How Long for Submissions?

This weekend, Becky Tuch posted a question on her LitMag News Substack looking for comments on what it means when a submission is out at a magazine for a longer period of time. I responded with my experience as editor of Poetry South and as a long-time submitter to magazines. I don’t want to reiterate that comement here, but the upshot of the comments seems to be that there’s no way to tell what it means if your submission has been at a magazine for a long, long time. It might be good news (they like it and are still considering it) or it might be bad news (they don’t love it but haven’t sent submissions back yet). No one likes being in limbo, but that’s the reality of submitting to literary magazines.

What we can gather from the comments seems to be that there are so many different magazines, each with their own review process, that no general rules apply to a case like this. Some magazines respond quickly, and some don’t. Writers can consult sites like Duotrope, ChillSubs, or The Submission Grinder to get some insights on the practices of individual magazines, but even then, the sample this data relies on is limited to the users of each platform who actually report their submissions (and the accuracy of those reports). There’s still a lot of guesswork.

Writers can also rely on magazines to tell them, via their websites, what their typical reading period looks like, so they have a more realistic idea of response times. At Poetry South, for instance, we try to indicate that from July through January our response time will likely be very slow. We’re happy to let you submit, but we are busy with production. So a response in six months or even more is not uncommon. But in January, we try to catch up, bringing our response time closer to 1-3 months. If you submit in July, we will try to respond in 1-2 months.

But when are your odds better? When we read that big batch of submissions, starting in January, we are actively looking for good work to fill the magazine. We are selective, since we know we’ll have six more months of submissions, but we also are excited about the good work we find that we know we want to use. We usually accept quite a few pieces right away, mark quite a few more as “maybes,” and keep reading. After working through a month or two of submissions, we’ll likely go back through those “maybes” and accept some more. We’ll also probably return some of them that don’t generate quite as much excitement the second or third time around. And we may save a few for the next round of selections, as we continue to read in the next month’s submissions, etc. We don’t wait until the bitter end to make final decisions, but we also don’t make all decisions on a first read.

If you know our reading habits, then you can know that if you submitted in July and it took six months for a response, this is likely because we didn’t start reading right away. If you submit in January and it takes more than three months, we held onto your work, and someone liked it. Once we get caught up, our typical response time is 1-2 months. If we held onto it longer than that, we like what we see, but we may need to weigh it against other poems that we also like and take a little more time with our decision.

Does every magazine operate like that? Obviously not. But if you research a magazine to see what their typical response time is and what their reading schedule looks like, then you can have a better sense of how to interpret the response you ultimately get. In the end, your submission will either be accepted or it won’t be. The magazine will send you a response, and from that you can judge whether they were interested or whether they are simply behind in their submissions.

I’ve stopped sending to magazines who took forever (over a year) to reply and still returned my submission without a personal note. I’ve submitted again to others whose response indicated they had been very interested in my work. If I feel a magazine is disorganized and doesn’t communicate well about submissions, they may not be worth my time. If I feel a magazine is overwhelmed with more submissions than anyone could possibly handle, I am sympathetic, but I might still decide they’re not worth my time. If it’s a top-tier magazine, though, I might decide it’s worth it if I want to be in that world.

The advice to forget about pending submissions (as long as you keep good records) is probably wise. Tracking your submissions also means occasionally checking to see which have been under consideration for a long, long time. A query might be worthwhile, though Submittable and other platforms at least can show you if your submission is “In Progress.” I wait to query longer if I know the submission hasn’t been lost, and I rarely withdraw a submission unless it gets picked up somewhere else. Because you never know. But I’m not surprised or even too upset when those finally come back to me. As long as I can simultaneously submit the same piece elsehere, it doesn’t hurt me to let a magazine consider my work for as long as they need.

Want to know what that response letter means? You might look it up on the Rejection Wiki to see whether it was a form rejection letter or a more personalized one. Not all magazines are listed here, and not all form letters may be up to date, but it is a good place to start, if you really want to go down that rabbit hole.

My advice is not to dwell too much on returned submissions, but to pay attention when you get a personalized letter so you can submit again soon. Keep your work in circulation at a number of journals, and try to be patient until it comes back to you. Keep track of the magazines that take a long time or that have quick response times, and use that when deciding where and when to submit. But don’t take the response you get too personally. Almost all magazines get thousands of submissions that they can’t accept, and they return far more good work than they can use. That’s just the reality of submitting these days (and it wasn’t ever a lot better). The ease of submitting (and writers’ reliance on simultaneous submissions) means there are a lot more submissions in everyone’s slush pile. But that also means more writers have access to literary magazines, and there’s some really great work being published.

