Incendiary Lit

A) I mean, come on guys, why don’t you know this already. If statement A doesn’t apply to you because B) you have already submitted, take this as a “Good one,” a pat on the back for supporting your literary community, if it doesn’t apply to you because of C) You don’t care, then tell me how little you care about these contests. Most creative wins a prize. Something glorious. Anyway October 31 is the deadline for:

James Hearst Poetry Prize c/o North American Review which is $18 to enter (includes a year subscription to NAR, which is well worth the $18 by itself) five poems (2 copies of each, no name on them for the blind reading, so make sure to also include braille prints. Or, maybe you can skip them this time.) for the $1000 grand prize.

Also, there is the prestigious APR/Honickman First Book Prize, judged by none other than the great Tony Hoagland. Go buy What Narcissism Means to Me this very instant. Even if you already own it. Someday you’ll need to send a writer a gift, and what finer gift can one hope to receive than one of the most entertaining books of poetry in the last decade? Anyway, basic specifications: $3000 prize for a book of 48 pages or more (by someone who hasn’t published even a long chapbook- over 25 pages). Entry is $25, but this is definitely one of the more prestigious of first book prizes.

November 1 deadlines (remember, that’s only 1 day later)

Bakeless Literary Prizes. This prize is issued in three categories (all for a writer’s first book): Poetry, Fiction, Non Fiction (no scholarly works for non fiction)You win no cash, but get publication by Houghton Miflin, and a free ride to the Breadloaf Writer’s Conference at Middlebury College in Vermont (a $2,200 value for the 11 days and room and board). The entry fee is just $10, so why not, right?

Briar Cliff Review’s prizes in Poetry, Fiction, and Non Fiction. Entry is $15 for the $1000 prize. Up to 3 poems, or one story for each fee. Each entry gets you a copy of the wonderful journal. Here’s my review of the last issue. It’s a very spectacular journal, and you won’t regret entering once you see what a great piece of art the journal is.

For more prize information check out the amazing New Pages contest page… for book contests check the link on the top right of the page. Poet’s and Writers also has a great contest calendar here.

The Mid-American Review’s annual Sherwood Anderson (fiction), James Wright (poetry) and Creative Non Fiction contests are all nearing their postmark deadline of October 20th (Saturday). MAR’s a really cool journal with accessible, well crafted work. The contest judges are David Kirby(poetry), Anthony Doerr(fiction), W Scott Olsen(cnf). I’m really excited about the James Wright prize because I love David Kirby’s work. I know this has no effect on luck I’ll have, but still, the possibility of David Kirby reading my poems is pretty awesome. The entry fee for each contest is $10 (which includes a copy of the winning issue) and the prize is $1000 in each division. Send up to 3 poems, or 6,000 words for prose. Also, if you enter more than one contest, you can also move your second free copy to the next issue (ostensibly)  so it’s like you get a year’s subscription… Here’s the rest of the information about it. It’s a good opportunity to justify buying a sample issue of a journal you’ve never seen at Barnes and Noble at the very least. You get the satisfaction that you made strides to get your work the acclaim it rightly deserves (right?) and you get to read wonderful work, as well as see what a potential market publishes. Win win win.

Let’s just pretend this is the exact predicament you are in: You’ve gotten really serious about your poetry recently, and finally feel like you have a small base of poems (at very least 5, though you can start submitting with as few as 3) that you feel are publishable, and you’re feeling lucky, punk. You should be at least mildly familiar with the journal you’re submitting to. Most literary publications have a website, and the majority of them have sample poems from recent issues. You’d be surprised what some people consider good poetry. That goes both ways, either it’s so weird or unintelligible, or it’s more plainspoken/prosey than an anecdote told at the bar after last call. There’s definitely a home for both in the various literary magazine world. Anyway, you have the faith in your work, and a thick enough skin to accept the inevitable string of rejections. There are very few stories that involve “published on first submission” that didn’t involve some sort of nepotism. The physical items you need are as follows:

9×12 Manila envelopes. Most drug stores sell 3 or 5 packs for a couple bucks. If you think you’ll remain serious about writing, I suggest you make a trip to an Office Depot or Staples or some other big chain of office supply stores. I just got a 100 pack at Staples for $7.29 so it won’t exactly break the bank.

