Publishing Teen Poetry

Video Transcript

"If you're a teenager and you want to get your poetry published, don't despair. There are some magazines that expect more experience and older people. But there are a lot of places that would be thrilled too have a good poem by a young writer. The trick is, you have to be better than the average teenage poet. Certainly better than I was when I was a teenager writing poetry. Somewhere I have a collection of my poetry that I wrote in high school. Oh, it's embarrassingly bad! And there's a good chance that no matter how talented you are. In ten, twenty years when you come back and look at the stuff you're writing now, you're also going to be embarrassed. So if you don't get published, don't feel too bad. But if you really do want to get published, figure who you're writing for. If you're writing for other teens, well, look at the magazines you're reading. If they publish poetry, go for it, send them something. Look at the subjects you're writing about. There are magazines that specialize in those subjects. Don't stress in your cover letter, that you're a teenager. You might mention, you're a student at such and such a place, maybe, maybe not. Some places, yes, will hold it against you. You don't want to deal with those people anyway. But the biggest thrill for an editor, and I was an editor for many years. The biggest thrill for an editor, is discovering a terrific new talent. Especially, discovering a young talent with whom you can work and develop a whole career. So a lot of editors are out there and if they see you can write a really good poem and you're sixteen. They will fall all over themselves, getting it published. If you're not brilliant yet, they may start giving you some kind of guidance. Because again, finding someone, developing a new talent, is one of the great thrills in publishing. It's really one of the reasons that people go into it. And don't get discouraged, everybody gets rejected, everybody gets rejected a lot. Rejection is part of it and you have to develop a thick skin. Once you've written the poem, now you're doing business, now you're not doing art anymore, you're doing business. Send it out, find out which markets will take simultaneous submissions. That's places where you can send it to more than one magazine at the same time. Because, focus on places where you can Email it, so you're not eating up your allowance in postage. Get familiar with Duotrope.com, D, U, O, T, R, O, P, E.com. And learn all the markets, learn who is publishing poetry, learn who is publishing the kind of stuff you write, and get it out there. The worst that will happen is, they'll say, no. And that's not saying you're a bad person, it's just saying, they're not interested in what you're writing, right now."