Wordle Strategy Upate

Some time ago, I wrote a post, just for fun, about My Wordle Strategy. At the time, my best streak was 45 in English, and I was doing a Dutch version, called Woordle, and Dordle, plus Quordle in English and Dutch. Today, my streak at the New York Times Wordle has reached 88, and I’ve topped 100 for my Dutch streak. Mostly, this means that I’m pretty consistent to play every day, but it also means I’ve developed some strategies.

It’s not rocket science, and I’m not claiming to be a genius at it or anything, but I do try to think ahead. Take today’s Wordle for instance. To avoid any spoilers, I won’t give away the words I used, but let’s just say that after three tries I had all but one letter correct and in the correct spot. That meant I had three more tries. I could have guessed the correct word on the next try, but after exaining all the letters I had left, I identified four possible words that used one of those letters in the blank spot. Obviously, I had three guesses left, so there was still a chance I could guess wrong each of those times.

So instead of trying to guess the word on the fourth try, I found a word that had three of the letters I had identified. Since I was looking for a consonant, I didn’t care whether the vowel in this word was even in the correct word (it wasn’t). I even allowed myself to use a double-letter combination (which I did) in order to make a valid word with three of the consonants I needed. One of those was in the correct word, but in the wrong place in my guess. But since I knew where that letter needed to go, I was able to guess the correct word on the fifth try. If none of the letters of my fourth try were in the correct word, I would have still had two more guesses — the fourth letter I had identified or possibly a word using a letter I hadn’t thought of.

Sometimes I intentionally guess wrong, just so I can use more letters that I think might be in the right answer. Sometimes I guess wrong so I can find a vowel or rule out letter combinations that might work. I try to think ahead and think in terms of letters, rather than just guessing words because often there are more good guesses than you have turns. It’s a good mental exercise, but ultimately, it’s just a game and it ought to be fun. Keeping a streak going is part of the challenge, but I know that eventually I won’t be able to play the game some day or I will mess up and break my streak, and then I can start all over again.

Happy News

This will be a quick post because I haven’t found time to write in a while and to share a little good news for National Poetry Month. I’m proud to have two poems, “Quarantine” and “Partial Eclipse,” appear in the new issue of Birmingham Poetry Review.

Also, in the last month or so, I’ve been in touch with a music group out of Greece, called StarWound. They reached out to me, actually, with a proposal to set one of my poems to music. They liked “Black Racer” that was in Delta Poetry Review last summer. Given their theme, I’ve sent them a couple of other poems to consider, so we’ll see what happens.

We’ve been in talks about bringing them to The W next October. We now have a date for their concert (tentatively Oct. 25, pending their other travel plans), and we’ll begin collaborating next month. Meanwhile, StarWound is in Germany recording their third album. They will also work with student poets and musicians for the day they’re on campus, which should be great.

Meet me at #AWP23

Next week, I’ll be headed to Seattle for the annual AWP conference. If you don’t know that acronym, it’s the Association of Writers’ and Writing Programs, an annual gathering of thousands (often over 10,000) writers, teachers, publishers, etc. Virtually everyone is a writer, but we all wear a number of hats.

I’ll spend most of my days at the table for Poetry South, Ponder Review, and Mississippi University for Women’s MFA program, talking to people about what we do. We’ll have brochures, sample copies of the magazine, swag, and candy if I can get out to buy some this weekend and fit it in my checked luggage.

I always save room to carry some magazines there in my luggage, along with many of the other things we give away. That way, I’ll have room to bring home some swag as well. The best advice I’ve heard about AWP is to wear comfortable shoes and save room in your bags for the books and magazines you want to carry home, which is great advice, but do beware of baggage weight restrictions for your return flight! Come get Ponder Review or Poetry South first, in other words!

I always love the conversations I have at our book table the most. Yes, I will get away for a panel or two — thanks to our graduate students who will take over when I need a break! — and I will wander the book fair myself as well. But if you’re also traveling to Seattle this week and want to stop by to say hi, you can probably find me at T1221. I’d love to talk about our program, our magazines, A Writer’s Craft, or my latest poetry projects — and yes, I’d also love to hear about your latest projects or whatever else you have going on.

