Following Submission Guidelines

As we review poems submitted to the Poets Online monthly issues, we are always in receipt of poems that do not follow our submission guidelines. (see those at poetsonline.org/submit.html) There are very simple items (title in caps; subject line "submission"), technical ones (single-spaced plain text) and optional ones (do you want your name linked to an email or website). There are also ones that will eliminate your submission immediately, such as sending multiple poems, not addressing the current prompt or putting the poem as an attachment. 

These are not unusual and every publisher has their own take on guidelines. Some publications are very strict about guidelines. We wouldn't reject a poem because the title was not in capital letters, but some publications would reject work that is in the wrong font or size. 

The point is that you need to READ THE SUBMISSION GUIDELINES for every submission, and you should also look at what poems that publisher has used in the past. 

I am part of a group that reads submissions for a print magazine and for a manuscript award. With manuscripts, the guidelines are more complex and more specific to the publisher. For example, they might want a short bio OR they might want no identifying information because the submissions are being read blind. 

There are no guidelines that apply to all publishers, but if you are preparing your first manuscript, here are some general suggestions that might help you get the document in shape.

For poetry, single-spaced (with allowances for special typography and layout), each poem beginning on its own separate page in the manuscript; 

Standard letter size (8.5 x 11") in portrait orientation and use Times, Arial or Helvetica at 12 pt. black font on white page background; 

Most publishers want a Microsoft Word .doc or .docx. Some accept a .pdf or .rtf document.

You should have a cover/title page indicating the manuscript’s working title. Usually, that will also provide the author’s full name, residential address, and contact information (e-mail, perhaps a phone).

You might have acknowledgements page of places where some of the poems have been published before.

You need a Table of Contents listing the poem titles and page numbers. This might be the most difficult thing to set up in Word as publishers want page 1 to be the first poem and not the cover or any of the pages prior to the first poem. This can be very confusing to do. The sequential pagination is usually in the upper-right corner (document header) or in the footer.  Some publishers ask for the header to include the author's last name and the manuscript title but, as noted earlier, another publisher may want no identifiers.

It seems like the majority of publishers are suing Submittable or an electronic submissions system. This can make things easier for poets and publisher but these services are rather costly (which is why the trying-to-stay-free Poets Online still uses old-fashioned email submissions). Submittable is free for an author to use because the cost is picked up by the publisher. But it's not always free to submit your poems. A submission fee to submit individual poems, manuscripts and enter contest has become almost standard. Fees I have seen recently range from $2 to $35. There are still free submission sites and those range from Poets Online to The New Yorker, Submittable allows you to filter sites that are still free, but those fees often support the actual publications (especially print publications) and awards or payments for acceptances and staff salaries. 

One last general thing that really annoys a publisher - if you do simultaneous submissions and your work is accepted, be sure to notify the other publishers to withdraw your submission from consideration. I have been surprised and a bit angry about the number of poems we accepted for a print publication where the poet then told us it was previously accepted or even already published elsewhere! This is an easy to do courtesy. Some publishers have long memories for such indiscretions.

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Prompt: The Voice of the Dog

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Photo by Paul Moody - Flickr 

“They say a poet
can never write a purely happy poem about a dog
greeting the sun and what it has done to rain.
I don’t know about that."

so writes Analicia Sotelo in her poem “Grace Among the Ferns”

Does that hold true for the two dogs who author (or are the voice) in these poems read by Billy Collins?

 

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In talking about his poems, Collins says that putting a dog into a poem makes it harder to avoid the sentimental. The dog voices in "The Dog on His Master" and "The Revenant" seem to be able to do it, though neither is "purely happy."

 I am the dog you put to sleep,

as you like to call the needle of oblivion,

come back to tell you this simple thing:

I never liked you — not one bit.”

The dog in Mark Doty's, “Golden Retrievals” (from Sweet Machine) I imagine being his golden retriever, Beau, who he wrote about in Dog Years: A Memoir (P.S.) who along with his black lab partner, Arden, helped Mark through a very dark period in his life. Beau uses a sonnet form.

On their walk, the dog is full of joy and in the moment. But the poet?

"... Either you’re sunk in the past, half our walk,

thinking of what you never can bring back,

or else you’re off in some fog concerning

—tomorrow, is that what you call it? My work:

to unsnare time’s warp (and woof!), retrieving,

my haze-headed friend, you. This shining bark,

a Zen master’s bronzy gong, calls you here,

entirely, now: bow-wow, bow-wow, bow-wow.

