Here it is, a cold Wednesday in January, and I did not win a prize. There are actually many days of the year — in fact most of them — when I do not win a prize, but this is one of the days when I'm standing at the mailbox, reading an apologetic letter telling me that I didn't win a specific prize. In this case, the promise wasn't money but book publication. The good news is, I was one of 30 finalists, out of a thousand entrants. The bad news is that they chose five books, none of them mine.

I like winning prizes a lot. I like the initial elation. I like telling my friends: hearing their delight and amazement. I like thinking fondly of the wonderful poem that won, which has suddenly become a very good poem even though last week I thought it might be verging on mediocre.

Once you've been a winner, you understand that they telephone to say you've won, they don't write letters. So just seeing the letter in the mailbox is a bad sign. Being a finalist is a good thing, never doubt it. But I've been a finalist quite a bit, and it can get demoralizing. Almost more demoralizing than not being one, because it gets your hopes up. And hope, as we all know, is a fickle mistress.

Like many people, one of the things I try to do — without turning into a Pollyanna — is see if there's anything I can learn from my experiences. Poetry has taught me a huge amount about life. Writing my first poems showed me that I wasn't afraid to do something new. Having them praised reminded me of my capableness: that I'm smart and aware: I can figure things out. Having them critiqued and learning to revise was one of the great lessons of my life, because it taught me — after the six months I spent resisting the idea — that no matter how good a poet I might think I am, I'm a) not perfect, and b) can get better.

The hardest lesson — the one that writers are taught over and over — is rejection. We write a poem or a book, we send it out, and it comes back. This particular manuscript has come back more than 20 times. It's like having your kid thrown out of every nursery school in town: very, very personal. It makes me feel frantic and unloved.

But rejection is a huge part of life. We don't get picked for the soccer team; we don't get jobs we want, or apartments we covet on Telegraph Hill, or the phone number of that cool-looking guy in the corduroy jacket at the Sweetwater. It's awful at the time, but it happens all the time. The trick is not to let it stop you.

So I'm going to walk up to the house, make a cup of tea, and take another look to see if there's anything I can improve on. Then I'll do what I tell my students to do: put the book in a fresh envelope, address it to another contest, and drive it down to the Post Office. You definitely can't win if you don't submit.

Just keep in mind that they don't call it submission for nothing.