Did you know that I teach a class in AWP? It’s one option for our Short Residency in the low-res MFA program. We have been studying the schedule, pouring over off-site events, comparing notes, polishing our elevator pitches, and this week, four of my students (Seattle is a long trip for most of us) and I will be at the conference. I’m there to support them and to take most of the hours at our table, and the students will spend their time going to panels, roaming the book fair, and also taking their shifts at our table, so if you want to meet some of our grad students, ask me when they’re planning to be there. I also know of at least 3 of our alumni who will be at the conference, and I’m sure they will stop by and maybe even pull up a chair for awhile.

This year, I’ll also have some flyers for a special issue of Delta Poetry Review that my friend Susan Swartwout is guest-editing. She won’t be at the conference, and I’m happy to help her get out the news about the call, so ask me about it, too!

AWP can be an intimidating place — what place wouldn’t be intimidating when 7,000 – 14,000 writers descend on it. I like to remember that all of the “important writers” mus feel equally overwhelmed, or even if they don’t feel that way now, they did the first time they were at AWP. I’ve been going so many times that it hardly phases me anymore. I’m used to being part of that flow, and I try not to take myself or anyone else too seriously, but it is a great place to catch up with old friends and to make new ones. It’s also a great place to make connections and learn a few things. Taken with a healthy grain of salt, AWP is invigorating and inspirational. If you think you have to conquer AWP, you will more than likely leave disappointed, but if you take it for what it is and accept whatever experience you have, then you will undoubtely leave rewarded.

The only way to truly win at #AWP23 is to stop by table T1221 and talk to us about our magazines and our program. If you haven’t done that, then you lose; if you have, then no matter what happens, you will win in my eyes. Of course, I’m joking, but I do hope you’ll find us and stop by for a moment.

Submission Etiquette and Tiered Submissions

I had an email exchange with a student the other day about magazine submissions, and I thought that it would be good to come back to here. My student’s had the good fortune of being accepted at a small, student-run publication with a small distribution, and it caused her a bit of a dilemma, since the same submission was still out at a number of other journals.

The etiquette for simultaneous submissions is to let the first magazine who accepts your work have it, and to withdraw it from other places where you’ve submitted immediately. Unless you have serious qualms about the magazine that accepted your work, that is what you should always do. For my sutdent, this is a lesson that you should research magazines well before submitting and send to ones that are of similar caliber, so you don’t have any qualms about an acceptance when it comes.  

To be frank, though, my student’s odds of getting this piece accepted at most of the other magazines she sent to aren’t that great, so she shouldn’t feel bad about it. I haven’t read her submission, so this comment is no reflection on her or her writing. Top magazines can take a long time to turn you down, or they might accept the same piece eventually, but you’ll never know because you need to make a decision about the acceptance right away. The more well-known a magazine is, the more submissions they will receive, so the harder it is to get accepted, and the odds of getting the same piece selected by two different places are always going to be slim.

That’s no reason not to submit to top journal, but it can be a good reason to rank the places you’d like to submit and then send the same piece to places with similar rankings first. This is often called tiered submissions. Start with the magazines you think are a good fit for your piece and that you would die to get into. Then if none of them accept your submission, move on to the next level of magazines that you’d love to get your work in. Eventually move on to those smaller, quirky magazines that you’d be proud to be in but aren’t top on your list.

If you do want to withdraw a submission from a magazine after it’s been accepted, you need to do that immediately and don’t wait for someone else to accept it, which would be incredibly bad form. Withdrawing after acceptance is bad enough, but you should never wait to do that, and I would only withdraw my work after it was accepted if there was something in their terms that I couldn’t agree to, which rarely happens. You should have a good idea of a magazine’s terms and of the magazine itself so that you’re willing to see your work published wherever it gets accepted first.

Once a piece has been accepted by one magazine, you should always withdraw it from everywhere else. If you submit poems or flash and have multiple titles in one submission, it is okay to inform the magazine which title you’re withdrawing and ask them to keep considering the rest if they allow that. If you submit fiction or CNF, then you will likely need to withdraw the whole submission. Maybe the magazine will allow you to submit something else, if their deadline hasn’t expired, though your submission will probably move to the bottom of their pile. Occasionally, when you withdraw a piece, the magazine will ask if you have something else they could consider, though simultaneous submissions have become so ubiquitous and withdrawals so common, that that doesn’t happen very often anymore.

