How to Submit Your Poetry to Magazines
by Lola Haskins
Places that publish poetry can be arranged in tiers. General circulation magazines like The Atlantic and The New Yorker at the top, then prestigious literary magazines like Poetry, American Poetry Review , Georgia Review , and Prairie Schooner, then the hundreds of terrific journals that happen not to circulate widely. At the bottom of the hierarchy would be magazines that publish only local writers. There’s nothing wrong with publishing local writers, by the way. I’m just being descriptive.
When you’re starting out, I think it’s a mistake to submit only to the top magazines because you’re likely to get so discouraged, you’ll give up well before you should. In other words, I think it’s best to begin in the middle. How high in the middle depends on where you think you are with your writing when you’re ready to share it.
How to Find Magazines that Match your Style
Once you’ve decided to try to place your poems in magazines, you should buy The Directory of Little Magazines and Small Publishers or Poet’s Market (Writer’s Market is OK, but Poet’s Market is better because everything in it will be relevant), then go through and highlight the most likely possibilities.
How do you know which those are? Start by highlighting magazines that mention your favorite poets and magazines local to you. To flesh out your list, try checking the acknowledgments page in a book by a poet whose work you admire.
This will get you a preliminary roster of magazines. But don’t, unless you already know them, submit anything yet. First read at least one issue of each one. The odds are that along the way you’ll find some poems you won’t forget, and/or some poets you’ll want to see more of. But whether you do or not, familiarity with a given magazine will help you make smart decisions as to which of your poems its editors might like.
A few years ago, this advice would have been impractical. It would have been too expensive to buy a copy of every magazine on your list, and unless you lived in a big city, you wouldn’t have been able to find many of them in your local library. But now there’s the internet, and you can use it both to shorten and to add to your roster. Shorten because some magazines on your list won’t share your taste, which means you’ll be wasting your breath (a.k.a. postage) submitting to them; and add to, because as you’re searching, you’ll come across magazines that weren’t in Poet’s Market, either because they’re too new or because they’re strictly e-zines and print isn’t how they generate submissions.
If you don’t have a computer, don’t despair; almost all libraries these days have web access. And while you’re at it, if there’s a large, or a university library near you, be sure to check out the current periodicals shelves. Sometimes just holding a magazine in your hand can tell you a lot about it. Besides, you can also, if you like it, browse back issues.
You’ve probably gathered from this that it matters which of your poems you send where. It does. I write in more than one style and I know perfectly well that if I submit some of my more outré poems to, say, Southern Review, I’ll be wasting my time. So I send them to Five AM instead, or to Exquisite Corpse. In other words, I tailor what I send—and so should you—to what I think the editors of a given magazine might be interested in.
Okay, so how do you decide what poems to send out in the first place? Of course, the answer is your best, but how do you know which those are? Well, in the last analysis, you can’t know, but one criterion you might use is to ask yourself, toughly, if there’s any chance that this poem sounds like whomever you’ve been reading lately—because if your work’s derivative, even if it’s well done, a good editor will spot you immediately—“That lilac perfume, I’d know it anywhere!”—and turn you down.
In other words, when you’re figuring out what to submit, pick the poems no one but you could have written. In contests I’ve judged, poems like that jump out at me because, even if they’re a little rough-edged there’s clearly someone home behind them, and that person behind the door makes them stand out among all the beautiful nothings. So, if you send out the poems that you’re technically happy with but that also expose the most of your particular life, you’ll be on the right track.
Once you have your candidates assembled, remember what I said: be careful with your choice of magazines. Think of yourself as a matchmaker. The sulky boy with the inward girl, the salesman with the girl who loves to give parties. And so on. But, and here’s a reality check: just because you like some magazine, it doesn’t follow that they’ll like you. Or at least, maybe not for awhile. Most good journals get backbreaking numbers of submissions, and the competition is heavy. Sometimes too, magazines have to get used to you, so you need to send a few times before they know you’re serious. Or sometimes the particular poems you’ve sent didn’t click. Don’t despair. Maybe something else will. Pay attention to editorship. Some magazines, like Ploughshares, rotate that. And, if a magazine has been consistently rejecting you, stop sending until the editorship changes.
