Tips On Submitting to Literary Publications

Here are some tips from the Superstition Review's Founding Editor Patricia Murphy and Hayden's Ferry Review Supervising Editor Katherine Berta about submitting to literary magazines.

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What Are Publishers Looking For?

Poets often ask other poets for advice on where to send poems and for tips about what publishers are seeking.

If you send out poems regularly, then you probably also regularly get rejections or a "declined" response on Submittable. For submissions to Poets Online, we reject the most poems for a very simple reason: they don't respond to the prompt, since we are looking only for poems from the current writing prompt, 

Publications always recommend that you look at a few issues (online or in print) to get a sense of "what they are looking for," but I have done that for some publications and have still wondered what made those poems the ones they accepted.

Writers should look at a journal or press' website for that submission guidelines page. A useful tool is the database at Poets and Writers magazine. If you look at their search tool and narrow the search to small presses that accept poetry, you will find many possibilities.

But the information given out by a press can really vary in its usefulness.

2River offers this EDITORIAL FOCUS "We prefer poems with these qualities: image, subtlety, and point of view; a surface of worldly exactitude, as well as a depth of semantic ambiguity; and a voice that negotiates with its body of predecessors."

Wow. That's a tough focus to parse. Do my poems have a "surface of worldly exactitude" and do they negotiate with some body of predecessors?  This would be a tough essay question for the final exam.

On the other hand, the next press in the alphabetical list is 3 Mile Harbor Press and their focus gives me a better sense of what they are looking for in submissions: "3 Mile Harbor Press is committed to publishing the best diverse work by new and established poets and is particularly interested in finding LGBQT, feminist and environmentally aware voices."

They further offer these TIPS FROM THE EDITOR: "Please no greeting card, overly sentimental or clichéd offerings--also nothing sexist, misogynist, racist or homophobic. 3 Mile Harbor Press is looking for strong voices and strong imagery. Virtually any genre of poetry is acceptable: lyric, narrative, experimental, magical realism, spoken word, etc., as long as it is within a cohesive manuscript."

You might think that Wake Forest University Press in North Carolina might be a good place for your Southern-focused poetry, but they say that they publish "Irish poetry only" and they do not accept manuscripts from American poets, including Irish-American poets. So, "If you are a native of Ireland and wish to submit a poetry manuscript, please email a representative sampling of your poetry and your biographical information."  Cross that one off my list.

Looking in the search under "literary magazines," I find one I am familiar with and have submitted to and have had poems published in. That is the Paterson Literary Review. But their description is not very useful "Poems: under 2 pages, high quality, any style... Please do not send more than five poems  at a time. We do not accept online submissions."

That is pretty basic and I know by reading the journal and by my own submissions that were accepted and also by being lucky enough to know the poet/editor, Maria Mazziotti Gillan, that "any stle" isn't really what they are looking for in submissions. If you submit "language poems," there is an excellent chance that they will be rejected. Looking in PLR, you will not find that style. Maybe you should send those to places like Poetry magazine, even though they claim a "desire to print the best English verse which is being written today, regardless of where, by whom, or under what theory of art it is written."

Publish, Don't Perish

The question that poets probably get asked the most in workshops is how to get published. There are thousands of articles, hundreds of books and an endless amount of advice that is shared about how to get published.

I'm sure there is good information in all those places, but I would say the best answer is that you have to write good poems and you have to send them out regularly.

No one is going to come up to you at a reading or at your writing desk and ask for a poem or manuscript for them to publish. That is the one in a million kind of story I associate with starlets being spotted by a director at a soda fountain on Hollywood Blvd. in the 1930s.

We can offer a few places to look for places to publish.

How about this appealing headline: "1,290+ Literary Magazines Ready to Publish Your Work?"  That was the tagline for the Literary Magazines database at Poets and Writers magazine.  You can use it to research publications before submitting your work, and then use it for deadlines for contest and submissions.

It has a wide variety of publications, from the well known to the never-heard-of: That Literary Review is interested in "creative nonfiction, fiction, and poetry of the mysterious and the wonderful." New Letters seeks "creative nonfiction, fiction, and poetry regardless of subject, style, or genre." Your Impossible Voice publishes "brash and velvety new work," including creative nonfiction, fiction, and poetry.

Poetry Mountain also has a list of literary magazines, as does poetrykit.org.

