Find Editors Who Like You
Poet reflects on the importance of knowing your community
Welcome to our weekly column offering perspectives on lit mag publishing, with contributions from readers, writers and editors around the world.
Write for an Editor
Back in the dim, predawn age, when cell phones were carved from sheer rock and journals were woven from bullrushes, I started sending my poems off to literary magazines. Every week I would print off four poems or so, painstakingly chisel the address on flint envelopes, include an SASE, and trot hopefully to the nearest mailbox. My career was underway!
It was not much of a career, but I did get a couple of pieces accepted at tiny magazines with names like Sidewalks and Fugue. I celebrated! I rewrote my cover letter so it said, “Noah Berlatsky is a poet who has been published in Sidewalks and Fugue (!)”
And then I…never submitted to Sidewalks or Fugue again. Because I thought the goal was to be accepted at a bunch of different places. You collected acceptances, like baseball cards, until you had a full set and then you automatically got an invitation to appear in Poetry or the Iowa Review. Success!
That was, at least, my plan. And it was a bad plan. But I did not know that because I was young and foolish, and because my Oberlin creative writing instructors hadn’t really explained to me how anything worked re: being a poet if you couldn’t get into an MFA program. (Did I mention I couldn’t get into an MFA program? If not, best perhaps to pass over it in silence.)
In any case! Now I am (much) older and (marginally) wiser and I can tell you how at least some things work. Namely…once you find an editor who likes your poetry? Do not let them go.
Find Your Clique
People like to think of writing as a meritocratic endeavor, and poetry as a kind of hyper-meritocracy. Great poetry (Yeats! Stevens! Terrance Hayes!) is universal in its greatness. So if you have written a poem that is good enough for Sidewalks, editors of Slightly Better Than Sidewalks will also recognize that you are the real deal, and you can, through skill and judicious credentialing, climb up the ladder until you find your proper place in the canon.
Alas, the truth is less clear and ladder-like. Who likes which poem is subjective and often, especially in the world of lit mags, very cliquish. Who you know is at least as important as what you write. It’s not an accident that poets tend to come in clumps: EliotStevensWilliamsPound or AshberyO’HaraKochSchuyler, the Beats over here and the Imagists over there. It’s not because great poets are attracted to each other by the force of great poet magnetism. It’s because “great poetry” is in large part a clique, and you usher yourself into the clique as a group effort, by publishing your buddies in your little magazines and advocating for your pals to get prestigious prizes.
That all sounds venal and disheartening, especially if you (like me!) don’t necessarily know great poets who helm prestigious magazines or prestigious prizes.
But! Do not despair! Or, you know, despair only moderately. Because the thing is that there are cliques and cliques, and while the editors you want may not necessarily rally round, you may nonetheless find editors you need.
Which is to say—if the editor of Sidewalks likes one of your poems, they may well like more. A publication may not necessarily be a stepping stone to other better publications, but it could be a stepping stone to getting to know other people who like your work, and whose work you might like.
You might argue that this approach is insular and limited. And, you wouldn’t be wrong. The thing is though that most poetry that isn’t Mary Oliver has a very limited, insular reach. My day job is writing arts criticism and op-eds, and I can tell you for sure that a lot more people are interested in reading a review of the latest Marvel movie than are interested in your latest haiku or sonnet. Poetry is a vanishingly small niche, or a vanishingly small series of niches within niches.
While the editors you want may not necessarily rally round, you may nonetheless find editors you need.
Be The Niche
The smallest niches can make you feel like you’re invisible or alone. But if you are willing to spend some time exploring, they can also start to feel cozy.
As one example, I recently got a chapbook accepted at above/ground, the venerable Canadian experimental publisher run by rob mclennan. In a fit of enthusiasm, I decided to subscribe to above/ground, and get all their chapbooks for the year. Soon I was inundated with weird pamphlet poetry paens to rotting teeth, translations of the medieval poet Rutebeuf, and inky visual poetry distorted representations of electric plugs.
Some of it I wasn’t that into. Some of it (like Jason Heroux’s amazing pamphlet Something Or Other) I adored. But it made me feel like I was part of a community of somewhat like-minded scribblers—not least since rob has infinite poetry projects which he will rope you into if you express any interest at all. I’ve got a couple pieces coming out in his regular lit mag Touch the Donkey; I promised to write him an essay for another pamphlet he publishes. Looking at the credits of some of his writers gave me some other ideas about where to send poetry off to (like the wonderful Origami Poems Project.)
Another venue I stumbled onto is Roberta Beach Jacobson’s Five Fleas (Itchy Poetry), a blog/zine that publishes haiku and other short poetry generally a few times a week. I started to submit at the beginning of this year, and I’ve appeared in the blog regularly since, penning such deathless poems as the one line haikuish thing, “I’m not great at being anybody.”
The Editor Is a Prompt
“I’m not great at being anybody,” is something I feel with profundity, and it still makes me giggle neurodivergently. But I probably wouldn’t have written it if I weren’t in the habit of spending fifteen minutes every couple days writing some bite-sized something for Five Fleas. Short poems are fun, and they’re even more fun when someone out there seems to appreciate them enough to print them with other short poems. Roberta Beach Jacobson likes my short poems, so I’ll write more short poems. I’m not proud.
The same goes for petro ck, my editor at dadakuku, a site that features short experimental verse. (My favorite thing I posted there is a poem called “Cow Drill” which reads, in its entirety, “Mrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr.”) And the same is to some degree true of Lachlan J. McDougall, who publishes pamphlets and the literary magazine D.O.R., where I send longer experimental verse. Sometimes I’ll write something and finish it and turn it to the right and left and then think, “Well, Lachlan will like this!” And sometimes I will sit down at the keyboard and think, “I should write something Lachlan will like!”
Having an editor, or an audience, or a venue give you an ear to scream at or an eye to sketch for. It’s a lot more satisfying than logging into submittable and uploading random verses for an unknown and uncaring judge.
What’s Your Ambition?
Don’t get me wrong, I still throw random verses at submittable. I still sort of kind of dream about getting into bigger, more prestigious venues, some of which might maybe pay. I just got rejected from Poetry again; I’ve got things at the Iowa Review and Triquarterly and probably somewhere else important, though I try not to keep track that closely because the waiting and the inevitable rejection can get depressing.. Hope is the thing with feathers that is springing eternally, as some poet said.
Ambition and striving ever upwards and onwards isn’t bad. I think it’s also helpful to realize though that poetry isn’t a great venue for upwards and onwards striving. If fame and fortune is your desire, you should be writing self-help books or pop songs, or maybe trying a different career altogether.
Poetry is a pretty good way to find the handful of people who are amused/inspired/distracted/delighted by obscure language games in the way that you are, though. If one of those people happens to edit a literary magazine, of whatever size, you should feel lucky you have found a fellow traveler in burble. If you can write more for said fellow traveler, write more for them. The lit mags may look more lustrous over on the other submittable tab, but there’s something to be said for planting weird flowers where you are, if someone will give you space to let them grow.
A good reminder that tilting at windmills is often our first, but not best, idea.
I loved this piece. I'm more interested in short fiction publication at the moment, but a lot of the advice could apply to any kind of niche writing. For those of us writing in isolation, there really is an overwhelming sense of not having any idea how this all works. This piece puts a lot of things into perspective. So thank you!