In the real world, submitting your work means sticking your neck out, and since it’s often, even usually, going to get chopped off, you’ll have to keep growing new heads. In other words, you’re going to have to get used to being told (if you take it that way) that you aren’t good enough. That doesn’t stop just because you’ve published a book or two, but it probably hits hardest at the beginning, especially if you see your first round of submissions as a test. If I don’t get something taken within six months, you tell yourself, I must not be any good. When you’ve been at this longer, you’ll realize that whether what you’ve written is good doesn’t depend on other people. Still, rejection’s never easy. It’s ironic, isn’t it, that people who write poetry, who of course must be sensitive on some level or they wouldn’t be writing, are also firmly in the camp of people whose path inevitably includes a lot of disappointment.
Here are a couple of things to think about. First, since choosing among good poems comes down to taste, if you’ve written well, there is probably someone out there who will like what you’re doing. Second, it’s a mistake to keep the wrong kind of score when you send your poems out. When you do finally get something accepted, it’s not 216 (rejections) to 1 (acceptance.) It’s 1 to zero. It’s like a soccer game. When the match is over, no one asks how many shots on goal you took. The only thing that matters is that in the end, you scored
When you send poems to magazines, there are certain things you can do to maximize your chances of being taken seriously. When I was an editor—first of The Devil’s Millhopper and later of The North Florida Poetry Review, it was obvious to me which submissions came from people who knew what they were doing, and which didn’t. So, in that spirit, here’s how to put your best foot forward.
Never send just one because a one-poem submission, unless it’s to an anthology wanting poems about a certain subject, makes it look as if this is the only thing you’ve ever written, and, obviously, if an editor thinks that, he/she is going to be immediately less interested in you. Besides, no one but a beginner would send just one poem so it’s a dead giveaway on the face of it. Three is a good number; two, if one of them is long or is a sequence made up of shorter poems. On the other hand, don’t send a whole sheaf of stuff. We used to get ten or fifteen poems at a time from one rather well-known poet. It made us think that she hadn’t cared enough about us to bother selecting something to send, so she just sent us everything. This was compounded by the fact that the most of the pages of her submission had obviously been folded more than once. Sometimes, they even had coffee stains. Though she wasn’t a bad poet, her whole approach made us tired, and when we were tired, we were reading with less interest than we’d otherwise have had. Another way to put this is that it’s usually best to send only what will go under one stamp, which is three sheets and your return envelope.
When you put your submission together, follow the basic courtesies. Make sure your poems are cleanly typed and readable (no old print cartridges!) and put your name and address on every page. Fold the poems together, not separately. And never send anything which has stains on it (your tear stains over the last rejection, someone may cynically assume—or the coffee you spilled at your writing group) or has obviously been folded before. Editors like to think they’re your first, not your last, choice.
Cover letters are often used to introduce yourself as a writer, so from that point of view if you don’t have a track record, you may decide not to include one. Even though it may earn you courtesy points if you thank the editors for reading your work, it’s rare that the fact that your submission includes only poems and an SASE (self-addressed, stamped envelope) will prejudice anyone against you. If you do send a cover letter, any kind, keep it short. Don’t tell the editor your life history. Don’t explain the punch lines of the poems you’re submitting. Don’t list every group or teacher that’s ever liked your work. Especially, don’t list thirty-three publications in magazines no one has ever heard of. Do, though, say something specific about yourself if you can, such as “My work has appeared in Carolina Quarterly and is forthcoming in The Atlanta Review.”
You might also mention something you liked in the journal you’re sending to. But don’t bluff. A couple of years ago, when I guest-edited for a friend, a submission arrived form a poet who said that while she couldn’t claim to have been a regular reader of my magazine, she’d looked at several back issues and to her surprise found some excellent poems there. I was surprised too since the issue I was responsible for was the very first for this magazine and there were no back issues.
My own cover letters begin with something like “Here are poems.” I used to say “Enclosed are poems for your consideration,” but after a few years, that felt wordy. If you more comfortable approaching things formally though, by all means do so. If the poems belong to a longer sequence or to a particular manuscript, you can say that now. After the “here are poems” sentence, I used to list my books and maybe a couple of my best magazines— like The Atlantic or The Christian Science Monitor. Now, I just mention the title and publisher of my most recent book. Then I thank the editor for his/her time. Thanking the editor is important to me because I really do appreciate that he or she is going at least to look at what I’m sending, and besides, I know from having been an editor myself how much energy it takes to read all the submissions that appear in the mailbox. Finally, I sign the whole thing “Sincerely,” write my name at the end, and tuck the letter inside the poems.
