submit my poems to journals (monthly)

Might as well put together another submission. So I did, to a downstate journal whose deadline for poems related to life in / persons from / places in Illinois is later this month.

All three are older poems that I revised for the purpose. One was originally two separate poems about the same place; I blended them into one & think it is much stronger than the two were separately.

I feel like a total poetry nerd today.

My first November submission is to a competition for short poems (16 lines or less), to be displayed on the sides of buses in a suburb north of Chicago! Up to 12 poems will be selected, one per month.

Previously published poems are welcome, which is nice. I am submitting two that have been published elsewhere & one that hasn’t. For this venue, I think positive, accessible but fresh poems are probably most appropriate—ones that will make people on the street smile & think at the same time.

Notification will be no later than December 5, which is great.

is the first site that comes up when my name is googled nowadays. I think I’m going to follow the lead of some of my poet friends there & make good use of that page. We can post our own writings, & the poem that won the Goodreads contest is already up on my page. In the next week or so I will round up a number of other poems that have been published in various venues a year or more ago & post them.

Dear Ruth,
Thanks for sending to XXXX, however this story didn’t quite work for me.
Thanks again,
Editor

The subject line of this e-mail did say “poem” (rather than “story”) & included my submitted poem’s title, but obviously this editor doesn’t take the trouble to customize his rejection notes, except for including my first name. And his syntax is a bit loose.

How’s that for a bit of sour grapes? But on the positive side, he replied in just 6 weeks. Would that all editors were so prompt.

Two poems that I submitted for a journal’s contest did not place. I just read the winning poem & think the prize is well-deserved; it’s a beautiful, haunting piece set in Chad.

However, the notification e-mail says that all poems submitted for the contest will be considered for publication in the journal; if one or both of mine are accepted I should hear back within 60 days.

are in their stamped envelope, addressed to the editor of a special international section that will appear in a journal next spring. Two of them are the ones that didn’t place in the contest I mentioned in today’s earlier post. Gotta keep these babies moving right along. I’ve got 34 out at present! A few of those are simultaneous submissions, but even so, I’m doing better than I ever have with this.

Last March I submitted three poems to a contest. A couple of months later one of those poems was accepted by an online journal, so I sent a notice that I was withdrawing it from the contest.

I have checked the first journal’s website a couple of times this month, & finally today I see that a winner & two runners-up have been announced. The poems themselves are posted too, & honestly I think my submissions were more interesting than the winner. I like one of the runner-up poems more than that one too. You’d think that would discourage me, but quite the opposite—I’m feeling good about the quality of my poems, & tonight I plan to send them off to another journal I’ve had my eye on for a while!

Somehow I happened onto another contest that seemed worth trying, & the postmark (or electronic sub) deadline was tomorrow. So even though I was out lateish at an event tonight, I stayed up late afterward to choose a set of poems & submit them.

In the poetry category of this contest, a submission constitutes up to 10 pages of poems. I chose five poems, & in a departure from my normal MO, three of them are being considered elsewhere. This contest permits simultaneous submissions, & the timing should work out fine for notifying its organizers if one of these is accepted in the other venue first.

Now I really really am done with October submissions. Unless some other irresistible deadline pops up . . .

Tonight I chose & revised three poems for yet another competition. That envelope is stamped & ready to go.

If nothing else, this process is pushing me to get more poems in decent shape. I now have 27 poems out looking for homes! Responses to 4 of them are due later this month (announcements of winners of other competitions).

Today I sent sets of 3 poems each to two contests. There’s a third contest with an October 31 deadline to which I want to submit as well, but I kinda ran out of steam, having a few other things I needed to accomplish today as well. :-)

1. Is the final judge’s style/taste somewhat compatible with mine? I google him or her & read a few poems to get a sense for that. There’s no guarantee that my work will ever reach that person, of course, since magazine staff or contest organizers usually take care of the first layer of judging. But it might!
2. What is the reading fee? Money’s tight, so I don’t usually enter a contest unless it’s free or has a fee of $15 or less.

The grandchild-in-the-womb poem already received rave reviews in a workshop, & I believe it’s one of my best ever, so it went to one of today’s contests. Yay!