[Allen Tice]

Originally Posted by Stephen Collington

Aaargh. If posting a poem here means rendering it ineligible for publication or prizes elsewhere down the road, then people will simply stop participating. The better the poem, the more the poet will hesitate to share it. That's got it exactly backwards, no?

This is a direct bounce from Golias's important thread "Avoiding Spiders." I apologize for the new thread, but think the question merits that prominence. Also, please look at Maryann Corbett's GT thread "Requests to delete poem threads." (My emphases.)

Quote from Golias:
... In the recent past I've had four poems declined, with apologies, because of their prior appearance online. G/W
Quotes from Maryann Corbett:
...it's also important that you not put the real title of the poem in the title field. If you do, the bots will find that.....
If anyone else's post refers to the poem's real title without protecting it with tags, that too will mess things up....
....And as an example of how long things stay in the cache, consider this. My poem "Rose Catalogue in January" was pruned at whatever time I got the January pruning to work correctly, at least a couple of weeks ago. It still shows up on a Google search.

Please pardon the emphasis below. It may be justified.

There are sure to be Eratosphere members who want to learn which other journals search the net and reject on the basis of Eratosphere trials. I know I am one of them. Would others share their experiences, or at least name the problem publications?

Allen

[Allen Tice]

I am going to be a big noodge. As to rejection because of Eratosphere or other forum posting, there is no way to know unless they decide to tell you. In any given case, the absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.

Originally Posted by Susan McLean

....more and more editors seem to be Googling workshopped poems and then rejecting them if they can find them.

And then this from Janice:

Originally Posted by Janice D. Soderling

I also read recently somewhere about a young poet who had won a contest and googled herself just to see what came up and found that her winning poem had won two other contests under someone else's name. So there are both advantages and disadvantages with these creepy-crawlies....It does help one keep a protective eye on one's work.

Heck, I'd even be willing to pay if things were secure!

Internet publication such as we have here is publication. My wife the lawyer says so.

If one wants to protest or change this pattern of rejection, we need to know who to complain to. Which publications?

If one wants to avoid wasting time and energy, one needs to know who not to submit to. Which publications?

Golias was brave enough to name Poetry. As with a disease, silence does no one any good.

Allen

[Allen Tice]

Listen to Michael (my bold-facing):

Originally Posted by Michael Cantor

Golias - permit me a question. Can you share with us which print journals it was that would not accept your work because it had appeared here? As far as I know, only Poetry takes this approach, and they don't inform people that they googled and found something on the net - they just spit out the usual rejection slip. If there are others with this approach, I would appreciate some advance warning.

Allen

[Allen Tice]

Janice, I appreciate your concern. I truly do. But there needs to be a place for explicit answers to the question I pose.

Best, Allen

[Laura Heidy-Halberstein]

It's especially puzzling to me to find that Golias has had poems apparently googled and rejected since he is one of the few here who posts under an assumed name. The use of an alias should make it much harder for a publication who was interested enough or had enough spare time on their hands to do seach and discard research each and every submitted poem.

As far as I know "Poetry" is one of the few which does not accept previously workshopped poems - and they state so explicitly on their submission page. I would think that if one wanted to submit a poem to them that they would be aware of their distaste for workshopping and either not workshop the poem ahead of time or just not submit it.

But that's just me.

And I'm cranky today.

[Philip Quinlan]

Well, for one - 14by14 explicitly states that it does NOT exclude Erato workshopped poems.

I wonder how many other "mags" make such an explicit declaration?

One could always stick just to those...

PQ

[Golias]

Allen, in response to Michael Cantor's question which you quoted, I did not receive a standard rejection slip. I received a personal letter of explanation signed by Don Share, the associate editor of Poetry. The lead poem I sent them was "Caravel" the sonnet which had been most favorably critiqued by Richard Wilbur in last year's sonnet bakeoff, and which was subsequently published in First Things.. The other poems had been workshopped also, either here or, in one case, at the Gazebo -- but all were declined and included in Don Share's explanation. It was a nice enough letter and I do understand the rationale of their policy. This will be my last online mention of Poetry or any other particular journal in the context of this discussion.

As long as we continue to PUBLISH workshopped poems here we must, I think, expect the better journals (some, not all) to consider it prior publication. Taking the workshop boards, and perhaps the bake-offs private, as has been suggested, sounds like the best and maybe the only solution that will allow poets who like to workshop but also aspire to publication in major print journals to continue workshopping any of their more promising work here. I understand some of the arguments against such a move, and they have weight. If it doesn't happen we must each make our own decisions and take or decline to take our own risks in the matter.


G/W

[Alex Pepple]

I've added a guide on Google indexing protection and the protection code usage in the FAQ system. Simply enter the search term 'google' in the FAQ to bring up the relevant instructions. Note that there are other search terms such as 'protection', 'indexing', etc. that will return these instructions as well, but 'google' is probably the most memorable.


Cheers,
...Alex

[David Rosenthal]

Alex,

Nicely done, and big thanks for all the work on this. I for one deeply appreciate the response to these concerns.

I wonder if you have considered doing the automatic permanent thingy that you have done with the workshop forums on Distinguished Guest, since the Bake-off, Deck the halls, and Master class stuff is all archived there forever. I suppose we don't want to hide all of the great conversations (Frostfest, Women in poetry, etc.) from the rest of the 'net. Meanwhile, it would probably be a pain to go back through those threads and put the tag in on top of every page of the contest threads.

What about this idea: two separate DG forums, one for discussions and symposia-type-stuff, one for bake-offs, contests, and master classes to which people might submit otherwise unpublished work. The latter could be protected from indexing, and the former left alone. It is tough, because I think of all the great discussion that emerged, say from Lee Gurga's responses to people's haiku drafts, or Rhina's DtH comments, or Rose's and Wilbur's sonnet comments, and what valuable resources such discussions could be to folks out on the net looking for insights; while on the other hand, some of us might be less likely to submit unpublished stuff again.

This is especially the case for a master class, in which participants are explicitly seeking critique on unfinished drafts, and in which the critiques themselves provide the launching point for the Master's instructional insights.

I don't know what could or should be done about any of this.

David R.

[Tim Murphy]

Alex,

David's double breasted approach might be a good one. As the former proprietor of DG, let me urge that in Bake-offs and Deck, people submit published work. For emergent writers, maybe DG is the place to be published? Never seen a poet there I wouldn't be proud to stand shoulder to shoulder beside. I can't say that of any periodical. And we've just established that even Poetry won't scotch your submission just because you're at the Sphere. I have just never had an issue with anyone, and let's face it, every editor worth his salt knows what I do here.