Win at Poetry! Get More Rejections!
Poet shares a liberating approach to submissions
Welcome to our weekly column offering perspectives on lit mag publishing, with contributions from readers, writers and editors around the world.
Poetry is a numbers game, kids. You can’t win if you don’t play, and to play you’ve got to get that product out there. That’s why in the last couple years, since I’ve been poetry-ing, I’ve racked up 225 rejections on Submittable, with another 30 still active—and 9 acceptances. That’s a success rate of…
Okay, let’s not calculate that because it would be depressing.
In any case! Some of you are probably saying to yourself, “How can I too flood Submittable and cause strong editors to weep in despair?!” Others may be asking, “Noah, what on earth is wrong with you?”
These are good questions, and I will try to answer some of them. I can’t promise that when you are done with this essay you will be able to get as many rejections as me. But I can perhaps help you get rejected more than you are now. And isn’t that really the point of poetry?
You Can’t Get Rejected Without Poems to Reject
Above I said that I’ve only been grinding out the poetry for a couple years. This is not exactly true. I started writing poetry more than 30 years ago in college because I am unfortunately that old. Back then I was young and full of beans and vigor and I wrote so excruciatingly slowly that my more impatient gerunds sometimes just threw up their metaphorical hands and stomped off the paper in a cloud of frustration and quivering-ings. I had one poem about Darwin and a cockroach infestation in my grad school apartment which went through roughly 1,323,344 drafts. Which was coincidentally exactly the number of roaches in my walls.
The cockroach poem was a good poem. It was also like 20 lines long and took me the better part of a year to finish. I probably sent it to 10 lit mags or so, all of whom rejected it. And while I appreciate those 10 rejections, and the despair they sent skittering through my heart, the truth is you can’t really pile up misery and self-loathing if you have to work for 365 days to get a measly couple handfuls of anti-validation.
Discouraged by my failure to get more discouragement (and, you know, by the discouragement itself), I quit writing really slow poetry, or any poetry, for 15 to 20 years in there. Instead, I started writing art, book and film reviews and op eds, proving that critics are in fact just failed poets like everyone always said.
Since I was trying to make a living as a writer, and since pay for arts criticism is…modest, I had to write a lot to make ends meet. Ideally, as a freelancer (I never got a staff job) I’d write an essay a day, or more, seven days a week.
When you’re writing that much, you can’t really do a draft for every cockroach. You can’t really do “drafts” at all. I’d get the idea for the essay and what I wanted to say in my head, then I’d write it straight through, at 300-500 words an hour. I’d give it a once over and that was it. If it wasn’t that good…well, hopefully it was good enough for me to get paid, and I’d go on to write the next one tomorrow.
Keep up that routine for 20 years or so and all lingering traces of perfectionism will get ground out of you, like smooshing a cockroach under your shoe. (Enough with the cockroaches you say? Yes, that’s what I said too.)
So, when I returned to poetry writing in 2022, I discovered that old, tired, dumpy me wrote a hell off a lot faster than young energetic me. I didn’t write poetry quite as fast as I wrote essays, maybe, but, on the other hand, most poems aren’t as long as essays. I could generally write a poem a day if I wasn’t writing epics, and I wasn’t. Before I knew it, my hard drive was groaning under the weight of multiple full-length manuscripts and chapbooks and lots of haiku-like dribs and drabs. On one week-long vacation I wrote like forty pages of poetry. It was fun!
Is Getting Rejected Really The Goal, Though?
Not only do I write a lot; I submit a whole lot. I generally try to send out a poem or a packet of poems or an ms every day.
My attitude here is again less about achieving the perfect submission and more about just jumping through the arbitrary hoop I have set myself because I am a neurodivergent weirdo with too many poems.
I do more or less try to get a broad sense of what the lit mag I’m submitting to wants (don’t send non-speculative poems to the speculative poetry magazine, Noah). And I send my best-er poems out to more places, since if simultaneous submissions are allowed, you might as well put your best simultaneous foot forward.
But also I try not to overthink it. As a freelance critic, it’s important not to self-reject; the editor can’t greenlight your pitch if they don’t see it. In a similar vein, I try to let poetry editors decide whether they want my thing or not. That’s why they get paid the big bucks, right?
Over time I’ve formed relationships with some editors and some lit mags, and have more of an idea what they in particular want, and that’s a much better way to get things published (as I discussed here.) But I do also still throw things into the Submittable void with my eyes mostly averted. That’s how you rack up those rejections.
You might argue that maybe if I was taking more care with the process and the poems, I’d have a better hit ratio. And that’s possible. Are all my new, quickly written poems fully polished and perfect and lasting documents for the ages to rival Keats and Shelley? They are not. But to be fair my obsessively-labored-over cockroach poem also was, for all its virtues, not by Keats or Shelley. Alas.
It can be fun to polish and polish and work and rework; I kind of enjoyed writing that one poem about cockroaches for a year. It was frustrating, sure, but also comforting; that poem was always there for me, steadfast, reliable, gross. So I’m not saying you shouldn’t take a long time to work on a poem. I’m just saying there’s something satisfying about finishing the inevitably imperfect thing and bopping right along to the next failure.
Poetry isn’t a money-making endeavor for most of us who aren’t Mary Oliver or Shel Silverstein. That’s somewhat unfortunate for obvious reasons. But it also means that, as a poet, your relationship to your own productivity can be whatever you want it to be. You can take a year to write a poem; you can take a couple minutes. You can research a few journals painstakingly to figure out if you fit. Or you can approach the submission process with a more relaxed, hail mary attitude.
For me, right at the moment, writing a lot of poetry and submitting a lot of poetry has made me feel more like a poet. I’ve finished things! I have manuscripts! And, okay, that’s a somewhat silly way to get validation. But it also feels nice after failing at being a poet in my 20s and then taking a hiatus of a decade or two.
Poetry isn’t actually a numbers game where you get points by racking up rejections. But if you’re burnt out with poetry, or frustrated, it can be nice to give yourself some latitude to be less polished and less perfect and even less “responsible.” It doesn’t exactly feel like winning, but it can make losing more enjoyable.
Loved this. Noah, you're the perfect motivational writing coach!
My favorite poems are usually the ones that took me only a few minutes to write. Lately I've been throwing together words and combining them with images and slapping them on instagram, just for fun. It feels really good to put stuff together and put it out there for whoever might enjoy it or not.