Advice
Absolutely basic advice on sending poems to Poetry Scotland
and other magazines
READ a copy of the magazine. (sample issue £1 post free from Poetry Scotland, 91-92 Main Street. Callander, FK17 8BQ)
TYPE/word process your work. Put your NAME AND ADDRESS on every page – loose papers can get detached. Most magazines are minimum staffed, so don’t expect us to remember everything, especially your address.
DON’T write long introductory letters about your past successes.
PLEASE DON’T send us book manuscripts until you’ve had poems printed in Poetry Scotland at least twice or three times. Publishing is a co-operative business and this gives us a chance to get to know each other. Even then, we can only do a small proportion of the books we are offered.
SEND a proper, large enough stamped addressed envelope. Not one that has been used 20 times and won’t stick. Not one that’s far too small. It’s OK to say, don’t bother returning the printouts; then you can use a smaller sae for a reply. Maybe that way it hurts a bit less if they can’t be used.
DON’T use recorded delivery. They’re only poems; they always get here. You ought to keep copies anyway> If you’ve sent a recorded delivery packet that arrives when we’re up the garden, we have to go traipsing down to the post office for the blessed thing, and that’s lethal in Edinburgh where the collection office is a mile in the opposite direction from my car, we’re asked for identification, there’s nowhere handy to park and there’s usually a queue. In the real world your poems aren’t worth recorded delivery, and it pisses off the editor before the poems have even been opened.
PLEASE put enough postage on. UK inland: 19p for six ordinary sheets of A$ paper. That’s why people tell you to send no more than six poems.
E-MAIL: poems from abroad may be sent by e-mail, and we’re experimenting with e-mail for UK-based poets. Our e-mail address is :
SUBSCRIBE to the magazines if you can afford it. We know not everyone can, but editors do appreciate subscribers. It may tip the balance if you have kept on trying and are getting somewhere. It may tip the balance if you would like advice on your work.
I’M SORRY if I can’t use your poems. I get many times more poems than I can possibly use. I choose the ones I like best and that fit in best – things like subjects can affect the choice. An ear to the ground helps a poet who seeks publication.
I WISH everyone would stop using the words reject and submit. I haven’t used either of them myself for years, except in statements like this one. You can’t get 85 people onto a 36-seater bus! Don’t let it worry you. Keep trying – without driving editors to distraction. Look for various magazines with a style and personality to suit you. Look at webzines. Try smaller competitions, like the ones in Envoi. Make your own website or produce your own pamphlets (not too prematurely). See:
IMPROVING YOUR WORK.
ADVICE is not your right. With Poetry Scotland it depends on the poem, the poet, the mood I’m in and how busy I happen to be at that moment. See: MEND-A-POEM.
PHONING editors is reasonable in my book only if you haven’t had a reply for a while when you think you should have done. I may have dropped your poem on the floor. I even once sent one back to the wrong person, and I don’t mind being phoned for something like that. (Though from now on you can e-mail). If you’ve accidentally DOUBLE SUBMITTED you should phone and explain. Partly because there is o little space for all the poems people write, editors as a species seriously dislike the same poems being sent to more than one magazine at a time. The allowable exception is when the readerships of two magazines don’t overlap, e.g. they are on different continents. Even then, you should tell the editor.
A note on not being paid.
Magazines can afford to pay writers if they have a large circulation (larger than most poetry magazines) or if they have subsidies or grants. Few can pay all the contributors and the law of the market place inevitably pertains. Authors will tend to be paid when the editor really needs their work and wants them regularly, when work is solicited (requested), and perhaps for more substantial pieces. Poetry Scotland has a payments budget which is constant for each issue and when it’s used up, that’s that. With the independent magazines payment comes out of the editor/publisher’s own pocket. It will be accounted as a payment but it will directly affect the editor’s personal income. The exception to this statement is work that will actually increase sales of the magazine. Any poet who knows that they have this power will use it to ensure they get paid, but you can really count such people on one finger.
