A Friendly Voice

Blueshift's Poetry Reader, Jackson Holbert, writes:

I wrote my first poem in my 11th grade Chemistry notes. I'd been reading too much Auden, and it came out as a pastiche of his poem, “Epitaph on a Tyrant.” Later that day, at home, I re-wrote the poem on an old legal pad I had lying around. I reworked it, adding sections, cutting sections, and, three months later ended up with the same poem I had written that day in chemistry class, minus a comma and a semi-colon. I sent it to my dad—an English teacher and writer and, after an hour of tinkering with a few lines that had been bothering me since I wrote it, he pronounced it “finished”.

At that point I really didn’t know what to do. I decided, probably more out of a mix between ineptitude, insouciance, and arrogance than any actual urgency I felt for others to read what I had written, that “finished” meant “should be published” and not filed away in some plastic drawer full of poems one writes when they are out of their mind in chemistry class. I knew a few magazines published poems—The New Yorker, The Atlantic—and I’d heard some mumbling about journals devoted exclusively to literature—The Kenyon Review and Ploughshares, if memory serves—but I just assumed those were far out of reach for someone like me. I googled “literary magazines” and, after a while, discovered duotrope—this was back when it was still free—and began my informal education on the world of literary magazines.

I immediately went to magazines with the fastest response times, read some poems from each, and submitted to the ones I enjoyed the most. The problem was, I didn’t exactly understand how to write a cover letter. Actually, I didn’t understand at all how to write a cover letter. I spent a while looking it up and came up with a basic outline. My big problem was the biography. I had no idea what to write and how to define myself. I had read a few biographies “X is from New York City. X’s poems have appeared in A, B, C.” wrote one myself, and sent the poem off. Since then, I like to think I’ve learned at least a little more about submitting, and can offer a few, hopefully, helpful tips on submitting.

• Read the journal you’re submitting to. Most every journal will say this on its submission guidelines page and a lot of people simply ignore it. They’ve heard it’s a good journal—or it has a low acceptance rate—and they submit there for that reason only. It’s easy to just submission bomb all the places you’ve ever heard of but sometimes the rejection letters are honest when they say, “although we enjoyed your piece, it was not right for us.”

• In a similar vein, look for places that publish the type of poetry you’re most interested in and the type of poetry you write. A good resource for this is the acknowledgments pages of collections. Really like Carl Phillips? Think you sound like James Tate? See where they’ve been published and read those magazines. Worst case scenario is you find a few poets similar to those you like.

• There is no science of the cover letter, though there are some basic rules: address the editor(s) by name, have a professional(ish) biography—at some point quirkiness in a biography is more self-indulgent than interesting—and, if you haven’t published anything before, say it, editors are almost always pleased to be the ones to discover new talent.

• When putting together a sheaf of poems make sure they’re, at least a little bit, similar. Styles and interests can vacillate a lot from poem to poem. If you have three sonnets and three experimental poems ready to send out, consider breaking them up into two different submissions and sending them to different journals.

• Don’t let rejection dishearten you. It’s much easier to say this than actually do it. No one enjoys receiving a rejection letter. It’s always good to keep in mind that the reading process is, legitimately, subjective and that, if you keep at it, your poems will eventually find a home.

--Jackson Holbert, Poetry Reader

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