How to maximise your chances of getting your poems accepted for publication

The current issue of The New Writer features interviews with three poetry magazine editors, which includes the following statistics:-

• Envoi magazine features 20 – 30 poets each issue, 400 – 500 poets will have submitted poems.
• Other Poetry publishes 200 poems from 3500 – 4000 submitted.

In other words, both poetry magazines only accept around 5% of poems submitted.  This is actually generous as some poetry magazines accept as little as 2% of poets submitted.  So how can you increase your poems’ chances of being accepted in such a tough market?

Read Poetry Magazines

Better still, subscribe to a few.  Although poetry magazines generally don’t favour subscribers when selecting poems for publication, subscribing to as many magazines as you can means that there will be a market for your work.

Reading poetry magazines will also give you an…

one day i begged at the corner of my street
but no one understood:
only a drop of sunshine please,
it costs half a dollar by tram
to get out from the shadow of civilized ghettos,
to renounce my cornflakes with yogurt,
only half a dollar for the 13th hour tram,
even if lonely women are conspicuous in city parks;
some people give tens of dollars to watch movies at the mall
and they are allowed to,
others give hundreds of dollars for iPhones
because they have who to talk to…
but only the heart, decent folks,
the heart mends with sunshine,
otherwise it becomes suspect
of a cancer not discovered yet,
or maybe the human himself grows leaves
in his entrails for always
in the shade of cold concrete
where only the sun costs half a dollar…

Loft

It was a conversion, once a part of the city walls,
the docks where spices were unloaded.
Gangmasters wrote messages on walls
lists of cargoes to be stacked into
ships that pulled up to the wharves,
that are unseen from this high window
with its railings, once anchoring hoists,
now converted to faux-balconies.
The dark boards throw up essence
of cinnamon, mace, nutmeg, clove,
despite a coat of varnish wearing thin in places.

I’ve only rented, can’t afford to buy
the price of these apartments is sky-high.
That’s why this room’s so bare
no new paint or plaster’s sheen is glinting in the light.
I hung this mirror by the name I found
scratched on the back wall.
I think it is “Jim Walters”, not really sure.
Now it has faded like the measure drawn
just at the edge of the mirror’s frame.

Carolyn O’Connell lives in Richmond-on-Thames.  Her…

Genealogy

Ich bin Englanderin
My mother’s great-grandfather had to leave
when they said his family name belonged to the enemy…
Tá mé bean na Fraince
..they spat upon his wife in the street
and hanged her dog on the garden gate.
Je suis irlandaise
My father’s great-grandfather had to leave
when potatoes turned to mush in the ground…
yo soy una mujer alemana
..his wife brought up sixteen children
without asking the parish for a penny.
I am an Englishwoman. With these voices in my genes
I cannot understand why an Englishman must shout
immigrants, go home.

Registers

Monday, and Mrs Hill
calls out the register. You answer loudly,
sit straight up, and see
a big red tick. But when she calls
“Sureya”, there is silence.

Tuesday, and no Sureya. Mrs Hill begins
to call her name, then stops.
And later, in the playground
Sureya’s brother isn’t there.
You see your best friend James, and Marta,
and play with them.

Thursday. Sureya’s birthday.
You drew a card for her: a girl
with yellow hair and long pink dress
with a pink yo-yo, but you haven’t thought
who the girl is. She’s not Sureya
who has black hair and a blue dress.
Sureya spins a yo-yo too, and skips, best in the class.
Mum bought a present for Sureya. She grumbled
that presents are for parties. But Sureya’s poor
and can’t have parties at her house.
Mum bought a necklace with pink beads
and wrapped it up in…

If your poem is struggling and refusing to breathe, here are some things you might try, to revive it and massage its heart:

1) Change the tense. Quite often present tense can make it more immediate.

2) Lose the first stanza: sometimes that’s just gearing up.

3) Look at your ending. Are you trying too hard to point up a moral? Chop it.

4) Look at your order and structure. Sometimes the ending needs to be the start.

5) Check out individual words. Is the one you have used the very, best most accurate word?

6) Consider changing the form. A free verse poem sometimes wants to be a formal poem. I speak from experience. I once had a poorly draft. Then I noticed there were two or three lines of iambic pentameter. The poem was telling me it was a sonnet. And when I listened to it, it wrote…

Part 1.

This post has nothing at all to do with the process of writing or with enjoying writing. But, regardless of whether you enjoy submitting to magazines or not, if you want to get your work published, you will need, at some point, to try and learn and understand as much as you can about the process. And you will need to become organised and methodical if you want to increase your chances of publication.
A few years ago I started to send my work out to magazines.
I was somewhat anxious.

I wondered if any of my poems were any good.  I was in love with one or two. I wondered which magazines to send too. Should aim high or low? Because my mate, Pete, thought my poems were great, perhaps the editor of Shoot the Moon would too? Not that I’d ever seen a copy of Shoot the Moon, or any other poetry magazine at that point.

I…