Rejection

An earlier post here was about the new use of the term "uncurated" in making poetrt submissions. Writing that post made me think about how the term "rejected" has been replaced by "declined" by some publishers. Do you feel any better about having a submission "declined" rather than "rejected"?

How do you feel about those templated decline emails that you get from journals and publishers? They are almost always a "compliment sandwich," with the decline slipped between two slices of of positivity. "Thank you for the opportunity to read your work" - then something about how many submissions they received and how hard it was to select the few poems they are using or the winner of that contest - "We hope you'll consider submitting in the future" - and paying a fee again to do so.

Anyone who has been through their teen years has experienced enough rejection for a lifetime. But writers invite rejection when they share their work with publishers. I think poets have more opportunities than writers in other genres because they can constantly be sending out a poem or a few poems to multiple publishers. 

I was reading about some famous examples of novels that were rejected many times before being accepted and turned out to be classics. Sometimes a novel just needs to find the right editor.

Here is the tale of a novel that is in the literary canon (and often read in those teenage years in schools), but that found many rejections before being published.  

William Golding finished his novel, Lord of the Flies, sent it out, and had it returned 21 times. When it went to Faber and Faber, it was initially marked for rejection. The reader (not an editor, of course) assigned to it called the work “absurd,” “dull,” and “pointless.” But a young editor at the firm named Charles Monteith, needing something to read on the train, grabbed it off the slush pile and realized its potential.

Lord of the Flies tells the story of a group of preadolescent boys stranded on a desert island after their plane is shot down while evacuating them from Britain during a fictional war. The submitted manuscript was changed quite a bit in the editing process, and the revised version went on to be a staple of high school reading lists, and William Golding went from a pile of rejections to winning the Nobel Prize in Literature.

Image from the Peter Brook film version package

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Follow this blog for all things poetry.
To see our past prompts and more than 300 issues,
visit our website at poetsonline.org

Will You Blurb My Book?

Book blurbs are those short recommendations found on book jackets or back covers of paperbacks. They are usually written by another author of that genre and, hopefully, the blurber is even better known than the author of the book you are holding. It is a kind of endorsement. 

I have written two blurbs and it is not an easy task. Of course, it must be positive. For a poetry book, it must sound a bit poetic. Having written many recommendations for students applying to college and ones for older friends applying for jobs, the assignment is similar but more concise. They are similar to those quotes from critics on film ads and posters. An excerpt from a longer review that has been carefully selected as a promotion.

The NPR Books newsletter recently informed me that the book industry really doesn’t like blurbs

You know them. But the book blurb industrial complex got shook up recently when Simon & Schuster’s publisher announced they’d no longer be requiring blurbs for the books under their flagship imprint. In an essay for Publisher’s Weekly, publisher Sean Manning wrote, “I believe the insistence on blurbs has become incredibly damaging to what should be our industry’s ultimate goal: producing books of the highest possible quality.”

This might seem insidery industry business to you (and maybe that’s one reason S&S is getting rid of blurbs!), but let me tell you, there’s been a lot of chatter in the book world about it. LitHub called it a “dazzling move.” Slate spoke to an anonymous novelist who called blurbs “a lazy tactic made popular by publishers who can’t be arsed to fairly distribute and creatively employ a marketing budget.” The author Rebeccca Makkai talked about the energy-suck that is blurb writing in an essay for The New York Times. The lone pro-blurb piece I could find was this op-ed in The Wall Street Journal, which compared the practice to an employer asking for references.

Does a blurb have any influence on whether or not you will read or buy a book or change your opinion about an author? If a Poet Laureate blurbs a book, does that mean it's a good book? Chances are very good that the blurber knows the blurbee, so it is a favor. Like those college and job recommendations, you don't ask some to write one if you think they will write a bad one. I have passed on writing recommendations and even once on a book blurb because I didn't feel I could honestly make an endorsement.

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Follow this blog for all things poetry.
To see our past prompts and more than 300 issues,
visit our website at poetsonline.org

To Publish or Not to Publish

I don't think it's a good idea for writers to think too much about the publishing world. I sense in a good many books, even in books by the best writers, an anxiety about how it will do in the marketplace. You can feel it on the page, a sort of sweat of calculation.
   -   Elizabeth Hardwick

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Follow this blog for all things poetry.
To see our past prompts and more than 300 issues,
visit our website at poetsonline.org

Publicity And Marketing for Poets

I know several people who have recently had poetry collections published by small presses or self-published. It's great to be published, but both of those situations mean that they will need to do some self-promotion.

Bigger presses will have a publicity person and ways of getting a book into the hands of reviewers, stores, and award judges and getting the poet into bookstores, events, and readings.

If the publicity and marketing is up to you, one place to start might be PR For Poets: A Guidebook To Publicity And Marketing. 

In the book, Jeannine Hall Gailey, a poet, provides information about getting your book out there using both social media and some old media, like librarians and booksellers, and readers.