Again, the secret is sending out your work. Prepare for rejections. A baseball player only has to hit once out of three at bats to have an excellent .333 batting average. For poets, one acceptance for ten submissions would make you an all-star. But you have to take some swings.

          

Getting Published

One of the perennial and difficult to answer questions that writers get in a Q&A is "How can I get published?"

When I was in a week-long poetry workshop about 20 years ago with Tom Lux, I asked him that often-asked question. He said he always had a dozen poems "out there" at magazines and journals, and he had envelopes ready to go to other magazines so that when a poem was rejected, it went right back out again. Persistence.

It's good advice and a discipline that does not come naturally to many writers.

These days, not as many poems get mailed on paper to publishers. Online submission portals and email is often the way we submit our work.

Poet and publisher Diane Lockward has regularly posted listings of print journals that are reading submissions. She did two Summer Journals A - F  and Summer Journals G - P post this year.

If you have used Submittable, a service used by a good number of organizations, it allows you to submit and track your submissions. They also offer an email newsletter that lists publishing opportunities.

I wish I knew the secret of getting a book published. I know more and more poets who are self-publishing and doing their own promotion, tours etc., but most of us want the recognition of a publisher accepting our work. Validation, perhaps.

I would also recommend using lists like one from Poets and Writers magazine to find individual publications for poems and also manuscript contests and grants.  There are always some that are free, but most have a fee which is how many presses pay for publication.

The Poetry Society also offers resources of places that use poetry.

Start with the free ones, but the secret might be to always have a few poems out there as submissions.

EXIT 13

EXIT 13 magazine is one of the many small press poetry publications that keep poetry alive across the country. It features poets of all ages, writing styles and degrees of experience, focusing on where and how we live and what’s going on around us. This "poetry of place" is about geography, travel, adventure and the fertile ground of the imagination. It’s a travelogue in poetry, a reflection of the world we see, and a chronicle of the people we meet along the way.

Tom Plante started the magazine which he named after the Elizabeth exit off the New Jersey Turnpike where Tom once lived. It is a very much a labor of love and one-man operation by Tom who has edited and published the magazine since 1988. The annual issues also feature photos of exit 13 road signs contributed by correspondents. Plante sends a copy of the magazine to each photographer whose work is published.

Tom is reading submissions now for the 2013 issue which celebrates the magazine's 25th anniversary. He will be reading until the end of February. Email submissions with the poems within the email (no attachments) or snail mail to to EXIT 13, Box 423, Fanwood NJ 07023.

Tom Plante has personally been writing poetry for over forty-five years. “Poetry is necessary,” he says. “Poems are road maps for the soul; the GPS of a higher plane."

Before he moved to the New Jersey, Plante lived in the San Francisco Bay area of California. There, he worked with a friend to produce a small poetry magazine called Berkeley Works. Plante’s work in California gave him the inspiration to start his own literary magazine on the east coast.

The journeys of all the contributors gives us poems with a geographic point of view - a supermarket at the Jersey Shore, the Philadelphia Flower Show, souvenir shopping in Gallup, the Witches Market in La Paz, and buying a final round in Belgooly, Ireland.

There will be an EXIT 13 25th Anniversary Issue reading event October 15, 2013 as part of the Carriage House Poetry Series in Fanwood, NJ.

Poetry Publishers Willing to Receive Submissions Electronically

Louie Crew, Emeritus Professor at Rutgers University, maintains a great list of Poetry Publishers Willing to Receive Submissions Electronically. Poets Online has been on the list for a number of years.

He lists poetry editors who are willing to receive submissions electronically with some preferring manuscripts in the body of an email message and others as attachments. Most of his entries have brief submission tips and direct you to a website.

Louie wisely suggests that you study a copy of the magazine or site archive to determine whether your material would have a fit with the other material published.

His page has been online since 1996 and visits each website at least once a month, and write to editors at least twice a year to confirm publications are still viable. he is also no fan of entry or reading fees or requiring an author to buy a copy of the publication to see her or his work. On the other hand, he says that he hopes "that all poets will be poetry consumers and subscribe voluntarily to a wide variety of literary magazines. It is vain to expect others to read our poetry if we have no abiding interest in poetry by other living writers."

His page at Rutgers is http://andromeda.rutgers.edu/~lcrew/pbonline.html

Poetry Only

Not that poets don't like prose, but...

Diane Lockward has a nice post that lists poetry-only journals that she reads so that she doesn't find herself "skipping over the prose pieces to get to the poems."

