How to Get Poetry Published

Video Transcript

"First you need to know, why you want to get your poetry published. That has a lot to do with, why you're writing it. If you just want to get your name out there, among your friends and family. Well, you can set up a Blog, Blogs are basically free. You can go to your MySpace or FaceBook page and put your poetry there. And your friends will be able to read it and it won't go any further than that. It's kind of, like handing around a Mimeographed sheet, that was what we used to do. Back when there were Mimeographs, now we would Xerox it, or printing off a bunch of copies on your printer. It's, it's passing it around. The next step up, would be perhaps a local newsletter. Church newsletters, club newsletters, whatever you belong to, whatever is in your community. Next step up is local newspapers, which will often run, well, pretty much anything you send them. Our local weekly, if it fits, they'll print it. So you can send them a poem and they would run it and your community would be aware of what you can do. If you're trying to develop a career as a poet, it's very different. Then you have to go to the more acceptable venues, literary magazines. And these run the gamut from junior college literary magazines up to the New Yorker or the Atlantic. Places that actually pay money and get reviewed. So you have to decide where you want to be in that spectrum and try to find your niche. Now you don't start publishing in the junior college magazine and that's where you belong. Ideally, you keep working, you move your way up, until you're in Prairie Schooner or TriQuarterly or really prestigious literary magazines. But you have to know, who is interested in what you're writing, you have to know where you fit in the tradition. This is very important, because that's part of who is going to want to publish you. Where do you fit in the tradition? If you are in the tradition of formal verse, that is very accessible. Well, most of your top rank literary magazines frankly, are bored with that, but there are markets for it. Poetry about scenery, poetry about God, poetry about your kids, love poetry. This stuff doesn't have to be really obscure but you have to make an effort to find who is going to want to publish it. And not just send it around to any place, you've ever heard of. Know your markets, know why you're trying to get published, and you can build yourself a little career."