Most poets are happy to have their work printed at all, and even the best known poets are philosophical about magazine payment, knowing that their main income from poetry is in readings, and in the sales of their books, and that anything at all that makes them better known will help.
More advice in:
Kenneth C. Steven: Poetry: how to get published, how to get paid. Writers Bookshop, 1999, 0 952911 97 3
(see poems by Kenneth in PS 16, 17 etc.)
Best book of writing advice known to yr Webmaster is:
Mary Oliver: A poetry handbook: a prose guide to understanding and writing poetry. Harcourt Brace, 1994, 0 15 672400 6
Articles in:::
The Writers Handbook (Annual)
Small Press Guide
Artists and Writers Yearbook (Annual)
Check for these in your library, or buy your own copies, which you can mark up. Don’t rely on out-of-date editions – things have a habit of changing.
IMPROVING YOUR WORK
Some options:
Read more poetry, in magazines and books
Choose some favourite poems, and learn them by heart (anyone fancy trying The Waste Land?)
Go to poetry readings (check out the ones in Links and Listings).
Join a writers group. If you don’t like it, try another group – they’re all different.
Visit the Scottish Poetry Library – browse, read, borrow – it’s free (but join if you can).
Go on an Arvon (or other) residential course, or take a weekend away to write.
Try different kinds of writing. Try various poetic forms – sonnet, sestina etc. (Yr Webmaster says everyone has a villanelle in them, which is OK as long as he doesn’t have to read them).
Be honest with yourself. Much of what everyone writes is rubbish. Throw away the second-best – you’re unlikely to come back to it. (Norman MacCaig did this).
Copy out good poems longhand (Dylan Thomas did this).
Increase the time you give to writing. Find an hour a day, or a clear half day each week. (Retire, says Colin).
Alternatively, write a bit less for a while. This can help if you’ve gone into overdrive and are writing too much. It may be repetitive; you may be stuck in a groove. This condition is perhaps the opposite of writers block (Colin suggests ‘writers runs’ as the technical term).
Make a quantum leap in the quality of your writing (easier said than done, Sally).
Not recommended: having an affair with another poet. (It always ends in tears, dears).
PLANNING YOUR WRITING LIFE
(hardly anybody does this properly).
Understand why you write. Is it to keep yourself sane? You’re in very good company – and do you know about Survivors Poetry and Survivors Poetry Scotland? Is it to make money? Don’t quote Dr Johnson’s remark – what does he know? Is it to ‘top the bills … and often win the coloured prizes’ (Vernon Scannell, PS16)? Well, all I can say is that Vernon Scannell has won out.
Expect to spend money on your interest, as you would on any other interest. Expect to spend time on it, years even. Work out its place in your life. There are a few jobs related to reading and writing, and many others where experience can be utilised, while time off the job is spent writing.
Relevant jobs:
teaching; leisure services, translating, editing, tv and scriptwriting, journalism, librarianship, theatre, bookselling, parenting, jobs involving travel.
Not irrelevant jobs: most others.
Writer-in-residence/writer’s bursary, alias state hack. Very convenient for experienced writers but perversely I think it is bad for young and new writers. It inevitably means you have a ‘writing boss’ and this discourages you from being independent. If you’re not going to be an independent writer, you may as well give in right away and be a typist. Still, if you can get it, and handle it, good luck to you.
Not recommended: doing nothing else at all.
Equally not recommended: going for a ‘rubbish job’ so you can ‘devote your time to writing’. You will probably devote your time to the rubbish job.
Tricky ones (a bit too close for comfort): arts administration, publishing. There’s a tendency for authors to distrust and blame both these two players in the literary game, who don’t like each other much, either.
Computing and the internet. If you’re reading this, you’ve made it into the new media. Some older people have trouble adapting. You’ll see novelists with laptops but most poets still draft in longhand and then revise on the computer. An email address is moving from useful to essential.
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