Casting the Net
Thoughts on trying to get published by fishing for journals
Welcome to The Trochaic Dispatch,
a newsletter where I discuss whatever unedited nonsense is on my mind.
Today’s nonsense is getting published.
I want to be published. Most poets do, I think, at least all the ones I know. Writers write, and writers write so folks will read their writing. A career in writing is built on a willingness to have your work seen, ideally in Good Places™.
I’m not a fiction writer and I don’t aspire to be one, but for a while I was and I did. I got an entire four-year degree in creative writing, took a publishing class as an intro to the industry, even submitted a story to a magazine (via snail mail) (I never heard back) (I don’t even remember the name of the magazine I sent my story to)(the story was garbage). After college, I drafted a novel and a half before realizing my heart was more of a poet’s heart. But by then I’d learned, roughly, the sequence for making it as a fiction writer: write book, query book, acquire an agent, agent finds you a publisher, sign book deal, cry, write book two. A frustrating, long, arduous process, to be sure, but a fairly linear one.
Publishing a volume of poems, on the other hand…oof.
How to Publish a Volume of Your Original Poetry
From the Perspective of a MFA Student Who Hasn’t Done That Yet
I’m not writing from personal experience, here. Not yet. I’m in the trying stage, the casting the net stage, where I’m throwing the same five poems at any journal or magazine with open submission periods and low reading fees and hoping one of the shimmering swarm will bite.
I’m writing about this process from the perspective of someone who’s been told how it works, and doesn’t yet know how it works because it’s happened to me. My professors are all published poets with multiple books on their CVs, and what I’m telling you is what I’ve heard from them.
Poets don’t have agents. You don’t query a poetry manuscript. You don’t even do a lot of sliding under editor’s doors or over transoms. Nay. It’s not nearly as straightforward as that.
The first step is being published in recognized, respectable, print journals. This could take some time. One of my professors compared submitting work to journals to the work of doing laundry or washing dishes—it’s a chore, you do it with the same level of emotional commitment as folding underwear, and you do it knowing that you’re more likely to get a “no” than a “yes,” but you won’t be devastated because you’ve got the same five poems marinating in someone else’s TBR pile.
This step feels especially embarrassing to me, since I’ve been published only once, and then only in an anthology of a writers’ organization I was a member of at the time. All journals ask for a cover letter, a document that introduces you to the editor and gives you an opportunity to prove you’re not a nobody by listing where you’ve been published before. I’m a nobody who hasn’t been published hardly at all, so this part of the process makes me feel like that recurring dream of finding myself naked in a public place.
Once you’ve been published in a magazine once, it’s a little easier to get published again somewhere else. Refer to step 1, paragraph 2, the little rant about the cover letter.
Once you’ve been published in a lot of places, your manuscript of poems might have a moth’s fighting chance in hades of getting looked at by the few, the proud publishing houses and imprints that publish poetry collections.
Most of these publishers are associated with universities, journals, and writer’s projects. Most of them are small, passionate presses, each with a unique mission, fighting to survive in the nearly-deforested former rainforest that is the publishing industry. Your book could make or break them, which means you need to bring a manuscript to the table with poems that have succeeded in the Good Places™, those established periodical publications that elevate the American poetic voices. I’ve heard the advice that you should begin and end your book with the poems that made it into journals, and make it clear in the acknowledgement section of the MS where those poems landed.
The debut book may need to be a contest winner. First-book contests abound, and for emerging poets (which, I think, is the term for poets who haven’t found a broad audience through a book yet, or may have one debut book and that’s it), there’s almost an expectation that you must win a contest in order to get that first book in print. These contests are typically run by presses looking to publish work by emerging poets—win a publisher’s contest, and the publisher will publish your book. Reading fees for contests are steeper than the $2-5 that some magazines ask for: contest fees run between $15-100, sometimes more.
Reading fees make becoming a published poet feel a bit like trying to win the lottery, or like being in the bottom rung of a pyramid scheme—it’s a criticized practice, for sure, as this article that Joy Lanzendorfer wrote for The Atlantic in 2015 will tell you. Paying around $400 in fees just to be considered for publication is a budget line item few can afford. The poet’s career, for socioeconomic reasons that exists well outside my understanding, is pay-to-play. Which is why I’ve set up a Ko-Fi just for accumulating cash for reading fees.
From what I understand, poeming gets easier once you’ve got a book in the world. Finding work as a professor or lecturer—the poet jobs that actually pay bills the poems won’t—is easier after the first book. You can start charging people to listen to you talk, or even to transport you to the places where they want to pay to hear you talk.
While a fiction author might one day finding themselves in a position where the books are paying the bills, poets will not. This understanding is part of the territory. The most ironic twist of the poet’s profession is that being a poet—a solitary craft that depends on solitude and silence and isolation for its sustenance and continuance—requires that you be Known. By People. In the Right Places. At the Right Time.
My understanding of the art of being published will hopefully evolve, and hopefully it will evolve because I’ll be published a few times and will actually know how it works. Until then, here’s what I know. I hope I’m wrong about some of it.