In "Grace Among the Ferns, "our model poem on the website for this month's prompt, the poet envies the dog. Grace, who like Beau in Doty's poem, finds delight in exploring the late spring ferns. The poet says:  

"I am not sure I have ever had such a joy,

either in discovery or expectation..."

The call for submissions for May is a dog poem in the voice of the dog. Let's take Collins' warning about over sentimentality into account. Let's remember the joy and Zen of Beau and Grace. You have to have ever owned a dog to know the voice of one - but having a dog that owned you will certainly change how to approach this prompt.

   

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Writing the Day Podcast

In April 2021, I started doing podcasts of some of the poems that I have been writing and posting on another personal site called Writing the Day  That site began in 2014 when I decided to try a daily poetry writing practice. I wrote 365 poems that year in my invented form. I have continued the practice though now on more of a weekly basis.

The website has followers and gets regular visitors and I assume some of the podcast followers are those same people - though perhaps the podcast has a different audience. It's hard to know about who is connecting to these virtual forms of poetry. 

It doesn't have a large audience but, for now, I enjoy writing the poems and doing the podcasts. There are now more than 800 poems on the website, so there is much that could be recorded. The poems are brief and so are the readings. Some have additional information about the poem but most of them clock in at just a few minutes.  

I record the poems using Anchor and you can listen to them at Anchor, but right now most visitors are listening at Spotify - which isn't surprising since it is a very popular app, though probably more associated with music. The podcast is also available on Google Podcasts, Apple Podcasts, Pocket Casts, RadioPublic and Breaker.  They are all free, as are the apps to listen.

Any thoughts? Have you listened? Leave a comment. 

Ken

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The Poet Buried Standing Up

Memorials in the South Transept of Westminster Abbey, Poets' Corner
 CC BY-SA 3.0, Link

In 1065, Westminster Abbey was consecrated. It was the project of King Edward the Confessor, but Edward himself was sick on this day and couldn't come to the ceremony and died a few days later. The next year William the Conqueror was crowned in the Abbey, a tradition that has continued to this day with a few exceptions. 

There is one section of the Abbey known as the Poets' Corner. The first poet buried there was Geoffrey Chaucer in 1400. It wasn't because he was a poet. It was because he had an administrative position with Westminster and lived near the Abbey. 

Then in 1599 poet Edmund Spenser was buried near Chaucer and, after that, it was considered a place for writers. Samuel Johnson, Charles Dickens, Thomas Hardy, Alfred Lord Tennyson, Robert Browning, Rudyard Kipling, and many more are buried there.

Ben Jonson      Public Domain, Link

Ben Jonson was William Shakespeare's contemporary. He has what might be the most famous epitaph in the Abbey: "Oh rare Ben Jonson." It has been claimed that the inscription could also be read "Orare Ben Jonson" (pray for Ben Jonson), though there is a distinct space between "O" and "rare."

Though he is buried in Westminster, it's not in Poets' Corner. Another oddity is that he is the only person buried there standing upright. 

The popular story goes of that burial oddity is that when the Dean of Westminster talked to Jonson about being buried in Poets' Corner, Ben replied, "I am too poor for that, and no one will lay out funeral charges upon me. No, sir, six feet long by two feet wide is too much for me; two feet by two will do for all I want." The Dean promised he could have it. 

When Jonson died in poverty in 1637, he was definitely buried upright, as some workers found out in 1849 when they accidentally dislodged his burial spot and his skull, with some red hair attached, rolled down from a spot above his leg bones.

A monument to Jonson was erected in about 1723 by the Earl of Oxford in Poets' Corner which has a portrait medallion and the same inscription as on the gravestone. It seems Jonson was to have had a monument erected by subscription soon after his death but the English Civil War intervened.

Reposted from One Page Schoolhouse

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Baudelaire, Sex, Death and banned Poems

Portrait de Charles Baudelaire
 en 1844 par Émile Deroy 

I don't recall reading the French poet Charles Baudelaire in my college days. He is most famous for his collection of prose poems, Les Fleurs du mal (The Flowers of Evil). I think I would remember poems about sex and death. When the book was published in 1857 it made Baudelaire famous. 

There were 126 poems. Six are about lesbianism. The poems linked sexuality, love and death, and touched on lesbian love and some of the seamier side of Paris. One 1857 reviewer wrote: “Never has one seen so many breasts bitten or even chewed in so few pages.” 

The entire book was considered obscene enough that Baudelaire, his printer, and his publisher were put on trial. The six poems were banned from future printings of the book and banned in France. Baudelaire responded, “Give them only carefully selected garbage.” The judgment of obscenity was finally reversed in 1949 and the poems were restored. T.S. Eliot called Baudelaire “the greatest exemplar in modern poetry in any language” 

One of the banned poems is "À Celle qui est trop gaie" (To One Who Is Too Gay) which though it is in the old sense of gay meaning happy, seems like a curious coincidence to a modern ear. 