Business sized envelopes. Every submission needs an SASE.

Stamp. OK, here’s the breakdown. Your SASE gets a $.41 stamp, a submission of 7 sheets of paper (don’t forget to include your cover letter in that count) and your SASE is one $.41 stamp, and one $.17 stamp. If your submission is more than 13 pages you need to add another $.17 stamp. If the submission is more than 19 pages add another $.17 stamp. You can usually get the $.17 stamps, as well as the $.41 stamps from a post office’s little stamp vending machine After that rates go up quite a bit. Consult USPS about it. There’s a postage calculator there, just add an ounce for every 6 pages.

Poet’s Market. OK, this is more of a strong suggestion. I haven’t had a chance to see 2008, but 2006 has almost everything that the 2007 has, minus a couple journals you can find on duotrope.com (which is a tremendous resource once you get used to the whole process) and when you get the slightly older version you get it for under $2.50 instead of $25.  If money is not an issue, go here and get the brand spanking new version. The reason I suggest Poet’s market so strongly is they have great stuff like sample cover letters, round table conversations with editors, clear categorizations, and it’s all in the same place, and one you can have on the coffee table to read on South Park commercial breaks.

OK, to summarize, a typical submission (of mine at least, because I generally write one page poems) includes:

1 9×12 manila envelope with one $.41 stamp and one $.17 stamp.

1 SASE (business sized envelope and $.41 stamp)

1 Cover letter with some sort of proof that you’re familiar with the magazine, if applicable. If you flip through a journal at Barnes and Noble even, and liked a poem or story, try to remember that in case you submit. Editors like to know that the people who submit care, even just a little bit, about those struggling to put new journals and books into the world.

5 poems, usually one 2-pager and four 1-pagers. If I think that two 2-page poems would fit the magazine especially well, I may include another one or two of the two page poems that don’t get submitted quite as often. If you write more specialized stylistic stuff that has more of a specific audience, then definitely spring on the extra $.17 stamp to send the poems that are most appropriate.

Other things in formatting of individual poems: Make sure to have your address and phone number (and email if you want to be really hip) on all of your poems and your cover letter. If a poem is more than one page, be sure you have page numbers at least… some editors say they want a header to pages with “continued from” then the last line on the first page. Some say not to staple submissions.

Also, you need to track your submissions. What poems go to what magazine, when is helpful, and what its status is (don’t delete the rejected submissions so you can make sure you don’t accidentally submit the same poem to the same journal twice). This way if a submission’s been at a journal for well after the response time quoted on the website (or in Poet’s Market) you can send an email to the editors with all the information to make their lives easier.

Be sure to check out the journal’s website for specific instructions they may have. For instance, Blue Mesa Review needs 2 copies of each poem with no personal info on them, but only in a cover letter. Concho River Review doesn’t like to get manila envelopes, and prefers folded submissions in a regular business size. The website is also the best place to find out the current position on simultaneous submissions. Hope this helps you with your first submission and thereafter. Soon I’ll have some sample cover letter and submission tracking sheet to help.

So you have your poems collecting dust, the journals they’ve been in are sitting on your bookshelf, or worse even, in a box somewhere. Now what? Put together a book of course. But you don’t want to just slip through the waters of the poetry world and sink to the bottom, you want to make a splash! Well, that’s a lot tougher than it seems like it should be. But your first book winning a prize, that’s a little something extra to put on a resume. Here are some First Book Awards that are coming upon their deadline still in the ‘07 year:

