[Maryann Corbett]

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

[Quincy Lehr]

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

[Susan McLean]

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

[Tim Murphy]

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.

[John Beaton]

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

[Tim Love]

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.

[winter]

Originally posted by Tim Love:
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.

[Katy Evans-Bush]

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.

[Quincy Lehr]

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

[Roger Slater]

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?