Get Circulating (part 1 of 3)
Tips for submitting your poems to literary journals.
Several students and clients have approached me over the past few years asking about the publishing world. How can they get their poems in journals? What about publishing chapbooks, or full-length book manuscripts?
Rather than keeping my responses hidden away in various emailed responses, I thought I’d put together a mini-guide to publishing, based on my own publishing experience (my stats: poems in ~45 journals, 1 book, 2 chapbooks, and a poem in an anthology).
First (below) I’ll talk about submitting individual poems, and in a later edition I’ll talk about chapbooks and full-length poetry books.
But first, why publish at all?
Should I publish, or self-publish?
It depends on what you want.
Literary, career-minded?
Are you hoping to advance a career in poetry (assuming careers in poetry exist)? If so, it’s probably better to focus on having your work reviewed by peers in a more systematic way than having a poem go viral.
I don’t have my finger on the pulse of all that’s going on, but I think that, for better or worse, most “official” legitimization of poets these days still comes through institutions—the institutions of literary journals, academia, anthology and book publishers, and so on.
That means that if your goals include building up your CV, getting grants, or being accepted to top-tier writing residencies or MFA programs, then yeah, you probably should engage in the slow-motion, administrative mountain-climbing that is poetry publishing.
Expression, sharing-minded?
If on the other hand you are more interested in expressing yourself creatively and sharing that with others (and if your goals do not include build up your CV or get grants or be accepted to top-tier writing residencies or MFAs), then I’d say don’t bother submitting to journals. It’s an administrative pain in the butt, it can take years and years and years, and these days it costs money, with many venues demanding submission fees.
Online self-publishing (on social media, your website, or blog) has many benefits. For one, it may help your poems actually reach readers. Like, maybe even more than two readers.
I’ll never forget going into a big bookstore in NYC around 2005 (before social media was even around to pull our attention away) and finding a thick layer of dust on the long aisle of literary journals. Heartbreaking.
It made me think of poets as masturbatory in nature, just publishing so we could see our own work published. It felt like none of us were reading each others’ work, and no one else was reading our work either. And I’m not really sure how much that has changed.
But, if you do decide to get your poems circulating with journals, here’s some stuff to know.
1. Don’t give up.
Publishing is primarily a numbers game, and only secondarily a merit-based enterprise. If you want to get published, it's important to submit your work to a lot of diverse venues.
I have kept up a single spreadsheet since 2005 for all of my creative submissions—primarily poetry journals and publishers, but also opportunities like grants and artist residencies. The spreadsheet tracks rejections and acceptances.
After totting it all up, I've got an average success rate of 15% —which means for every 10 journals or publishers I submit my work to, 1.5 of them accept my work.
BUT! that's just my average over 20 years. There have been years where I submitted to dozens (and dozens) of journals and got zero (0) acceptances. It's important to commit to the long haul when it comes to submitting poems.
Some folks actually aim to get 100 rejections each year. This reflects a celebratory attitude I also adhere to—though I don’t aim for that number, I do get excited each time I receive a rejection, because I get to add it to my nerdy spreadsheet.
More importantly, it’s proof my poetry is out there in the world, being read and considered by actual human editors (who, after all, are also my literary contemporaries). It helps the whole endeavour (ordeal/adventure) of writing feel more real.
Don’t take it personally when you get rejections. Everyone gets a lot of rejections. Keep trying.
2. Evaluate your chances.
Besides keeping up a good volume of submissions, there is value in researching each journal and understanding their style and their acceptance rate. Submitting to super selective publishers/journals is harder than submitting to more welcoming publishers/journals. If you have the resources to pay for it, I'd advise purchasing a monthly subscription to a publishing database. Personally, I’ve used Duotrope.
The most useful aspect of Duotrope for me has been its acceptance rate statistics, which reveal that some journals accept, on average, 30%-50% of submissions, while others accept less than 1%. Knowing this ahead of time helps you gauge your efforts so you don’t put all your eggs in a couple of lofty baskets.
Duotrope also offers a way to track your submissions (which is how they gather their data). I personally just use my old-timey spreadsheet, but their way might well be more convenient.
They also curate helpful lists, like the top 25 journals with the fastest response time (many journals can take 3-12 months, so it's nice to submit to faster responders), the top 25 most welcoming journals for new writers, or the top 100 journals that are the most difficult to get into, etc.
3. Revise your poems.
Strengthen and hone your poems as much as possible. Make sure each poem is communicating what you really want it to—whether that’s a feeling, idea, story, or vibe. Share it with other readers and writers to gauge their experience of it.
Also, cover your bases, craft-wise. Many of us, myself included, sometimes overlook this step. But as a former journal co-editor, I can attest that editors are reading a plethora of poems, and if they spot telltale signs your poem is an early draft or otherwise needs revision, they’ll likely move on to the next submission.
Examples of such “telltale signs” can include:
Common words and phrases. Editors are looking for creativity, not stock phrases. Instead of “the love of my life” try something more unusual. Instead of “It was raining,” perhaps “the day bled water.”
Multiple ways of saying the same thing. For example, in the same verse, referring to a “prodigious planet” and then a “massive world” and later “its vast size.” Try to ensure you only use repetition strategically.
