Poem Submissions

I’m currently in the midst of waiting for replies from PhD programs in creative writing, and I’m also in a (short) stretch of time with my teaching where I can coast on lesson plans for a day or two. So today, instead of mindlessly checking gradcafe, or the new creative writing PhD blog, or reading online articles I decided to do something I haven’t done in a long time—send out poetry submissions.

I used to do this regularly, sitting down on a Friday afternoon and printing out poems, addressing envelopes, stuffing envelopes, then dropping them off at the post office. Initially, I even enjoyed receiving rejections and took pleasure in sticking them on a nail in my office, a practice I stole from Stephen King’s memoir On Writing.

At some point though, I was worn down by the deluge of generic rejection slips in familiarly creased SASE envelopes and I started acting like Anne Bradstreet. One afternoon, when I saw the mailman drop another SASE in my mailbox I opened the door, struck a dramatic pose, and shouted, “I cast thee by as one unfit for light,/ The visage was so irksome in my sight!” Okay, I didn’t do that. And Bradstreet wrote that about her published poetry (false modesty) and not a rejection slip (much less cool).

Anyway, I told myself I’d work on writing better poetry before I invested time in sending it out the door again, and that was probably a year or so ago (Occasionally I’d send out an essay or short story to one place, but nothing serious). I’ve generated quite a bit of material since the beginning of that hiatus, and this week started to feel like the season for sending work out into the world again. I put on Horse Feather’s latest album, Thistled Spring, sat down in my office with a cup of coffee, and went to work. My handwriting isn’t great, so it takes me a long time to address envelopes that an editor won’t think are from a 5th grader—but after a while I started enjoying myself. I was something like a sewing circle of one—my hands were busy scribbling, leaving my mind unoccupied.

I eventually settled on six literary journals, all print. Only four of them needed physical letters sent, the other two were online submissions.

1. The Paris Review
2. Alaska Quarterly Review
3. Crazy Horse
4. American Poetry Review
5. Third Coast
6. Passages North

I thought I’d start with top tier publications, and when the rejections come, send to five or six more that may be more realistic. Third Coast and Passages North would be cool because they’re both Michigan publications (Western Michigan U. and Northern Michigan U, respectively), and I have a long standing beef with Alaska Quarterly Review. In my very first poetry course as an undergrad at Indiana Wesleyan, one of my assignments was to research a literary journal and send them a submission. AQR, naturally, rejected mine. I have no idea what I sent, but I’m guessing it sucked pretty bad. Nevertheless, at some point in my life I’m going to redeem that day.

One other tip I learned from the professor of that course was to keep track of all my submissions, something I still do. Here’s my sweet recording journal:


In other news, I’m past page 200 in Swann’s Way, and making my way through Swarm (Jorie Graham) and an anthology of Michigan poets as well (you can see it in the picture of the envelopes). I think after I finish those I’m going to look for some modern fiction—something by Michael Chabon, perhaps, or Margaret Atwood.

Fingers crossed until then, and may the cream always rise to the top.