Using tiered submissions sounds good, but can also be a collossal waste of time. If you always send to the top journals first, that’s one or two rounds of submitting where you have very poor odds of getting in. That’s why I would suggest a tiered submission practice that is also targeted to the specific works in the submission packet. In other words, I consider where I think are the best places to send each packet and start there. I want each place I submit to be roughly equal in terms of how I will feel if my submission gets accepted, but I don’t always start at the top of my list of magazines. Some submissions are just more appropriate for that quirky little ‘zine that I want to support with my writing. Others seem to be more appropriate for a more mainstream audience.

And of course, the reality of submitting is that magazines have different reading periods and deadlines, so you can’t always send to your top magazines all at once. You will likely send to a mix of places that have open reading periods. Just make sure that you will be happy enough with any magazine that you won’t regret it if their acceptance comes first.

It’s never wise to sell yourself short, but it’s also unwise to always shoot for the moon. Be thoughtful about when, where, and how you submit, and you will always be thrilled (and rarely have regrets) when your work is accepted.

Do Your Research Before Submitting

Today I had another valuable reminder of the necessity of doing diligent research before submigging your writing, and of trusting your instincts. Becky Tuch, in her invaluable Lit Mag News newsletter and Substack, wrote about her research into C&R Press, which appears to have some shady business practices, along with Steel Toe Books, Fjords Review, PANK Magazine, American Poetry Journal, who all seem to be run by the same three people under a few different names. These publishers charge fees for submissions (not unheard of and not always a bad sign), take years to respond, and have been accused of offering dubious editing or other services.

I’ll admit that I’ve sent a manuscript to a C&R Press contest, though I’m glad to see that even Becky Tuch is only now finding out about some of their practices. When I submitted, back in 2020, I doubt I could have found out that they weren’t legit, but now that seems to be the consensus that is building. My first clue was that it took them over a year to respond to my submission and in the meantime, they kept sending me announcements of their next prize. On its own, that’s not enough to say they are definitely a scam, but it did give me pause, and I decided not to send again. Now I’m glad that I trusted my instincts, and didn’t waste any more time or money on them.

Becky Tuch cites comments on the Writer Beware blog for helping her tease out who was who at these presses and magazines and trace how they the publishers changed hands or the names of the players shifted. I recommend Writer Beware as a great resource for those who want to research publishers. Another good resource that Tuch mentions is Authors Publish, which has published a list of publishers that charge contest fees (which again, is not that unusual).

Try to keep up with industry news and search on any publisher you want to submit to, looking for potential issues. Even some of the lists of good publishers, like what you can find at CLMP or Poets & Writers, New Pages, or Reedsy can be wrong (they can’t know about everything). Ultimately, you may pay a contest fee or two (or more) for one you later realize wasn’t legit, but trust your instincts. If something looks fishy, it probably is. And even if it isn’t, you’ll be happier if you go with someone you have confidence in than if you take a risk on a deal that sounds too good to be true or where there are unexpected fees.

How to Write a Pantoum

Lately, I’ve been challenging myself to write more formal poetry. Not a lot, mind you, but I’ve tried out a couple of forms and with some success. Awhile back, I described writing a ghazal, and I thought I’d do the same for the pantoum.

This is a form that has stymied me for awhile, yet it is deceptively simple. In English, the lines often don’t rhyme, though in the original Malay form, they did (and I believe there were many more words with rhyming endings to draw on, so rhyme was less pronounced). The form does use repetition of whole lines, often with slight variation, and follows the pattern that the second and fourth line of each quatrain are repeated as the first and third lines of the next. That sounds easy enough, but it’s a little more complicated in practice.

I wanted to follow the original form and start with a quatrain made up of two couplets. Mathematically, that makes sense. The first couplet doesn’t have to be one complete sentence, but I didn’t want two write a couplet where each line was its own sentence. I went for a two-line sentence, where the second line could be the start of a new sentence (thinking ahead to stanza 2). I did the same for the second couplet of the first stanza. Because I had been planning ahead, it wasn’t two hard to start with lines 2 and 4 from stanza 1 as lines 1 and 3 of stanze two, and then add new lines to complete the couplets.

I don’t want to publish the full poem on my blog because I’d like to publish it in a magazine one day, but I know that talking about numbered lines gets pretty vague and hard to follow after awhile, so let me give you the first two stanzas as an example.