The Gatewood Prize Deadline: October 1 (for only women between 18 and 39)
The Gerald Cable Book Award Deadline: October 15
Three Candles Press First Book Award Deadline: October 15
APR/Honickman First Book Prize in Poetry Deadline: October 31
Patricia Bibby First Book Award Deadline: October 31
Lexi Rudnitsky Poetry Prize Deadline October 31 (For only an American woman)
Walt Whitman Award Deadline: November 15
Yale Series of Younger Poets Deadline: November 15
Perugia Press Prize Deadline: November 15 (for only a woman’s first or second book)
New Issues Poetry Prize Deadline: November 30
A Poulin Jr. Poetry Prize November 30

The Amy Lowell Poetry Travelling Scholarship is one that falls through the cracks sometimes at it’s deadline of October 15th, and not as many people seem to know about it, as should. So here’s what the deal is: Poets who want to live abroad as some sort of writing fodder, for an entire year (costing in the ball park of $49,000) should apply for this scholarship. Past Lowell Scholars are Nick Flynn, Robert Bly, Phillis Levin, Galway Kinnell, Edward Hirsch, and even Stanley Kunitz (in 1954). To apply you send either a published work and 20 pages of recent work, or if you haven’t published a book, up to 40 pages, as well as a simple application, including a brief travel synopsis. I’m applying, anyone else?

Thank you to the wonderful people at www.newpages.com who offer writers one of the most valuable websites online, behind, of course, icanhascheeseburger.com for their lolcats. Everyone should bookmark New Pages, and move that bookmark to the top of their bookmark list. No scrolling through old links to get to that one. Same with Duotrope.com. Anyway, the point of this is to link to New Pages’ recent literary magazine reviews, which include 6×6, Brilliant Corners (jazz literature), Cave Wall, Columbia, Diner, “Forklift, Ohio” High Desert Journal, Insolent Rudder, Iowa Review, The MacGuffin, Missouri Review, Polyphony HS, Quarterly West, Quay, Smartish Pace, and Versal. That’s a mouthful. Then there’s links to a whole bunch of other reviews. It’s always a good thing to get an outsider’s perspective of a magazine you’re thinking about submitting to. Usually journals don’t like to say what they tend to publish, claiming eclecticism, and though that’s usually the case to an extent, everyone has their own personal lean.

Magazine

Time has almost elapsed for Poetry Magazine’s summer student submission spectacular. OK, not only students, but as I posted about here, in Yo Bum Rush the Poetry Show(with a wonderful graphic I might add. haha) Poetry Magazine is only accepting submissions from people who have not published their previously, which includes 99.95% of students, if not a bit more.

It’s fall again, or, it will be very soon, and that means a few things for us writers: Most college produced literary magazines reopen for submissions, and the big first book contests are back. But, with contest fees reaching deep into the pocket ($25 to read my book? Is it really that bad?) you have to pick and choose wisely. The major first book awards which have their submission period in the fall are American Poetry Review’s Honickman First Book Prize in Poetry, with a whopping $3,000 Prize, one of the largest for first books, outdone by Spring’s big buck prize University of Pittsburg Press’s Agnes Lynch Starret Poetry Prize at $5,000. This year’s Honickman judge is none other than our favorite narcissist Tony Hoagland. Why does this matter? Well, in a way it doesn’t, nor does the particular press publishing the winning manuscript, technically. The first answer always given by editors is always “Excellence is our only requirement” or some such blanket statement. But what excellence are they looking for? Robert Pinsky excellence? Fanny Howe excellence? Stephen Dunn excellence? They all are good at what they do, but few presses/journals are truly as eclectic as they claim, and why should they be? Anyway, what I was getting at is that one can reasonably judge that aside from excellence, the judge might like poems similar to their own. This gives you a slight insider track on what to submit. Then comes the bad part, when we realize that many poets like a wide variety of poems, and that your manuscript is up against hundreds of other hopefuls who have been honing their own brands of excellence and submitted their most excellent (says Bill S. Preston, esquire) poems without regard to the final judge’s own poetry. Damned if you do, damned if you don’t. For instance, Billy Collins selected Spencer Short’s Tremolo for the 2000 National Poetry Series. Don’t get me wrong, it’s a good book, just not exactly that similar to Collins’ work. Honickman’s deadline is October 31st, and the reading fee is $25. Another prestigious first book award is the Yale Series of Younger Poets, which is on the lower end of the reading fees that have been climbing as fast as gas, at only $15, and luminaries such as Carolyn Forche are past winners. Their deadline is November 15th. Now, another little way to toe the waters of a contest you might be interested in submitting to is to take a look at past winners books.
For instance, before I entered the Agnes Lynch Starret prize I bought a copy of the last winner that was available, at the time it was Aaron Smith’s Blue on Blue Ground and while it didn’t really affect my poem choices, nor the outcome, it was an excuse to get a new book from a new voice. Always a fun exercise. So none of these tricks are foolproof, nor do they even make a huge difference most of the time, but you never know. It won’t hurt anything to buy the book of a judge or a past prize winner, and it could be the difference between being eliminated by one of the anonymous readers buried in the thank yous, and being eliminated by the guest judge in the final round. Other first book awards coming up shortly are Boa Editions Ltd.’s A. Poulin Jr. Poetry Prize judged by Jean Valentine, ending November 30th, with an entry fee of $25, and a grand prize of $1,500. Also the 2008 New Issues Poetry Prize judged by the one and only Carl Phillips, with a $15 reading fee and a grand prize of $2,000. The New Issues Poetry Prize deadline is also November 30th.

