The following announcement appeared on The Accomplished Members a few days ago.

I'm wondering if this means Poetry Magazine has lifted it's refusal to accept poetry which has appeared in any venue on The Internet or if we were wrong in these two recent threads
http://www.ablemuse.com/erato/ubbhtm...ML/002670.html
and http://www.ablemuse.com/erato/ubbhtm...ML/002671.html

about what their guideline regarding "appeared online" and "anywhere, in any form" really meant.

We cannot consider anything that has been previously published or accepted for publication, anywhere, in any form. Work that has appeared online is considered to have been previously published and should not be submitted.
http://www.poetrymagazine.org/about/guidelines.html


Anyone have a clue?



[This message has been edited by Laura Heidy-Halberstein (edited July 30, 2008).]

(See this is "edit" mode -- I've added the code to try to keep this thread hidden)

I've no idea. I certainly don't say hey this is great, because it survived the deep end on my submission letters. Nearly everything I have published since the inception of the deep end has been workshopped there, disappeared from its archives in due course, and no editor has ever raised the issue. We're talking about 150 poems, so this is not a small sample. If any editor ever objects, I'll send the work elsewhere.

Nah, I know that, Tim. Most of do the same.....it's just that there's been such a big deal made of Poetry's policy here and on various other poetry and/or submission sites as well as in Poet's Market, that I was just wondering how others felt about it. As far as I know Poetry's the only magazine which has such a hard and fast rule about it - most other places do not consider workshopping as publishing, and rightly so, if you ask me. (But of course, no one ever does.)

I'm wondering if most people just ignore the submission guideline - knowing that pruning takes place and that all threads are removed over time and trusting that the few remaining editors who DO care aren't out there googling away. I, personally, don't see them as wasting the time - and for what, anyhow?

Does anyone else really think it matters if a poem's been workshopped online and was available for reading for a brief period of time to a small number of people?

Good call, Roger. Though of course, since Tim's original post has been sitting on AM for several days now, the issue is moot. Google will definitely have been by and indexed the page by now. But it's a useful reminder: we should all be careful about cutting and pasting other people's words from one thread or forum to another. I'm sure it doesn't matter in Tim's case, but it might for others.

As for whether your intervention succeeds, that will depend on whether the site was being scanned at the time. If you beat Google's robots to the punch, then yes; otherwise no.

As for the larger question, I think it's a silly policy. Poetry is "well endowed," so they may continue to publish with paper and glue for longer than others, but I suspect that e-zine publishing will indeed be the way of the future. There's still the tricky question of how to make that pay, but I think that the sheer pressure of numbers will eventually drive everyone on line. We are living in a transitional time.

Steve C.

Don't ask, don't tell.

Nemo

A little bit of clarification from the assistant poetry editor at Poetry... .or maybe it just muddies the water even more, I dunno.
http://www.poets.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=11671

I could email Fred, but why? Let sleeping dogs lie. I think underpaid, overworked, harrassed assistant poetry editors have better things to do than punch their way through Google's robots.

Poetry Magazine's poetry or prose publication agreement: Paragraph 5: The author further represents and warrants that the Work has not previously been published, in part or in whole, in any medium in the US or abroad.

My position is that my workshopping here does not constitute publication. That is all of our positions. No problem.

Yes, let sleeping dogs lie. We should assume their policy is the same as everyone else's policy: published means published (or, at least, posted permanently on a website), not discussed in a workshop plus (ultimately) deleted "unarchived". Any other position would be too extreme so ... it's perfectly reasonable to assume their position is reasonable, not extreme.