I've looked around and can't find a thread on this question, exactly. If there is one, I hope someone will send me there, and if not, I'd love to hear your views.

How do you decide what poems to group (or not) in a submission? I've read advice from various sources, and some of it conflicts.

For example (if the submission guidelines don't say) the standard advice is always to send at least three poems. But Ted Kooser says "I have from time to time submitted just one or two poems if I thought they might be just what that magazine might like."

Another example: some people think the poems grouped should have a unifying principle, so they make a group that could be published together, as some journals like to do. Others think the submission should be varied (within the range of what that journal wants) to increase the chances that something suits.

If you're submitting to a formal-friendly, but not formal-only, journal, how do you decide the balance?

Do you try to keep the same poems together as a submitted set (at least until one of them gets accepted)?

Tell me what works for you, or what hasn't worked. Especially if you are, or have been, an editor!

Maryann

Maryann--

If I were submitting to myself at MM (chapbooks, remember--http://www.modern-metrics.com), I would do the following--

1. Check to see if submissions were being considered.
2. Look at the samples on the web site.
3. Query if I were still unsure about my fit.
4. Submit.

Please note--we're not doing open submissions right now--though the more chappies get bought, the sooner we at least potentially can. If you're an Erato regular and send MM a chapbook ms. full of villanelles, you haven't done your job of researching well enough.

As for submitting to magazines, particularly blindly, it's a crap shoot. The main thing is to just do it and keep doing it. I've gotten stuff into places where I was shooting blind, and not gotten stuff into places where I really thought about what I sent, in what order (strongest to weakest, folded so the type faces outward), etc. got completely blown off. At this point, I look at samples on web sites, read submission guidelines, and just fire the things off. It's the Hegelian principle of quantity into quality where submissions are concerned, I guess.

Quincy

Maryann,
I usually try to submit to journals I know (so that I have some idea of what they publish) and send 3-5 poems. I send the best work I have on hand that I think has any chance of being taken by that journal. Sometimes I save a piece to send to a particular journal that I think it is a good fit for, but I don't usually send it alone. I wait till I have other poems appropriate for that journal. I try to send a mix of material (not all sonnets, for example) and sometimes I include material that I think is a long shot. I have occasionally been surprised to see that that is what is taken.

I don't try to keep a particular batch of poems as a group, unless I think they play off one another particularly well. Instead, I usually will send a different mix next time I send poems out. I try to keep the poems circulating, finding a different place to send them as soon as they come back, unless I have lost confidence in them entirely. I do keep trying a few journals I have never tried before, in an effort to find new markets, but I also try to submit regularly to journals that have accepted my work in the past.

I hope this helps. I floundered a lot when I started submitting, wasting a lot of time sending to places that I didn't know or that never published the kind of things I wrote. I was doing my research, but no one steered me to the right places, and it took me a long time to stumble across them. Eratosphere helped.

Susan

I used to submit five poems. Now it is often one. I know the tastes of my editors after years of work with them. But Maryann, you're not there yet. Follow Susan's advice.

One lesson I've learned is to be selective when submitting your best work.

I have few publication targets, but there's one Canadian competition which I find uniquely attractive. Last year I shortlisted but did not place. However, in putting together my submission, I found that all previously published work was ineligible. In the past I had chosen my best poems for publication without much thought. That made them permanently ineligible for this more meaningful submission.

With the benefit of hindsight, I'd have gone through the following process before submitting:
1. List my target publications or competitions
2. Based on expected difficulty of gaining acceptance and level of satisfaction that would result from being accepted, grade them by level: high, medium, and low.
3. Mark those that don't accept previously published work.
4. List and grade my poems as best, strong and moderate. (Anything below "moderate" is probably not worth submitting.)
5. Map the poems to the targets by level and try to match accordingly when submitting.
6. Pay more attention to this if you have key targets that don't accept previously published work.

John

I quite often send 2 ok poems with 1 offbeat one, hoping that the ed might like something a bit different. When Larkin sent stuff away he used to add a poem just to make the others look good. Such poems were often the ones the ed took.

Heh.

Do you happen to know, Tim, how Larkin reacted to that? Did he change his policy so that his second rate stuff wouldn't keep appearing? Or did he continue to send it for the sheer amusement value of seeing editors accept his worst poems?

Maryann
I try to send magazines poems I think they will like. I rarely send to magazines I've never read before. I tend to send only to magazines which have previously published poems I have enjoyed reading.
I have gathered a fair number of acceptances and rejections. Be ready for the rejections - some editors will warm to your work, others won't.
As for whether to submit varied poems or similar ones - again, it's best to look at the magazine and see what it tends to publish from other people and submit accordingly. As far as getting a balance between formal and free verse - if a magazine accepts both, send the poems you think might fit the magazine and don't worry about the balance.

I'm glad to hear that about Larkin. I think it's almost safe to say that if I EVER throw in a makeweight, that will be the one they take. It raises an interesting point about whether we can see our own work - it is often impossible to see past our own intention/feeling when writing it/effort or lack of it/etc.

