Sunday, April 03, 2005
Irons in the Fire
Although the true pleasure of poetry for me is in the reading and writing, I also want to share it with as many people as possible (life goal: every English-speaking person on the planet), so I also find many aspects of the publication and promotion of poetry very interesting. Today I'm going to discuss submissions to journals.
It's not so much that I take great pleasure in the slog that is sending out poems for journal publication, but that the process of reading new journals to discover places that would fit my work can be a rewarding experience, and simply tracking my submission results, response times, and so on in a database taps into the mathematical side of me, which doesn't get enough exercise these days. (I was really good at math in high school, and actually started as a computer science major in college.)
Right now I have submissions out at about 25 journals. That's nearly two years worth of poems (minus the already-published and the drafts that are still waiting to become good), and much of it is simultaneous submissions. I'm not Suarezing or Lyfshinning (pick your favorite) either in terms of number of poems I crank out or number of places I send each poem. The journals where I have work submitted range in prominence from Shenandoah all the way to a new literary magazine at Western State College in Gunnison that, as far as I know, doesn't have a name yet (unless they really are going to call it WSCLM).
My favorite submission resources, more or less in order:
It's not so much that I take great pleasure in the slog that is sending out poems for journal publication, but that the process of reading new journals to discover places that would fit my work can be a rewarding experience, and simply tracking my submission results, response times, and so on in a database taps into the mathematical side of me, which doesn't get enough exercise these days. (I was really good at math in high school, and actually started as a computer science major in college.)
Right now I have submissions out at about 25 journals. That's nearly two years worth of poems (minus the already-published and the drafts that are still waiting to become good), and much of it is simultaneous submissions. I'm not Suarezing or Lyfshinning (pick your favorite) either in terms of number of poems I crank out or number of places I send each poem. The journals where I have work submitted range in prominence from Shenandoah all the way to a new literary magazine at Western State College in Gunnison that, as far as I know, doesn't have a name yet (unless they really are going to call it WSCLM).
My favorite submission resources, more or less in order:
- My print journal subscriptions. See the resources page of Sturgeon's Law.
- My library of journal website bookmarks, categorized in a number of ways--I've become leery about submitting anyplace that has no web presence or reliable e-mail contact. At some point, maybe I'll get into the categories I use.
- Jeffery Bahr's great site, especially the Submission Response Time Database and the Approximate Print Journal Ranking System.
- Poetry Daily and Verse Daily (it's instructive to see which poems I like come from which journals).
- The Writer's Directory, though I understand it's not being updated anymore.
- And finally, as a last resort, Poet's Market and Dust Books' Directory of Poetry Publishers.
