worlds”—the curators hoped to spawn a “direct dialogue” among them.

What stayed with me most about the exhibit, though, was this part of the curators’ explanation:  “The title Mirror Cells references mirror neurons, specialized brain cells that are activated when observing the behavior of others. Researchers have theorized that these cells allow us to feel the joy and pain of others and associate them with understanding human intention and feelings of empathy.”

What would happen if a poem could replicate the mirroring feelings a person experiences while he observes the behavior of another? Such a poem could reproduce the sparks of empathy that are a prelude to love. It’s with a feeling of gratitude toward that rejecting editor that I share my shy poem with you for the first time.

Mirror Cells

By David M. Katz

I’ve lived entire lives in narrow rooms, But now see something else entirely: An undivided field of yellow grain, As if the stalks, bent back by wind, had left A path for me to see you as you really are, Someone like me in some respects, in others Someone else, scratching her own itch, distressed By thoughts that I could never grasp in just The way you do, because I lack the spark Of being you. Yet I can empathize, I really can, for while I watch you read, Then pause and seem to think, turn up the light, Small rooms inside my brain, the theory goes, Are mirroring the finest grains of all You do, and moving me to feel that I Can do it too: pick up the book, turn on The light, and turn it up to make it bright.