     The heavy, deadly scent of nightshade, hangs
     musky-sweet like the smell of the day’s first rain.
     It pervades the hedgerow where we pull invasive
     weeds, bright purple flowers with yellow stamens.

     Musky-sweet like the smell of the day’s first rain,
     the August afternoon hovers in the air, as my love
     weeds bright purple flowers with yellow stamens,
     deemed deadly poisonous, yet eerily beautiful.

You can see that in the second stanza, I chose to let the sentence flow through the entire stanza instead of keeping two distinct couplet sentences. You’ll also notice how the meaning shifts. The smell is now the smell of the afternoon, and “weeds” is no longer a plural noun, but becomes a singular verb for “my love.” This transformation of the meaning of words as the lines are recombined with others is something I wanted to consciously attempt. Pure repetition gets old, but repetition with some variation, even if the words themselves don’t change, adds meaning.

But this is where I got stuck for awhile. Planning ahead for the third stanza wasn’t really possible. I liked stanza two, but wasn’t sure how to connect “my love” and “deadly poisonous.” Nor did I really know what this poem was trying to say.

Incidentally, that is one of the joys of writing poems in form. They can be deliciously unpredictable. It is hard enough to decide where to start, let alone to predetermine where they are going to end. So I saw this as a good challenge, but one that took me weeks to figure out. I won’t claim that I came back to this poem every day during that time, but I did look at it periodically while working on other poems, and nearly got to the point where I thought I would never finish it. Then the insight hit me of a possible solution.

Rather than focusing on “my love,” I let the August afternoon come to the fore, which allowed me to let “my love” become “my love / for this place” and not a person. The deadly poison could still refer back to nightshade, though to mix things up, I focused on the dark berries of the plant, whereas before I had focused on the flowers.

Stanza three is a little more like the traditional pantoum in that the two couplets are not thematically very related. That was a quality of the pantoum that I had broken a bit by allowing myself one sentence for stanze two. Stanza three again had two sentences, and the connection between them was just the place and the plant and the memory of pulling weeds.

Incidentally, I’ve seen different varieties of nightshade. The ones we have in Mississippi are pretty, but don’t have the very strong, pungeant odor of the ones we pulled at my mother’s in Iowa. Those can overwhelm you, and they are very invasive, so we have to throw them in the garbage, not the compost. So if you don’t share my association with the smell, count yourself lucky!

Back to the form, though. I wanted to follow another convention of the form where the pantoum ends with a final stanza that includes lines 2 and 4 of the previous stanza as lines 1 and 3, following the pattern we’ve established, but lines 2 and 4 of the final stanza are lines 1 and 3 from stanza 1.

Sometimes you see the pattern reversed in the final stanza, so line 3 of stanza 1 becomes line 2 of the final stanza, and line 1 becomes the final line of the poem. I chose not to do it that way, but to keep the order from stanza 1 and have line 3 of the first stanza become the final line of the poem. If you look back at my example, you’ll see that this presents a problem, since line 3 would not be the end of a sentence. I allowed myself a slight variation on that line, changing “it pervades” to “pervading” and “we pull invasive” to “we seem invasive,” which allowed the sentence to end and also makes us more like the weeds.

I’m reasonably happy with the way the poem has turned out, though we’ll see if it continues to undergo revisions before it gets published. I’m mostly happy I got past that hurdle of stanza three, and that the poem took some unexpected turns on the way to its conclusion. I think if I write another pantoum, I will give myself a few more stanzas to get to the ending and allow it to wander even further. I’m intrigued by the notion that the couplets in each half of the stanza do not have to be thematically related (like in the ghazal) and the form is what holds them together. This could lead to a wider-ranging poem, though it may take me a few more tries before I let loose and give free reign to the form.

How to Write Your Third-Person Bio

This ought to be self-explanatory, but I’m always surprised at the number of submitters to Poetry South who either ignore the bio that we request or don’t write it in third person. There are times when I simply don’t read a submission if it doesn’t have a bio because I don’t want to have to ask for one later. If I do read it, your submission had better be fantastic because I’m less likely to vote for it if your bio isn’t there or if it doesn’t follow our guidelines.

Start with your name. Most magazines will use the bio in contributors’ notes and want to list them alphabetically. Though we can edit your bio to put your name first, we’d rather not. Start with your first name and end with your last name and or anything that should follow like “Jr.” list your name the same way you want your name to appear on your work and in the table of contents. If you write under a pseudonym, use that name here.