And what are editors looking for? I think there are "competition poems" and "magazine poems" as well as things that will play better surrounded by their own kind - i.e., in a book. Journals - or magazines - are a very different proposition from what often gets into books, and I think a lot of one's favourite poems in books would never have made it past a magazine editor. Too long, too difficult, too abstruse, whatever. (Which is not to say that long, complicated pieces never get into magazines! But I think if you read 90% of poems in 90% of magazines there is a "reader-friendly" element, or "hook" which could even be reduced to a "shtick" in the weaker ones.)

And I've long thought that in the National Poetry Competition here in the UK it is often the commended poems which really shine. The winners too often look like compromises.

All that is probably no help to anyone & I'll be branded the bad fairy at the christening, but I'm on no position to say what editors want. They want easy-to-read stuff by well-known poets, I think. I'm off submitting at the moment. Dead in the water.

I once got two ballast poems accepted in one week. The stuff I thought was better got rejected. Murphy's Law, I suppose.

But a note to the Brits in particular, It's really much, much easier to know your market on this side of the Atlantic. The number of publications is much smaller (e.g. in Ireland), as presumably, is the number of people submitting to them. In the U.S., every fleabag university has a literary journal. There are tens of thousands of people with MFAs in poetry. Nothing's really centralized, and relatively few pubs are readily availble--even in Nueva York. My research, when I first started submitting, involved going into the Columbia Library periodicals room and just reading pubs, jotting down the ones where I thought I might have a remote chance of placing something. Generally remote. But unless one does very little besides read litle magazines, there's simply no way one can read one's way through the market.

I'd also have to say that a fair number of my publication successes went through editors I at least vaguely knew. Or who were aware of knowing someone I know. Or something like that.

Quincy

I have another question that may belong on this thread, as well. What if you have two or three poems that are not a sequence, per se, but which you'd really like to have published together because they are related in some way or would complement each other. Is it permissible to stipulate, when submitting, that you are offering them together on a take it or leave it basis, and the editor is not free to cherry pick?

oh, nevermind

[This message has been edited by Rose Kelleher (edited November 19, 2006).]

Rose,

I kind of liked a lot of what you told us not to mind--the main point being that the work is the poet's, and if the publisher doesn't want it, that's the publisher's problem.

But something more basic needs to be said. The chances of being accepted out of the slush are almost nil. Strong submission; weak submission; doesn't matter. I once got a rejection notice back with the words "Thanx for you're [sic.] interest!!!" written on it, clearly by some freshman drone they'd hired (or convinced to volunteer) to axe the slush... and who was perhaps not the best reader for the multi-page, heavily allusive poem I'd sent. Even if you know who the ultimate editor is and what he/she likes, you really don't know all that much about what will happen to your poem when you send it in. So carpet-bomb the fuckers. Who gives a shit?

Quincy

I just got a ride home from choir from Anna, my in-person fellow poet, and we were lamenting together about the crapshoot nature of submissions. We lamented about college literary mag editorial boards, and the situation in which one kid who has a thing about, say, a particular word can by being forceful axe a poem. We lamented about the changing editorships of those boards, so you're always aiming at a moving target. We lamented about pubs that use changing assistant editors, so that what you thought you knew changes with the next issue.

While it's true that there remain a few Rocks of Gibraltar (Lyric, Light, Iambs & Trochees), an awful lot of pubs shift like the sand. So the most one can do, it appears, is try not to get on an editor's bad side at the outset, find out what you can, be thick-skinned (as we've said four hundred times) and keep sending. Until you need a break.

(But about Larkin, I've got to wonder whether "This Be the Verse" was one of those added to make the others look good.
I also wonder who took it.)

Seriously, thanks for all these varied answers, and keep talking if there's more to say.

Maryann

winter: Do you happen to know, Tim, how Larkin reacted to that? - No. I can't even remember where I read it - in a reprinted interview, I'd guess.

Returning to a point Maryann raised - if you send poems that the ed likes, but too few of them, the editor can always ask for more. One of my most depressing rejections was when I was asked to send an extra bunch in, and got as a reply something like "Well, let's just stuck with the original one for now".

>Is it permissible to stipulate, when submitting, that you are offering them together on a take it or leave it basis, and the editor is not free to cherry pick?

The poems belong to you; anything you want to stipulate is permissible. But most editors probably feel that grouping poems in their magazines is their prerogative, and react to such a stipulation the way you'd react to their changing a word in your poem without your permission.

>When Larkin sent stuff away he used to add a poem just to make the others look good. Such poems were often the ones the ed took.
>Do you happen to know, Tim, how Larkin reacted to that?

He complained about it.

I don't see the value (aside from efficiency when carpet bombing) in always sending a minimum number of poems. When guidelines say "3-6 poems" I think 3 is the preferred maximum, but poets can send up to 6 if they really must. I can't imagine an editor turning up a nose at all submissions of 1-2 poems--more likely the fewer poems each get a better read than the poems in a larger submission. The exceptions would be editors of magazines that always publish at least 3 poems of each published poet. It may only mean that I'm not familiar enough with poetry markets, but I can't think of an example in which anyone would want to be published.