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Visit our website at poetsonline.org

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Following Submission Guidelines

As we review poems submitted to the Poets Online monthly issues, we are always in receipt of poems that do not follow our submission guidelines. (see those at poetsonline.org/submit.html) There are very simple items (title in caps; subject line "submission"), technical ones (single-spaced plain text) and optional ones (do you want your name linked to an email or website). There are also ones that will eliminate your submission immediately, such as sending multiple poems, not addressing the current prompt or putting the poem as an attachment. 

These are not unusual and every publisher has their own take on guidelines. Some publications are very strict about guidelines. We wouldn't reject a poem because the title was not in capital letters, but some publications would reject work that is in the wrong font or size. 

The point is that you need to READ THE SUBMISSION GUIDELINES for every submission, and you should also look at what poems that publisher has used in the past. 

I am part of a group that reads submissions for a print magazine and for a manuscript award. With manuscripts, the guidelines are more complex and more specific to the publisher. For example, they might want a short bio OR they might want no identifying information because the submissions are being read blind. 

There are no guidelines that apply to all publishers, but if you are preparing your first manuscript, here are some general suggestions that might help you get the document in shape.

For poetry, single-spaced (with allowances for special typography and layout), each poem beginning on its own separate page in the manuscript; 

Standard letter size (8.5 x 11") in portrait orientation and use Times, Arial or Helvetica at 12 pt. black font on white page background; 

Most publishers want a Microsoft Word .doc or .docx. Some accept a .pdf or .rtf document.

You should have a cover/title page indicating the manuscript’s working title. Usually, that will also provide the author’s full name, residential address, and contact information (e-mail, perhaps a phone).

You might have acknowledgements page of places where some of the poems have been published before.

You need a Table of Contents listing the poem titles and page numbers. This might be the most difficult thing to set up in Word as publishers want page 1 to be the first poem and not the cover or any of the pages prior to the first poem. This can be very confusing to do. The sequential pagination is usually in the upper-right corner (document header) or in the footer.  Some publishers ask for the header to include the author's last name and the manuscript title but, as noted earlier, another publisher may want no identifiers.

It seems like the majority of publishers are suing Submittable or an electronic submissions system. This can make things easier for poets and publisher but these services are rather costly (which is why the trying-to-stay-free Poets Online still uses old-fashioned email submissions). Submittable is free for an author to use because the cost is picked up by the publisher. But it's not always free to submit your poems. A submission fee to submit individual poems, manuscripts and enter contest has become almost standard. Fees I have seen recently range from $2 to $35. There are still free submission sites and those range from Poets Online to The New Yorker, Submittable allows you to filter sites that are still free, but those fees often support the actual publications (especially print publications) and awards or payments for acceptances and staff salaries. 

One last general thing that really annoys a publisher - if you do simultaneous submissions and your work is accepted, be sure to notify the other publishers to withdraw your submission from consideration. I have been surprised and a bit angry about the number of poems we accepted for a print publication where the poet then told us it was previously accepted or even already published elsewhere! This is an easy to do courtesy. Some publishers have long memories for such indiscretions.

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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Visit our website at poetsonline.org

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Defining "Published"

Image by Janet Gooch from Pixabay

A poet new to the Poets Online website emailed me some questions about her submission which was recently published on the site. I thought her questions might also be those of other poets submitting to Poets Online or to other publications.

Can I submit my poem on Poets Online to other places? 

That depends on the publication's rules. Many print and online publishers now do not accept work that has been previously published, in print or online. Resubmitting poems for contests and for anthologies often waives that rule. Some publishers (Rattle is an example) do not consider self-publishing to blogs, message boards, or social media as a publication with respect to this rule. Always read the submission rules carefully for any submission.

Muse-Pie Press's policy is much stricter and doesn't consider previously published poems, stating that "if a poem is posted on a blog, website, or social-networking site, or another online journal, we consider it published."

If my poem is posted in the archive at Poets Online is it considered to be published?
As with the answer above, I would say that Yes, it is published and if included in a collection that should be acknowledged. If you're submitting again, research the submission guidelines.

Should I copyright my poems?
As noted on the Poets Online copyright page in greater detail, poems published on the site are protected under the U.S. Copyright laws regardless of whether they are registered with the copyright office. It is not necessary for the symbol © to appear beside a poem for that poem to be protected by copyright law. All work published on poetsonline.org are copyrighted one time only and then the copyright reverts to the authors.

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Visit our website at poetsonline.org

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The Mimeo Revolution

The “Mimeo Revolution” was a period stretching from the early 1960s through the mid-1980s when small-press publishing proliferated. Many poets started their own presses, producing small books and magazines that ranged from letterpress publications to mimeographed and photocopied pamphlets.

In the late 1960s, I "published" my own "underground" newspaper, The New Times, photocopied covertly on the Xerox machine at my after-school job and distributed by hand at my high school and to friends.

Handmade books, self-publishing and publishing others who had few opportunities to be published in the mainstream presses. Some of the poets of the period include LeRoi Jones (Amiri Baraka) and Hettie Jones, co-founders of Totem Press, and Lawrence Ferlinghetti of City Lights.

The avant-garde Mimeo Revolution fostered diverse literary communities and gave new voices a national and occasionally international platform.

