For every win, there are at least three failures. Sometimes four.

I’m learning this. It’s been a rough month for writing jobs. One of my favorite outlets announced they’re no longer accepting freelance articles, and then I got a delayed rejection that could have gone either way, followed by two rejections that just sat on me.

That’s the writing life. But then I met with my local writer’s guild and found that I placed in this month’s poetry contest.

My recently revised poem “Phoenix Fly Through the Fire” won third place. I know third place well. It’s kind of a thing with my work. And that’s just fine with me. Placing helps keep me going, even with verse.

Poetry and I have a rocky relationship. I hate it most of the time, except when I’m writing and submitting it. But my best poems, like my stories, are the ones that sit for a while before I revise and send them out.

Poetry is a writing exercise. It’s flowery and emotional and just too goopy for me as a general rule. But it has its place, sometimes, I guess (when it’s not modern stream of consciousness garbage like: I sat and looked and then everything looked at me. The end.)

I’m more of an epic poetry person. I like rhyming storytelling with serious vocabulary.

I fell for the “poetry doesn’t have to rhyme” ideology for a while, but the more I write it, the more I realize that poetry without some flow or rhyme is just a smattering of thoughts. It’s boring and, often, useless. At least for me. Pretentious. Self-righteous. Call it what you want.

I still don’t understand why I even try writing it, or submit it for publication. I think it’s the challenge at this point. Just to see if I can do it, or if people buy into it when I’m pretending to be some kind of “poet,” which I’m not, nor do I think I ever will be.

I just write, and sometimes poetry spurts out of me. It’s a bit annoying. But it clears my head for the real writing. The articles, the essays, and stories. So it’s worth something.