As Diane says, these are "poetry with perhaps some reviews of poetry books, interviews with poets, and/or a poetics essay. A bit of art would be nice, too.

She includes: Poet Lore (Poetry and Reviews, occasional essay. Two issues per year.), Rattle (Poetry and interviews. Each issue has a section of poems solicited from a particular group, e.g., nurses, attorneys. Reviews are online. Two issues per year.), Southern Poetry Review (Pure poetry. Two issues per year.) and others.

Read on...  "Blogalicious: Poetry Only, Please:

2011 Marsh Hawk Press Poetry Prize

2011 Marsh Hawk Press Poetry Prize

Submit a manuscript of 48-84 pages of original poetry in any style in English. The manuscript must not have been published previously in book form, although individual poems appearing in print or on the web are permitted. Entries may consist of individual poems, a book-length poem, or any combination of long or short poems. Collaborations are welcome.

Submission deadline: April 30, 2011

Alicia Ostriker will judge the 8th Annual Contest. Ostriker has twice been a finalist for the National Book Award, has published 12 volumes of poetry, most recently The Book of Seventy, for which she received the Jewish National Book Award for 2009. Her most recent book of criticism is Dancing at the Devil's Party: Essays on Poetry, Politics, and the Erotic. She has received awards and fellowships from the NEA, the Guggenheim and Rockefeller foundations, the Poetry Society of America, and the San Francisco State Poetry Center, among others. Ostriker lives in Princeton, NJ, is Professor Emerita of English at Rutgers University, and teaches in the low-residency Poetry MFA program of Drew University.

Poetry Publishers Who Accept Electronic Submissions

I received two emails recently from poets who submitted poems to Poets Online and had their poem "discovered" online by another publisher who wanted to put it in print.

For example, Violet Nesdoly wrote "In Stitches" for our February 2006 prompt about being "in the moment". Recently, she heard from the editor of Vogue Patterns magazine, asking if they could publish it in an upcoming edition. I'm encouraged that a everyday publication not known for printing poetry would print one for their readers.

The Internet offers so many opportunities to share your poetry and find new audiences.
There are more and more places to put your poetry online or submit your poems online for print publication. An increasing number of established publishers now accept online publication as a first publication.

Louie Crew, Professor Emeritus at Rutgers University has been listing websites (including Poets Online) of Poetry Publishers Who Accept Electronic Submissions

Help Salt Publishing

Economic times are tough. These are even tougher times for traditional publishers. And for publishers of poetry...

Here's a letter from Chris at Salt Publishing asking for your help, and it can be as simple as buying one of their books of poetry.

I hoped I'd never have to write this note. The recession has continued to have a very negative impact on sales at Salt and we're finally having to go public to ask you to help support us.

Our sales are now 60%... down on last year and have wiped out our grant and our cash reserves as we continue to market and publish what we can from what we believe is a great list. We've plans in place to help secure the business from November 2010 — though the books we'll be publishing won't deliver any real revenue until 2011. We're sorry to ask, embarrassed to ask, but we need your help to survive until then and if you were considering purchasing a Salt book, we'd dearly love you to do it right now. We've less than one week's cash left.

If you can help us, please do two things:

1. Buy one book from us — we don't mind from where, it can be from your local bookstore (they need your support, too), it can be from Amazon.com or the BookDepository. It can even be directly from us. But please buy that book now.

2. Please tell everyone you know to do the same. Buy just one book and pass it on.

If money is tight for you, too, you can simply write a review of any Salt book you love on Amazon. Or recommend a book to a friend.

You can visit our Web site right now, simply go to http://www.saltpublishing.com/
and buy Just One Book.

Remember too, that every book you buy directly from us gets a raffle ticket in our Big Summer Raffle — and you could win one copy each of the next 20 books we publish from 1 September.

Thanks for continuing to support us.

Chris Hamilton-Emery
July 14

Support the publishers of poetry.

Poetry Contest Deadlines

Here are some opportunities to mail that poem, chapbook or full-length collection before the end of the year.