Pretend you’re someone else writing about you, and use he, she or they to refer to yourself, not I. It’s good to say something interesting about yourself, but you don’t have to get too personal. Maybe mention what you do for a living or a hobby or where you’re from. It’s fine to mention family or pets if you are comfortable with that. It’s also fine to mention if this is your first publication or if you are involved in any literary events.

Then list recent publications. Just don’t list every place you’ve ever published, and if you have more than a few books, you might want to only mention two or three, depending on the length of the titles. I like mentioning other magazines I’ve published in recently because I like to read about those in others’ bios. It’s a great way to learn about cool new or unusual places to publish. But a long list will just get ignored, or even more likely, edited down.

Don’t bother mentioning your Pushcart or Best of the Net nominations because so many writers have those. Do mention if you’ve won an award or been a finalist, especially if it’s a recent accomplishment. If you have a lot of awards, maybe just list a couple. This a bio, not your cv.

Stay within the guidelines. At Poetry South, we want a bio of 80 words or less. We’d probably like at least 30 words from everyone, but if you go over 80, we’ll edit it down, and if you go way over 80, we probably won’t accept your submission. Is that harsh? Maybe, but that’s the reality at most magazines.

Speaking of guidelines, some magazines will tell you what kind of bio they want. If they request a funny bio or a quirky one, then do your best to comply. They probably don’t want a list of other magazines and awards. If they don’t tell you what to write, then these suggestions will help you write one that looks professional.

Don’t stress too much about your bio, though. I don’t think anyone has been accepted solely on what they say in a bio, though they might have been declined because their bio was too wordy, too pretentious, or nonexistent. Just follow the magazine’s guidelines, be yourself, and know that we probably want your bio up front because we don’t want to ask for it later. It won’t be the biggest factor in our decision unless you don’t include it, or you ignore our guidelines.

Cover Letter Advice

Since we’re talking about submitting to magazines, let’s talk cover letters for a moment. As I said the other day, I don’t know that they help all that much, but the can hurt, so while I wouldn’t advise spending too much time trying to get it just right, I also would advise taking enough care to avoid some of the obvious pitfalls.

Many magazines still require or request them, but some do not, so my best first advice is to follow the magazine’s guidelines when submitting. If they don’t want a cover letter, then don’t send one. If they provide a cover letter field in their submission portal, then include a brief cover letter unless they say it is optional, in which case it really is up to you.

Unless the guidelines say otherwise, don’t include the cover letter in the file you submit. People do this all the time, and I try to ignore it, but it’s annoying. Many magazines want to read submissions blind, and even if we don’t, we usually don’t want to read the cover letter with the submission. We may read it first or we may read it last, but we want to see the poems (or fiction, etc.) by themselves. In part, this is because we will take the file of any submission we accept, and we will import that into the file we use to create our magazine. We won’t publish your cover letter, so we don’t want it in that file.

If the guidelines say to put it in the file, then follow those guidelines, of course — everyone has their own way of working, but typically the cover letter is separate.

In an old-fashioned postal submission, a cover letter was always a separate sheet, attached with a paper clip to the submission. It could be easily removed as a record of the submission, which would then be circulated among the editors. I suppose that’s why it’s called a cover letter. It listed the titles submitted, the name of the submitter, and the address. Those are all included in an electronic submission somehow, so cover letters aren’t as important as they once were.

The next best advice I can give is to keep your cover letter reasonably brief: no longer than my longest paragraph above, and that’s probably pushing it. You will not impress anyone with a long cover letter. You will distract them from getting to your poems or story, etc. Make every word count, but keep it short and to the point.

Have you actually read the magazine? If so, then it’s fine to mention something specific about it. But don’t pretend you read it when you haven’t. That becomes painfully obvious. Avoid phrases like “I love your magazine” unless followed by something that shows you know what magazine you’re submitting to. Flattery may not get you anywhere but false flattery gets you nowhere, and fast.

Don’t list every publication you’ve ever had, and don’t try too hard to impress with your publications. I’m of the mind that it can be a good idea to list a few recent publications, but if you sound like you’re bragging, you could turn an editor off. Be modest, but tell about who you are. Often, I don’t list publications at all, but I’ll tell a little about myself and maybe say something about the magazine. However, when reading cover letters, if I see a short list of publications, I don’t mind, and it can get my interest, especially if they are similar to mine.