Automated, unconscious choices. For instance, every line beginning with a capital letter because that’s Microsoft Word’s default setting. Or, opting to center-justify (or, to a lesser extent, even left-justify) a poem rather than do the conscious labor of being strategic about line placement on the page.
Random line breaks. When you break up your lines randomly without giving thought to why, it’s going to be evident to a seasoned editor. Think about the sounds of the words, and about which words are auditory and visual neighbours with other words. You can enhance a poem’s overall meaning, lyricism, and sonic assonance/consonance just by focusing your attention on where to break the lines.
Of course, those are merely rough guidelines. Some poems thrive on common phraseology; sometimes randomness is what’s needed. The point isn’t to avoid these things at all costs, it’s to make sure you’re being intentional about your choices. You want editors to look at your poem and think, “wow, this was carefully crafted.”
Here’s a fun PDF chart I created for checking whether you’ve been intentional with your poem.
For more tips on revising your poems, check out my (free) three-part series on poetry revision:
4. Match your poems to journals.
As far as choosing which poems you should submit to which journals, there are two main camps.
One says to throw your poems, en masse, at every journal ever, and some will just statistically be hits.
The other camp says to carefully read back issues of the journal or books the publisher has put out, or in the case of juried opportunities, to read the judges’ own poetry and then select your poems accordingly.
Because of the aforementioned fact that it’s more a numbers game than a meritocracy, I’m genuinely not sure which approach results in more acceptances. However, I feel like option 2 is much more respectful to journals and editors.
Personally, I’ve landed somewhere between these two options. I briefly research each journal’s goals and aesthetic by reading their “about” page and glancing through a few of the poems they’ve published. Then I try to pick some poems of mine that might be a good general match.
5. Do the drudgery work.
Reading and adhering to submission criteria is the lion’s share of the administrative labor involved in publishing. Make sure that you meet the publisher’s criteria. In the old days, direction were printed in each copy of the journal; these days most journals will detail their submission process on a “Submissions” or “Submit” page on their websites.
Maybe they’re looking for poems only about grief and your poem is about baking a pie, or their anthology is just for Canadian poets and you’re not from Canada. They may be very particular about having 12-point font and a certain filename format, or they want you to send it via email with a certain subject line. They may only accept PDFs or .docx files, or only receive submissions by post/snail mail. They might require you to let them know in the cover letter if you’re simultaneously submitting the poems to other journals.
The quickest way to have poems rejected is to ignore (or overlook) a journal’s nitty-gritty criteria.
6. Write a cover letter.
Keep your cover letter short, respectful, and to the point. Don’t get stalled because you want to write the “perfect” cover letter. Just aim to include:
Any info they’ve specifically requested you include
Gratitude for considering your poems
The titles of the poems in list form
A short bio (third-person, unless they request otherwise)
Here’s an example—a cover letter I wrote this past June:
Hello,
I'd like to submit 5 poems for your review. Each are excerpts from a poetry novel I'm in the process of writing, about the life of a 100-year-old woman:
- She left him
- a hunt's surviving duck
- she asked for stars
- In the factory
- hands:
Bio:
Elisabeth Blair is a poet and editor with an extensive background in music and the visual arts. Her publications include full-length collection because God loves the wasp (Unsolicited Press 2022), two chapbooks—We He She/It (Dancing Girl Press 2016) and without saying (Ethel Press 2020)—and poems in a variety of journals, including Harpur Palate, Feminist Studies, cream city review, and Juked.
Many thanks for considering my poems.
Cheers,
Elisabeth
If you don’t have prior publications, instead of a paragraph-long bio, just write a short descriptive sentence about yourself—some examples:
Elisabeth Blair is a queer writer and dog-parent based in Anemki Wequedong (Thunder Bay, ON).
Elisabeth Blair is a singer of folk music, a writer of poetry, short fiction, and a blog [blog address here] and a stubborn participant in the yearly National Novel Writing Month. She adores sparkling water and the foam on beer.
E. Blair holds a degree in visual art but is secretly a writer.
Those last two are actual bios I used back in 2006.
7. Track your submissions.
Whether you do it through a platform like Duotrope, or with a simple spreadsheet, it’s important to keep track of which poems you sent where.
If you’ve sent poems A, B, and C to six different journals, and journal #4 accepts poem B, you need to tell the other five journals that you’re withdrawing poem B from their consideration.
This is a matter of courtesy—it stops editors and editorial teams from wasting time reading and discussing your poem when it’s no longer available. (Why? Because most journals won’t accept poems that have been previously published elsewhere—they want to be the first-ever venue for your work).
It’s also just plain fun. I visit my spreadsheet to remind myself that I am indeed trying, my words are out there circulating, and there’s a purpose to all the angst and administrative hassle. Even when I’m looking at dozens of rows of rejections, I feel proud for putting myself out there: As long as I keep trying, there will always be hope.
The bottom line: Publishing poems is hard, but you’ll never publish if you don’t try.
Let me know in the comments if you have any questions about the poetry submission process—I’ll be very glad to offer more thoughts. (And soon I’ll write about submitting chapbooks and full-length books).
Elisabeth, you are the coolest. Love this.