...To whip your joyous flesh
And bruise your pardoned breast,
To make in your astonished flank
A wide and gaping wound,

And, intoxicating sweetness!
Through those new lips,
More bright, more beautiful,
To infuse my venom, my sister!
   (translated by William Aggeler)

Baudelaire barely made a living wage writing. Besides his poetry, he did art reviews and articles and translated Edgar Allan Poe’s works into French. He became addicted to laudanum, then opium. He became quite ill, moved in with his mother, and the last two years of Baudelaire’s life were spent in semi-paralysis in an aphasic state. He died in 1867 at the age of 46. Most of his poetry was published after his death and sold well.

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Hello Laura. Farewell Writer's Almanac

I was saddened to learn that Garrison Keillor will be ending The Writer's Almanac program this spring. I have listened to that daily program since it began in 1993 - first as a radio program and later as a podcast. I was fortunate to have several of my poems featured on the show. Each day, you got a poem read aloud in his good radio voice with some almanac-style notes on things about the day, mostly about writers.

Today, for example, you learn about poor Petrarch and his unrequited love for his sonnet muse, Laura.

"It was on this day in 1327 that Italian poet Petrarch first set eyes on “Laura,” the ethereal woman he would use as his muse for more than 300 sonnets. He met Laura on a Good Friday at St. Clare Church in Avignon. Some historians think she was a woman named Laura de Noves, a married woman, and mother, and most agree she never responded to Petrarch’s overtures. She died during the Black Death of 1348. The first 263 poems Petrarch wrote for her are known as the Rime in Vita Laura. After she died the remaining poems were known as Rime in Morte Laura. Petrarch’s works for Laura laid the groundwork for the sonnets of the Elizabethan era. Shakespeare would not be Shakespeare without Petrarch."

About his unconsummated love for Laura, Petrarch wrote:

“In my younger days, I struggled constantly with an overwhelming but pure love affair — my only one, and I would have struggled with it longer had not premature death, bitter but salutary for me, extinguished the cooling flames. I certainly wish I could say that I have always been entirely free from desires of the flesh, but I would be lying if I did.”

Apparently, the Almanac just wasn't paying its way and Garrison Keillor is leaving radio in favor of writing. He has a full shelf of books written already and lots of audio collections. Many of those concern his fictional town, Lake Woebegone, and come from his long-running radio program A Prairie Home Companion. 

How many radio shows became major motion pictures? PHC did - directed by Robert Altman with Keillor, Woody Harrelson, Tommy Lee Jones, Kevin Kline, Lindsay Lohan, Virginia Madsen, John C. Reilly, Maya Rudolph, Meryl Streep, and Lily Tomlin. Wow!

He still writes frequent columns, and newsletters and has a new audiobook, Serenity at 70, Gaiety at 80, coming out, (here is a preview) so he hasn't given up on reading aloud to us.

The show's ending leaves a poetry gap that I hope someone else fills.

More about Petrarch and his poetry

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Prompt: Bed Sonnets

When I saw Carol Ann Duffy's poem "Anne Hathaway," I confess that my first thought was that it was about the actress with that name. No, it is about William Shakespeare's wife, or more specifically about the bed he left her in his will.
He gave his wife, Anne Hathaway, his second-best bed. On the surface, that seems like an insult. Beds and other pieces of household furniture were often the sole bequest to a wife because the common practice was for the best things to go to the children and the second-best to the wife. (see Anne's bed)

Duffy's poem is a sonnet written by Anne to her husband, the man known for his sonnets. It is about that second-best bed. It seems very appropriate to use a sonnet form for this topic and having Anne write the poem is a nice turn.

It's not a formal sonnet, though it has 14 lines and a closing heroic couplet. We have called for sonnets twice before. Once for sonnets in one of the sonnet forms (2013) and earlier we asked for sonnets that were less adherent to the forms but that focused on a specific topic (1999). You might look at those earlier issues for information about the sonnet forms and examples.

This month the call is for sonnets concerning beds. That is one piece of furniture that suggests many things - sleep, dreams, sex, escape, laziness...

Our minimal sonnet requirements are 14 lines and a concluding couplet. You may go for a full rhyme scheme, one of the sonnet forms, the 8 lines with a turn to the concluding 6, or any allusions to sonnets. 

Deadline: April 30, 2022

  

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