If you’ve never published or if you only have a few publication credits, don’t feel embarrassed by that fact. It’s fine to mention that this would be your first publication or that you are in high school or college or are fairly new at publishing. Editors like to support new writers, and we also like to publish people who have good credentials. We’re looking for a good mix of seasoned and fresh voices. We often like to know a little bit about where someone is submitting from or what they do for a living. It won’t get your work accepted, but it does make you seem human and may add a little context to what we read, if we read your cover letter first, not last.

That’s really all you have to do. Follow our guidelines and act like a real human being. Don’t try too hard to impress, just be yourself and then let your submission do most of the talking. If we ask for anything specific, be sure to give us that, but otherwise just let us get on to reading your work.

Of course, a cover letter can be too brief. I still remember one of the worst cover letters I ever got. All it said was something like, “I hope you like my poems. If not, you’re an idiot.” I laughed out loud when I read it, but I still didn’t accept those poems. I might have, but they weren’t that great.

On that note, you should probably avoid humor in a cover letter unless you know the editors well enough to know it will work. And don’t be too personal, unless you know the editors very well. Keep it cordial, keep it professional, and keep it brief. Remember that the main thing the editor should care about is your submission.

Letter to a Young Poet

The other day, I received an email from a poet, I don’t really know his age, asking about what he could do to get his work published. From his message, I gathered he was submitting to magazines, but hadn’t been accepted yet, or hadn’t been accepted much. I thought I could use that as an opportunity to put together a blog post with some advice on publishing, and that I could allude to Rainer Maria Rilke’s book Letters to a Young Poet in my title. I also borrow some of Rilke’s advice in the end.

The first bit of advice I always give to poets who haven’t been published is to be patient. It takes time and perseverance to get your work seen by a magazine. As you know, magazines receive many, many more poems than they can possibly publish. The acceptance rate at most magazines is under 5%, and for some of the most well-established magazines, it is less than 1%. Poetry South, receives around a thousand submissions per year, maybe more. Since we only accept 4 poems at a time, that’s well over 4,000 poems. We aim to publish about 100 pages of poems per year. Some poems are more than one page, so there will be less than 100 poems in the issue, but let’s stick with 100 to keep the math simple. Each poem has a 1% chance of being accepted. If you send four poems, you increase your odds to 4% that one of them could be the one we pick. Of course, we do sometimes choose more than one poem by the same poet, but your odds per submission and per poem remain about the same.

Now let’s think about that. What are the chances that 96% of our submissions are not as good as your poems? Realistically, even for poets who’ve been around for quite awhile and are writing at the top of their game, there’s no way that their poems will be that much better than 96% of all the other submissions. You see that editors have to make a judgement call that is incredibly difficult. And you see that the decision has less to do with the quality of your poems, so you shouldn’t take a returned manuscript personally. I don’t like to call them ‘rejected poems.’ They simply weren’t chosen. Your poems may have been better than 50% or better than 80% of other submissions and still not have made the final cut or even the initial cut. As hard as it is to believe, you have to realize it usually isn’t about you at all.

It’s not just a numbers game, either. If you consider the odds, it is probably true that if you submit your work to enough magazines over time, eventually one of your poems will get accepted. Of course, quality does matter, so you could be submitting work that is consistently in the bottom 50% of submissions all of that time and never get an acceptance unless you send to magazines that really don’t care — are there any of those? Would you want to be in them? So how can you increase your odds and ensure you’re in the top 50% of submissions or higher? My best answer is to do your research.

This will help you in many ways. Not only can you get a better sense of what poetry editors are interested in today, but you will also learn that there are many different kinds of magazines and many different kinds of editors, and that they are looking for many different kinds of poetry when they read submissions.  Poetry South doesn’t have one kind of poem that we want to see, but there some kinds of poems that we are a lot less likely to accept than others. We might surprise you, or we might surprise ourselves, but if you read our magazine (and back issues are available online for free), you’ll get a better sense of our aesthetic. If you do that with many magazines, you’ll also begin to develop your own aesthetic, and you’ll start to identify the magazines that align well with your aesthetic and are the places where you want to submit. 

Then you’ll still need to get your poems to the right person at the right time, and there’s only so much you can control about that. You can’t tell who will read your work, and you can’t tell when they will read it, but you can influence that by choosing when to submit. Keep track of each magazine’s deadlines, and try not to submit right at the final bell or your poems will be there along with everyone else’s who submit at the last minute. That’s my best general advice about when to submit (early to the middle of the submission period), but it does sometimes work to submit at the deadline, so I wouldn’t avoid that entirely. Just know that you may have to be luckier to get accepted if you do. Yes, luck plays a part, which again is why you can’t take a returned poem personally.

