Your Literary CV – for beginners

This article is for poets who are setting out on the road to becoming 'published poets'. If you've been writing poems for your own and your friends' consumption, perhaps for many years, and are being told by admiring friends, 'you should publish, make a book of them', and find you have a drawerful or a computerful of poems that you would like to share with the world at large, read on.

But first, a reality alert: if you're envisaging a poetic career as a household name, or a steady income from your poetry's being published, be aware that neither of these outcomes is easy or even possible for most poets. It's a cliché but like most clichés, it's true – there's no money in poetry.

Poets write and publish because they have to, because they love words, and because they enjoy the poetry community that now flourishes online and at readings and spoken word events. They more often earn their living by teaching the art and craft of writing, or by keeping another day-job that leaves them time and energy to write poetry. 

Having said all that, a literary CV – a list of your achievements as a poet – is a useful and satisfying addition to your poetic life.which will help you to get your work taken seriously by potential publishers. It can also help you to gain credibility as a workshop leader or teacher, or as an applicant to a Creative Writing university course. This note is intended to suggest how to build one, using your drawerful of poems as a starting point.

SUBMITTING TO JOURNALS AND MAGAZINES

Submitting poems to journals, magazines and anthologies is normally free  of charge. You may not receive an acknowledgement or rejection letter, but you should be informed if your poem has been accepted, with a date when it will be published. Guidance when submitting:

• Read the rules that their website sets out, and stick to them to the letter, whether you submit a poem to an online webzine or a print journal. They will receive a lot of submissions, and will reject without reading  those that ignore their stipulations about the length of poems, the presentation (font size, spacing etc), the number of pieces that can or should be included in one submission, and the way they should be submitted. (Increasingly nowadays, submissions online by email are the norm, though some publishers and competitions still ask for postal submissions.)

 

• ​Only send poems that you don't intend to submit to competitions. Competitions normally only accept unpublished poems. The reverse is not true – poems that have been placed in competitions or published in competition anthologies are normally eligible to be submitted to magazines and journals or as part of a book submission to a publisher. ​

 

• Keep track of what you have submitted and where it is at any one time. Make a list on your computer or using a card index system and note down the details of when and where they have been submitted, and move the cards or the digital records as your poems are published or rejected – the published poems to a file for future publication in a collection, the rejected ones to the next journal where you hope to have them accepted. There's a good article about setting up and using a card filing system for this, here: www.graceguts.com/essays/tracking-your-poetry-submissions On a computer database, you can move each title from one magazine to another, as one publication rejects it and you submit it to the next one. A card index allows you to record in detail the details of the publication, of course. A digital data-base is necessarily more simplified but it immediately shows you the placement of all the poems you have sent out. The important point is that you keep the details of the final publication date and placing of each of your poems.

You will have noticed that I assume that your poems will suffer rejection. It's important to keep in mind that most poems, like most manuscripts, are rejected, on average ten times, before they find a resting place in a publication, and that it's the poem that is rejected, not the poet. So we keep on keeping on!

​Here are a few of the webzines and print journals which advertise for submissions. Before submitting, read their website and make sure they are accepting submissions right now: at some times of the year they may not be reading unsolicited manuscripts. Always include a covering letter, giving your name, address and other contact details,, and if possible a SHORT resumé of your literary CV. ( I would recommend about 50 words.) If you can address the letter to a named person, do so. Keep your letter fairly formal. Most of these run competitions too.

The Lake (webzine) http://www.thelakepoetry.co.uk/submit/
Magma  (quarterly print journal) https://magmapoetry.com/ – £8.00 per copy
Orbis (monthly print journal and online newsletters) www.orbisjournal.com 
– This is a very prestigious journal, reasonably priced: sample 2 back issues for just £7 
(inc p+p). Single copies: £5.
​SOUTH (twice yearly print magazine) http://www.southpoetry.org/
The Journal (online and print journal) https://sites.google.com/site/samsmiththejournal/
The London Grip (webzine) https://londongrip.co.uk/

If you don't already have a Facebook or Twitter account, it would be a good idea to set one up, because there's so much useful information there about openings for submitting your poems, as well as opportunities for publicising, reading and buying poetry.

SUBMITTING TO COMPETITIONS

Poetry competitions can be a short-cut to publication, and in some cases a means of actually making a financial profit from poetry. They can also be a drain on your finances, because they usually exact an entrance fee, to fund the prizes and anthologies that they promise to deliver.

• Finding competitions to enter: Reseach online: Look on the Poetry Library website for a comprehensive list.; subscribe to magazine newsletters; join the British Poetry Society to receive their newletters, online and in their quarterly news-sheet; Google for poetry competitions online. All poetry festivals run competitions, too. Local newspapers also run poetry competitions sometimes.

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• Choose carefully which competitions you should enter. If you can, find out something about the poems that have won an annual competition in the recent past. Research the work of the judges who will be selecting the winners. Find out what poems were well-placed in previous competitions. This is not by any means a foolproof way of choosing which poems you should enter from your own oeuvre, but it will give you an idea of the quality of work which might be successful.

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• When you decide to enter a competition, treat your entry as you would a submission (see above). Make sure you follow the rules and instructions the organisers have given, to the letter. You will not have your money refunded if your submission is not read because it doesn't conform to the competition rules. 

 

• Remember that by entering a poem in a competition you prevent its being submitted for publication elsewhere, or to other competitions, until the results of that competition are known. 'Simultaneous submissions' are frowned upon by editors and competition organisers alike.

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Your poetry CV will stand you in good stead when you decide to submit a manuscript to a publisher, or to apply for a position running a poetry workshop, or a position in the creative writing department of a college, school or university, or for a place on a degree course yourself. Keeping records of where your poems have been seen and read is worth the time spent on admin work, and after a while you'll find yourself encouraged, despite day-to day disappointments, to find how many successes you have achieved, especially when you list  them on the "Acknowledgements" page of your first collection.