The poet who is turning rejection into art

Job hunting, dating, university applications - we've all experienced rejection in one form or another.

But what if rejection didn't have to be a negative thing, but could also be the jumping off point for something more positive - like art?

That's the attitude of poet Abhi Arumbakkam from Maidenhead, Berkshire, who has turned her swathe of rejection emails into poetry.

Ms Arumbakkam said the rejections hurt, but she wanted to give herself "permission to have a laugh".

Ms Arumbakkam started collating rejection letters from jobs, funding bids and commissions in 2013.

By 2020, she had collected more than 150.

"I wanted to do something with that body of texts but I never knew exactly what," she said.

And then she stumbled across the work of American author Austin Kleon, who produced poems from redacted bodies of text.

"I thought - that's it," she said.

"That's exactly what I want to do with these rejection emails - to turn them into found poetry."

Despite her mission to turn her rejections into something positive, Ms Arumbakkam said it wasn't easy to produce the poems.

"When I was looking through them, it hurt afresh, even though I was coming at it from the point of repurposing them for art," she said.

"To have the door slammed in your face is never a nice experience."

But she persevered, and in February, her work was on display at Norden Farm, an arts centre in Maidenhead.

She said she hoped the exhibition provided people with a "lighter way" of viewing rejection.

"I want to suggest an alternative way to view rejection, to embrace it, to see it as an inevitable fallout of trying," she said.

"There's so much emphasis on being perfect and right, we only see the end product.

"These kind of rejections often get overlooked and sidelined, but I just want to say 'it happens to everyone, so why not just have a laugh?'."

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