A good job on the cover letter may get you through the first screening, but it won’t always matter. I’ve had my stuff come back with my carefully-composed cover letter still folded in, which gave me the idea that no one ever did look at anything I sent, and that may have been true. Some magazines use screeners who aren’t careful and others just aren’t good with unsolicited submissions, period. The New Yorker in particular is notorious for losing them. Now they seem to be losing them in cyberspace but not much else has changed, so don’t take it personally if you send something to The New Yorker and in return get the silent treatment, as if you’ve offended your lover and he/she isn’t speaking to you.
The one other thing you need to be sure to do when sending to any magazine, is to include your appropriately postaged return envelope (a.k.a. SASE). If you don’t, you’ll never get your work back, and it will be your own fault. I think a legal-size SASE is best. The 8 and a half by 11 ones make you look as if you think you’re too important to be folded, which in turn makes you look silly, and the smaller envelopes makes it look as if you think your poem is a love letter. Not a good idea.
One more thing: never send anything illustrated or otherwise embellished. I judged a contest once, in which one of the entrants had cross-stitched her poems onto what looked like chair covers. I thought it was sweet, but I admit it made me take her work less seriously than I might have, and some people, seeing that violet and green thread, wouldn’t even have read her entry.
When you do start sending your poems out and getting them back, you’ll get an instinct just by picking the envelope up, as to what it contains. If what I get back is thicker than what I sent, it can be a good sign, because it usually means there are permission forms inside. On the other hand, magazines can fox you out on this by sending subscription forms with your rejection—a cheap way for them to advertise but probably not very productive because what are the odds that you’ll send them money when they’ve just told you you’re a loser. If the envelope’s much thinner than it used to be, that can be good too, because it means they’ve kept something. But if it feels exactly the same, I’m steeling myself as I tear the envelope open.
In any case, no matter what I say or what you tell yourself, you’re going to feel a little down when you open that envelope and find your children inside, sent home from school with a printed slip. That’s only natural. The only problem is that unless you live with another artist, your significant other, however wonderful that person is, is sooner or later likely to lose patience with the fact that you’re poor company tonight because three rejections came in the mail you picked up on the way home from work. I used to let bad news in the mail bother me to the point where I’d ruin perfectly good evenings every time I got any, which in those days was more often than not. In fact, after awhile, when I was feeling low for any reason, my husband would ask me, what’s the matter, did you get a rejection? This annoyed me a lot, especially because it was sometimes true. So. If you do go public with your writing, your parent/lover/spouse is going to have to put up with you, so if they get occasionally obnoxious about it, be nice. I know it’s hard, but try.
Here’s some motherly/sisterly advice. Don’t feel guilty that being rejected affects you. It’s just a byproduct of being sensitive, and it’s good you’re sensitive. On the other hand, don’t be unrealistic and expect that your non-artist friends and lovers are going to understand exactly how you feel, because, really, trying to legislate that won’t work, and anyway it isn’t being fair to them.
Here’s how I suggest you handle turndowns so they have minimal impact on you and on the people you care about: Don’t reject that surge of disappointment, maybe even anger, out of hand. Listen to it and when it’s said what it came to say, let it go. Those feelings are part of the territory, just like mesas are parts of the Arizona desert. Besides, it’s a good territory, all things considered. You’re becoming a part of a community bigger than yourself by sending your work out into the world. And keep in mind that the best way to put disappointment to bed is to turn around and send whatever it is right back out. Sooner or later, if your poems are good, someone will take them.
But, be realistic. If you’re sending only to the top magazines and getting only straight rejections back (no notes from the editor) don’t let it go on forever. Try looking through directories, in libraries, etc., for magazines that you like, but which aren’t so famous. Start there and work up. This can prevent you from getting so discouraged you stop submitting altogether. After all, keeping yourself going is a legitimate and important part of the breaking-into-print business.
This material is adapted from Not Feathers Yet: A Beginner’s Guide to the Poetic Life (Backwaters Press). Copyright 2007 by Lola Haskins.