Poets House in New York has one of the most comprehensive and various chapbook collections in the United States. You can find out more about this period in publishing that helped foster many poets in their digital collection of chapbooks. One example that you can read online is Diane di Prima's 1973 Loba Part 1 from Capra Press.

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Visit our website at poetsonline.org

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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.

The Author to Her Book

Anne Bradstreet was the first published poet in America. A Puritan mother of eight children, her only poems published in her lifetime were in a collection published in England without her consent or knowledge.

She is now considered to be an early feminist. The title given to her poetry collecion was The Tenth Muse, lately Sprung up in America. The "Tenth Muse" can refer to the ancient Greek poet Sappho.

Her is a poem she wrote in response to the second edition of that unauthorized edition being printed.

The Author to Her Book
by Anne Bradstreet

Thou ill-formed offspring of my feeble brain,

Who after birth didst by my side remain,

Till snatched from thence by friends, less wise than true,

Who thee abroad, exposed to public view,

Made thee in rags, halting to th’ press to trudge,

Where errors were not lessened (all may judge).

At thy return my blushing was not small,

My rambling brat (in print) should mother call,

I cast thee by as one unfit for light,

The visage was so irksome in my sight;

Yet being mine own, at length affection would

Thy blemishes amend, if so I could.

I washed thy face, but more defects I saw,

And rubbing off a spot still made a flaw.

I stretched thy joints to make thee even feet,

Yet still thou run’st more hobbling than is meet;

In better dress to trim thee was my mind,

But nought save homespun cloth i’ th’ house I find.

In this array ‘mongst vulgars may’st thou roam.

In critic’s hands beware thou dost not come,

And take thy way where yet thou art not known;

If for thy father asked, say thou hadst none;

And for thy mother, she alas is poor,

Which caused her thus to send thee out of door.

from  The Works of Anne Bradstreet

Places to Submit Poems Electronically

Louie Crew, Emeritus Professor at Rutgers University, has maintained a great list of Poetry Publishers Willing to Receive Submissions Electronically since 1996 and has included our main Poets Online site since we launched in 1998.

Louie recently contacted me and the other 994 (!) sites to confirm that the links and emails are current. In this labor of love, he visits each website monthly and writes to editors at least twice a year to confirm publications are still viable.

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. These are both "e-zines" like Poets Online and traditional print publications.

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.

I am also on board with Louie in not being a fan of entry or reading fees or requiring an author to buy a copy of the publication to see her or his work. Of course, there are publications that only exist and publish because of a fee. And I agree that poets need to also be poetry consumers and should subscribe voluntarily to support good literary magazines.

Louie Crew's entire site is a diverse and interesting read at andromeda.rutgers.edu/~lcrew/

Submit Your Poetry This Summer

Is summer a time that you have more time for your writing - and to mail off poems for publication?

Poet Diane Lockward has again posted on her blog a useful, updated list (in 3 parts) of print journals that read during the summer and some that read only during the summer.

Journals
A - F
G - P
Q - Z 

Unfortunately, there aren't links to the journal sites or addresses, so you'll have to do some of the work for yourself!

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)

Self-Publishing: Blurb

Blurb is a company (and community) that shares your joy of books. That includes reading them, making them, sharing them, and selling them.

There is something magic about holding a book of your work (poems, stories, photos, recipes...)

At one time, publishing your own book used to be called the "vanity press" but these days lots of writers are self-publishing. I should do a longer post on some of the better publishers for that. It doesn't take as much time, technical skills, money , or a friendly editor, agent, contest judge or publisher to actually publish a book - or 100 copies of that book.

One service that a friend used recently and liked is Blurb.

• Prices start at only $12.95 for a 40-page softcover, $22.95 for Hardcover, Dust Jacket and $24.95 for Hardcover, ImageWrap.
  
• Their bookmaking software is free.
• All feature professional bindings and coated, semi-matte paper.
• You can order just one copy or many, and you have the option to place your book in Blurb’s bookstore for friends and family to purchase.
• Interesting formats -a distinctive Square 7x7 to Landscape 10x8 or Portrait 8x10 to Large Format Landscape 13x11.
• Dozens of book styles, backgrounds, page designs, and text options to showcase your writing.
• Orders arrive on your doorstep in approximately 7 to 10 business days

Nicely done website with lots samples - check out "poetry" to start.

Celebrating NJ's Literary Journals - June 1 - Free Festival

Diane Lockward has been organizing a poetry festival that is a "Celebration of New Jersey's Literary Journals (and Some Neighbors)" since 2004. (Here's a funny NY Times take on that first one.)

I guess folks outside NJ don't realize that there's a LOT of poetry happening here. After all, the Geraldine R. Dodge Poetry Festival (the Big Kahuna of poetry festivals) is here, and the Dodge supports many other poetry efforts in the state.

This day of poetry spotlights New Jersey publications devoted to poetry and brings editors out to meet the people who are submitting poems. There are also very fast paced readings going on all afternoon.

Check out Diane's own poetry site for the full list of poets, journals and editors.

Here's a look at last year's event -





Sunday, June 1, 2008
1:00 PM - 5:00 PM

at the West Caldwell Public Library
30 Clinton Rd.
West Caldwell, New Jersey

call for info: 973-226-5441

click for directions