The Hollis Summers Poetry Prize from Ohio University Press and Swallow Press (postmark deadline October 31)

The Ledge Poetry Chapbook Competition (postmark deadline October 31)

Miller Williams Poetry Prize from University of Arkansas Press (postmark deadline October 31)

The T.S. Eliot Prize from Truman State University Press (postmark deadline October 31)

Bakeless Literary Prize in Poetry from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference (postmark deadline November 1)

CBC Literary Awards for Canadian citizens and residents (postmark deadline November 1)

Donald Justice Poetry Prize from West Chester University (postmark deadline November 1)

Perugia Press Prize for a first or second book by a woman (postmark deadline November 15)

Howard Nemerov Sonnet Award (postmark deadline November 15)

Yale Series of Younger Poets Award (postmark deadline November 15

Crab Orchard Series in Poetry Open Competition Awards (postmark deadline November 16)

Poetry Business Book & Pamphlet Competition (postmark/online entry deadline November 29)

A. Poulin, Jr. Poetry Prize from BOA Editions, Ltd. (postmark deadline November 30)

Bright Hill Press Poetry Book Competition (postmark deadline November 30)

The Motherwell Prize from Fence Books (postmark deadline November 30)

The Plough Prize Poetry Competition (postmark/email deadline November 30)

The Anthony Hecht Poetry Prize from Waywiser Press (postmark deadline December 1)

Beatrice Hawley Award from Alice James Books (postmark deadline December 1)

Prompt Action: Protest Poems

I am continuously delighted by the contacts that I make from around the world by doing poetsonline.org and this blog. One such contact inspired me to use the protest poem as a writing prompt for the site in April. It was an email I received from Ren Katherine Powell, the founding editor of Babel Fruit.

Ren is a native Californian, now living on the southwest coast of Norway and has "seriously invested in wool socks." She is a member of the Norwegian Writers' Union and Norwegian PEN's Women Writers Committee representative. She helped to establish the International Cities of Refuge and worked as the project coordinator. She is a dramatist, poet and translator currently pursuing a PhD in Creative Writing. Her performance work has been staged in the US, Canada and Norway. She has two volumes of poetry and nine books of translations to her credit. (More about her on her website and her blog, Sidestepping Real.)

Here's my initial contact from her:

I hoped that you would consider adding two links to your links page. I am the founding editor of Babel Fruit online journal: http://www.babelfruit.org/. We publish award-winning writers of prose and poetry.

We also have an associated project called ProtestPoems.org. It is a writing prompt/protest letter project. Writers do writing exercises anyway. We provide a specific theme and do the grunt work of putting them in the mail. We post the compilations on the website, and all poems contributed to ProtestPoems are considered for Babel Fruit.

Babel Fruit is an independent initiative first established in cooperation with the International Cities of Refuge. Each issue of Babel Fruit presents a previously persecuted or exiled writer.

Poets Online has been offering a monthly poetry prompt for about a decade. But if you feel the need for writing prompts that have more impact, try the monthly poetry prompts at ProtestPoems.org. They have asked for "poems to fight censorship, satire against those who silence satire, acrostic poems to spell out support of free speech." All poems are sent along with the protest letters, and all poems are also considered for publication in Babel Fruit.

How's this for an editorial policy: "These unedited compilations are serious protest actions - an ode to your ant farm will not be included unless the writer wrote about, lived in or liberated an ant farm."

The Submission Game

My friend Diane Lockward wrote recently a semi-serious post on 7 things you should know about being a poet and the one that caught me was

You would write poetry even if no one published you. But you might not revise so carefully.

I made a conscious decision about 5 years ago to stop submitting poems to publishers. It was a combination of things including the time involved, the acceptance:rejection ratio and all the politics and scams involved in even the best publications. But my number one reason for stopping was this: I realized it was changing my writing. At times, I found myself thinking about what a publisher "wanted" as I wrote. In the early days, I would sift through my poems and select things that I thought fit a market (as with those writer types I see in Barnes & Noble drinking coffee and using B&N as a library as they furiously copy addresses from The Writer's Market or The Poets Market).

That's not a healthy way to write.

I mentioned this to 2 poets recently. One said she never gives a thought to whether or not what she's writing "fits" a market. The other person said he figures that people who submit to Poets Online probably have some sense of "market" (if such a foreign concept applies to the site!) if only because the prompt is changing what they write. Hmmmm...

I wonder about that, especially since at least 50% of the poems submitted each month have no connection to the prompt.

I'd be curious to hear from any of you who do submit about whether or not you have a sense of a "what we're looking for" at Poets Online.

If you are doing the submission game, another post by Diane is about on submitting poems to journals via email which certainly beats the snail mail method.