Here’s a little blog by Kenyon Review editor David Lynn posted about simultaneous submissions, and here’s a blog about the blog. So yes, this is in essence, a blog about a blog about a blog about a magazine. For those who don’t know, a simultaneous submission is when you send a story or poem or what-have-you to more than one journal at the same time. Some journals allow the process, on the understood basis that if the work is accepted at another journal, they will be immediately informed and they will stop considering the piece. Now, you can have a piece accepted on the first submission, but most writers know that’s a rarity, some poems/stories end up not being accepted until 10 submissions, or even 20, 30 before it is finally accepted. Even great pieces. David Kirby, said in Best American Poetry 2000, that the poem they’d chosen as one of the best of the year, had been rejected 17 times before it finally found its home at Parnassus. Seeing as most journals ask you to allow 3-4 months, sometimes as many as 9 months for them to consider your submission before even checking on its status, your entire wardrobe could be out of fashion by the time it’s accepted. You’d be wearing your Kris Kross overalls (backwards of course) writing a poem that may not be published until your mother sends you a pair of those ridiculous Croc shoes.

Anyway, there are two sides to the argument of Simultaneous Submissions, or, as I call them SS’s. It’s like pretending you’re Kaa from The Jungle Book… Trusssst in me. But yeah, most journals take SSs, but some don’t. Of those who don’t are the likes of The New Yorker, Poetry, The Kenyon Review, The Atlantic Monthly, The Sewanee Review, American Poetry Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, Playboy (for fiction, at least) and many more prestigious magazines. Some respond very quickly (Michigan Quarterly Review usually in under a month from personal experience, and Poetry right around a month) while others take many months. So basically, there’s a decision to be made. Your options?

1. Submit your work only to one journal at a time and hope that your work attracts someone’s attention while you’re still stylish enough for an author’s photo on your dust jacket.
2. Only submit your work to journals who accept simultaneous submissions, and cry bitterly that you’ll never be in The New Yorker unless they change their horrible ways.
3. Submit your poems simultaneously everywhere, even to magazines that don’t accept simultaneous submissions, and if a piece happens to get accepted, sit under your covers with a flashlight hoping the editors don’t find you in the night and ruin your literary career with a publication embargo.
4. Submit some poems simultaneously, and when poems happen to not have any overlap at other journals, venture a submission to a NoSS journal, and hope they send you a prompt rejection, or for that miraculous acceptance.

This is an interesting roundtable type of discussion about getting your work published, conducted with editors from publications as various as One Story, Paris Review, New Yorker, and Open City. It is mostly aimed at fiction, but has much information poets can find useful as well.