The other day I got my contributor’s copy of the 2018 Poet’s Market. I’ve had articles in
the past six editions on topics like chapbook design and the “anatomy of a
book*.” In this new one I have an
article, “Coming Unstuck: 10 Techniques to Break Out of a Poetry Rut.” It’s
basically 10 prompts to trick yourself into writing poetry by springboarding
off news stories, stolen dialogue, and torrential floods of words to shake yourself loose from old conventions, topics, and voices that might have you bored or stymied. I’ve written
a lot of how-to pieces for writers over the years, and I can honestly say that
this was the most fun I’ve ever had writing an article.
There’s this book
Writing for the Poet’s
Market always feels a little surreal because that book was such a fixture
in my house when I was a young writer. Back in the 1990s, when I began to get
serious about sending my writing to literary journals, the internet wasn’t
quite a thing yet. So to research journals, I’d visit local bookstores and scour
their magazine racks. Even then, the “literary” section was usually small**—maybe
a couple dozen journals and zines, some letterpressed, some tiny and
odd-shaped, along with the big ones everybody knew about, like The Paris Review and Ploughshares. I bought as many as I
could afford, took them home, and studied them. If I thought one might be a
good fit for my work, I’d mail them a request for their guidelines, along with
a self-addressed stamped envelope, and wait.
Around that
time I was also taking a series of creative writing night classes. One night the
teacher mentioned that there were many, many other literary journals out there that
I’d never find at a local bookstore. But, she said, there was one place that
listed hundreds of them: a thick book called the Poet’s Market.
If you’re a
writer my age, you probably remember this drill: I bought a copy of the Poet’s Market and pored over that thing,
night after night, dog-earing its newsprint pages and penciling stars next to
journals that looked right for my work. (I still have a muscle memory of
turning those pages and drawing those stars, and I can picture the bedroom
where I sat up and did it, my cat asleep in the sock drawer.) Then I started sending
away for sample copies—because, again, in those pre-internet days there was no way
to get a good feel for a journal other than buying a copy and looking at it.
That cost some money, but I had a job and I figured it helped support the
journals.
Over the
next couple of years, I amassed a bookcase full of sample copies. I studied each
one carefully and came up with a rating system using colored labels*** that I
stuck on the spines:
• Blue = blue
chip, top drawer, probably too good for the likes of me.
• Red =
mid-tier, decent quality, niche-y or regional, well worth trying.
• Black = dreadful,
amateurish, offensive, needlessly baffling, and/or hastily bound by brads****.
Of course I tried for some of those blue chips, but I pretty
much lived in the red zone. My first few publication credits (for the record: Rattle, Faultline, and, strangely, Asimov’s
Science Fiction) were a direct result of all that Poet’s Market research.
Where’s the “find” on
this thing?
So…fast-forward 20+ years. Now that we have the internet, an
actual physical book listing all those literary journals—something that can’t
be updated daily and has no “search” field—is obsolete, right? Well, not in my
house. Although I always check a journal’s website for their most current
guidelines, I still keep a copy of the Poet’s
Market on my desk and grab it whenever a little niggling question comes to
mind, like whether a journal is quarterly, or whether it’s the one associated
with that university, or whether they regularly nominate for Pushcarts or
whatever. I like having all that info in a book that I can quickly leaf through
without having to turn on an electronic device. I also like seeing the stats that some journals put in their Poet’s Market listings, like response
times, reading periods, and acceptance rates. There’s so much about the poetry
biz that can’t be quantified (and indeed, most of the “stats” are only
ballparks at best), but my numbers-loving brain likes to compute stuff like
that. Of course, there are online sources for such things (Duotrope, notably, and the Poet's Market also offers an online database you can access with a code inside the front cover).
But in my quiet office, I like to commune with a big book now and then. And the
browsing can’t be beat; when I’m looking up the Brown Spot Quarterly, I may stumble across the Brass Knuckle Review or Bruin’s
Lunch, which I might never have found otherwise.
I admit
that I don’t send away for as many sample copies as I used to, and that’s a sad
result of the internet age. Although I still pick up literary journals wherever
I find them—bookstores, writers’ conference, book fairs—I imagine those
journals don’t make much revenue anymore from sample-copy sales. And of course
the whole landscape is changing, the old paper/subscriber paradigm morphing
into online journals and—well, I don’t know what will come next. I used to be
in the magazine business, and we had a hard time figuring out how to stay
afloat with advertising dollars shifting to digital. And now there are a lot of
great online journals, with editors seemingly working with the goodness of
their hearts and little else. Change, change. The Poet’s Market now includes listings for many of those web-only
journals as well as print ones.
Full circle
So it was only natural when, a few years ago, I responded to
a call for articles for the Poet’s Market.
(In addition to all the journal/publisher listings, the Market always has a section of useful articles on everything from formatting
your manuscript to sniffing out scam contests.) By then I’d been doing a lot of
writing for writers, as well as blogging, and I had notes and ideas for
articles on all sorts of topics. I pitched a few to the Poet’s Market editor, Robert Lee Brewer, and he accepted one called
“10 Chapbook Design Tips Every Poet Should Know*****.” I had a blast writing
it, and I’ve got to say, it was a special thrill to see my article in that book
that I’d turned to for help for so many years. This year marks the sixth
edition I’ve had an article in the Poet’s
Market. It’s still a thrill, every time.
* I got the idea for the “anatomy of a book” article when a
friend’s publisher asked her to check the galley proofs of her upcoming book.
She called me in a panic because she had to turn the proofs around in 24 hours,
but she’d just received the package and was surprised to find that it was a
big pile of loose papers. She couldn’t tell what was a left page or a right, some
pages were blank, and she had no idea whether the legalese text on the
copyright page was correct. Having worked in book publishing for many years, I’d
probably checked 100 sets of proofs of like that, so I drove over and went through
the pages with her. It had never occurred to me how confusing a loose galley
like that might look to an author who’d never seen one before.
** The exceptions were Kepler’s in Menlo Park and A Clean
Well-Lighted Place for Books in San Francisco, both of which stocked an amazing array of
literary journals. God bless them both.
*** I made these from cut-up address labels, hand-colored
with magic markers, which gave them that faintly poopy smell of old felt pens. Later
I found some metallic colored stars that teachers stick on students’ papers. I
used those for a while, but I missed the down-home, smelly, hand-colored ones. I
also stuck a Post-It note inside the cover of each journal with general
impressions (“Brilliant,” “Too show-offy,” “Great poems on pgs 57 & 128,”
“Would gaze at its navel if it had one”) and, if I liked it, titles of poems of
mine that seemed like a good fit.
**** To be fair, “held together by brads” isn’t necessarily
bad. I’ve seen some kick-ass journals and zines bound this way, as well as an
excellent chapbook by Eugene poetry legend Erik Muller called Cinema of the Steady Gaze.
***** That idea, I’m sorry to say, was spawned by seeing a
lot of bad choices in chapbooks, like maddeningly small type, cramped back
covers, and scary author photos.