The only reason not to send one, I imagine, is that there are doubtless many instances of the following:

Young man breaks up with girlfriend. Goes into catatonic state of depression. While wandering drunkenly through his apartment, chain-smoking and eating microwaved ravioli, the following comes to him:

LOSS

I love you, Charlene,
And my underwear's not clean.
My life is a living hell.
Only you can make me well.

This is, of course, brilliant. Eliot, Frost, Byron? FUCK THEM. This is poetry in its purest, most raw emotional form. He's never written a poem before and probably never will again? WHO CARES? "Loss" is one for the anthologies! (Or poetry.com.) He looks up a local poetry magazine and fires it off.

Submit more than one to indicate you're not that guy.

Quincy

[This message has been edited by Quincy Lehr (edited November 20, 2006).]

Roger, when I am submitting poems that are linked in theme but not a sequence, I often stipulate that the editor take them all.

If the poem itself doesn't indicate that, you've got bigger problems.

I've submitted single poems a few times. In at least two cases I can think of offhand (Snakeskin, TSCR), the poem was accepted. I've also tried that with First Things a few times; never successfully, but I don't think the poems were rejected just because they were submitted as singletons, I think they just weren't the kind of thing the editor was looking for (note to Emily Dickinson: Faith is not, after all, Doubt). I tried it with Poetry once, and got an impersonal Post-it-sized rejection, but what else is new?

Any editor who rejects a submission simply because it contains only one poem is not doing his job and should not be catered to. I suppose there are also editors who reject all poems containing the word "pumpkin," but that's their problem.

I assumed that some editors (especially of better mags) don't want one-hit wonders. They want to publish people they might build up a publishing relationship with, which is why they want to see more poems than they'd ever print. I've no evidence of this though.

Then it's not about the poetry.

Rose, I agree with you, I think, but I wonder if there's not another point of view. If a poet has a distinctive or unusual voice, isn't it possible that we can miss that voice if we've only seen a single poem by that poet, but if we see more of the poet's work, we begin to "get" what the poet sounds like? I have certainly had my appreciation of individual poems expanded to a certain extent by later becoming familiar with more of a poet's work. If you only read one quirky poem by Emily Dickinson, for example, you might not immediately figure out what's going on, but that same poem may speak to you very clearly and beautifully once her voice has become familiar to you. I know it took me years of reading her before I was able to "discover" certain of her poems.

Maybe, too, this relates to my question about submitting thematically related poems, or poems that are not part of an actual sequence but are related to an extent. Two poems may "belong" together in the sense that they complete a bigger picture. E.g., a poem about Mother may go well with a poem by the same poet about Father. In a sense, every poem exists in a vaccum, but that doesn't mean that the reader approaches every reading experience without any sort of context or preparation.

From my tiny experience at choosing subs for the Shit Creek Review and WORM, my feeling about the group of poems issue is this:

For SCR I focussed just on the individual poem and its merits, irrespective of who the author was and what other poems they had sent. I stripped them all of their author names, mixed them up in a new order, gave them an identifying number, sent a text version of this stripped list to Nigel Holt, and put them aside for a while. At more or less the same time I was processing a similar list for WORM - again stripped of author ID.

Then I went back to my sripped SCR list and gave each poem a score 0 - 5 - 10 (= decline - maybe - definitely). Of course I could occasionally remember who sent what, but there were a lot of subs, over 200 poems, and I could rarely be sure; as well, I tried hard to not let that factor influence me. I tried to rank them totally on the merits of the poem. Nigel did the same, only with no idea at all of what belonged to whom, and he sent me his scores. From this it became clear which poems should be in, and the small group of maybes was discussed further between us - as poems, not as works of authors. I'm not saying this was foolproof, but it did make us focus on the poem alone rather than on other issues. It is a watered-down version of the WORM method (which has three editors), which I think has a lot going for it.

Maryann,

Thank you for starting this thread. You expressed an interest in hearing from present or former editors. When I was poetry editor of Edge City Review, I tried to consider every poem individually. I suppose the impact of a given poem can't help being affected by that of its siblings. But much more, it's affected by the cumulative mass of poems (both published poems and submissions) that an editor has read previously. If the poems immediately preceding were tedious, it just MAY be easier to find the next one refreshing, surprising---and vice versa---but in my time as poetry editor, first impressions never held sway because "possible" poems were always reread later; and I was amazed sometimes at how different they seemed the second time.

As for those few (yes, few) authors who revised poems after they were accepted, I didn't mind that, provided they acknowledged that having the revisions accepted was a privilege and not a right. The even fewer who presumed it was a right, impressed me as being insensitive to the labors of editing--especially when it's a labor of love. However, if I had taken a long time getting back to them, I took that into account.

FYI: I haven't been poetry editor of ECR for the past five years or so.

Claudia


[This message has been edited by Claudia Gary Annis (edited November 25, 2006).]