It will take many, many submissions to get accepted—or maybe it won’t. I’ve had some poems accepted by the first place I sent them, and others, that I felt were just as good or better, returned by a dozen or more magazines before they found a home. A few of my favorite poems were never published until I put them in a book, at which point I stop sending them to magazines unless the magazine accepts previously published work. So never give up. Keep looking for new places to send your work that you think will be a good home for it, then send it at the right time, and hope for the best. I have a couple of recent blog posts that might help with this and provide some links to resources.

Besides researching and finding the best places to send your poems, of course, you should also take time on crafting your submission. Make sure to proofread it carefully. There’s nothing like a typo to get an editor to move on to the next submission. That may seem harsh, but when you have hundreds of poems to read in a night, there’s really no point in reading past a glaring mistake. There is such a thing as poetic license, but it doesn’t extend to misspelled words or misplaced commas, unless those are clearly intentional. Send clean, clean copy. Proofread multiple times and maybe get someone else to look at it who might see something you overlook because you’ve read it a dozen times. Also make sure to craft a submission for the magazine you’re submitting to. Choose poems that go together and poems that you think are a good fit for that magazine.

You asked about cover letters. I’m of the opinion that they really can’t help you much, but they can hurt. So don’t sound like a jerk and don’t sound pompous or egotistical. It’s fine to list some prior publications (don’t list them all if you have a lot), but there’s really no need to impress. Let your poems do that. Say one or two things about yourself if they might be interesting. Keep your cover letter brief, and keep it professional.

Don’t send the same cover letter to every magazine — or if you do, then keep it very generic and only about yourself, not the magazine. If you do say something nice about the magazine (which is common advice, though I don’t know how helpful it really is), then name the magazine you’re submitting to, and maybe say something specific about a poem or about an issue you’ve read. Nothing sounds more disingenuous than a sentence like “I’ve been reading your magazine for years.” Unless I know your name from our subscription list, I will believe you say that to all the magazines, and it will definitely turn me off. I’d rather you didn’t say anything than that you sound too generic if you’re going to give us a compliment.

Do follow the magazine’s guidelines. At Poetry South we ask you to include a short bio written in third person. If you don’t do that, you’ve just made it twice as hard to get accepted. If your bio isn’t short, you’ve made it three times as hard to get accepted, because I’d rather ask for a bio later than edit one that I know is too long. Read contributors’ notes in the magazines you submit to so you’ll know how they should sound. Every magazine has their guidelines and each one is a little different. They may seem arbitrary to you, but for the magazine they are important and they keep the system running smoothly — remember, we’re all overworked and usually not paid, so we need things to work the way that works for us.

Finally, you wanted to know what you could do to improve your poetry so it would be more acceptable. I will borrow Rainer Maria Rilke’s advice from his Letters to a Young Poet, and tell you to search within yourself for your answer. Rilke’s letters might not be bad to read either, but I would say you could start with what moves you in a poem and explore what you want a poem to do. Then weigh this against the poems you read in the magazines you research (or read current books of poetry). What other poets move you, and how do they do what they do in their poems.

Don’t just try to copy other poets, but allow those other poets to challenge you, either to write like them (but in your way) or to write differently but in response to what they are writing. You don’t have to like or even admire every ‘famous poet’ (an oxymoron if I ever heard one), but you should find the kinds of poets that you respond to, learn from them and challenge them. And learn about where they have published (acknowledgements pages and contributors’ notes can be invaluable) so you find the places that might be receptive to your work.

A graduate degree (MA, MFA, PhD in writing or literature) can help you along this path, but isn’t absolutely necessary unless you want to teach. Writing workshops, festivals, readings, open mics, or other venues can also help you connect with a writing community. The more connected you are, the more opportunities you will find for getting your work out there. And the more connected you are, the more you will be challenged to improve your writing, and if you are challenged by people you admire and respect, then it won’t feel like someone telling you what to do. It will feel like the natural evolution of your voice.

As long as you keep reading, writing, and growing as a writer, then if you keep submitting your work to magazines and keep looking for the magazines that will be receptive to your work, you will get published. It is only a matter of time, and of putting in the effort.