Publishing poems

I'm going to be in "The High Window", which I'm pleased about.

Sad news is that Envoi's closing down after over 60 years of issues. I've had over a dozen poems in it. Fortunately magazines are still coming into being. See for example

• Poetry Birmingham
• Finished Creatures

For more ideas about where to send pieces it's worth looking at

• Angela Carr's list
• Poets' directory

Publishing short stories

I've had a story accepted for the next Postbox magazine. They received 82 submissions, from which they chose 15. I'm surprised so few authors sent stories. The press which produces the magazine published a book which has just appeared on the Edge Hill Prize longlist of the year's best short story books (along with books by Picador, Faber, etc). All 12 longlisted authors are female.

Magazines come and go. Here are some magazines I've sent stories to in the last year or so, and got replies. There's a UK bias. A few are prose only but most print poetry too, so space is at a premium. Some are paper only. They all accept longer stories - I've a different list for Flash. Have a look at the sites if you can before sending off, to see the types of authors and stories they deal with. Buy the printed magazines - they deserve your support. I think they're all respectable (even if they're all not major). Many accept simultaneous submissions. Many have submission windows.

• Ambit - UK poetry and prose paper magazine. Has submission windows. You pay to submit - http://www.ambitmagazine.co.uk/submit
• Barcelona Review - http://www.barcelonareview.com/mis/subguide.htm
• Barren - https://barrenmagazine.com/submissions/
• Fiction Pool - https://thefictionpool.com/submit/ ("An unusual style or voice really grabs our attention. We would prefer not to read stories … concerning the Covid-19 pandemic")
• Fictive Dream - https://fictivedream.com/submission-guidelines/
• Forge - Online. Stories only. Pays $60/story - https://forgelitmag.com/submit/
• Lunate - https://lunate.co.uk/submissions
• Manchester Review - http://www.themanchesterreview.co.uk/?page_id=231
• Postbox - Stories-only paper magazine - https://www.redsquirrelpress.com/submissions (2 windows/year)
• Short Fiction - Online. Stories only. Pays! - https://www.shortfictionjournal.co.uk/subs
• Sonder - https://sonderlit.wordpress.com/submissions-3/
• Stinging Fly - Irish poetry and prose paper magazine. Very competitive. See https://stingingfly.org/submissions
• Under the radar - UK poetry and prose paper magazine - https://ninearchespress.com/magazine.html (June and December windows)

Cornwall

We spent a few days at St. Ives, visiting Land's End, Penzance, The Eden Project, St Michael's Mount and Tintagel. The street names in St. Ives were dual language - a tourism ploy maybe, though I know more people are learning Cornish nowadays. Cornwall flags were flying.

The visual arts seemed popular in the region, with galleries, art schools and the occasional sketcher. Alas, the Tate and the Barbara Hepworth museums were closed.

Driving was a hassle. Sometimes there were helpful signs. One road advertised itself as a 25% slope, though other unsigned roads seemed steeper.

I read an anthology of short stories (Updike, Achebe, etc), and a book about why people read fiction (theory of mind, etc).

Diversity statistics

In a recent report The State of Poetry and Poetry Criticism in the UK and Ireland 2011-2018 there's an analysis of how well women and BAME writers (BAME=Black, Asian, and minority ethnic) have got on in magazines. 26 magazines were studied. Over the period, the percentage of poems written by women and Non-binary people rose from 39% to 48%. In contrast the percentage written by BAME poets has stayed at about 8% (the census results suggest that about 13% of the UK are BAME).

I have some sympathy with the editors. Perhaps the low-BAME magazines get few submissions from BAMEs despite their best efforts. Perhaps they publish a high percentage of some other oppressed minority group - the old for example, or Rhymesters. Sometimes only a change of [sub]editorship will convince submitters that a magazine is genuinely open.

Poets will send poems to outlets that they think gives them the best chance. Sonneteers will send sonnets to magazines that publish sonnets, not realising that other magazines might love to publish more sonnets if only they were sent more. Ditto perhaps for poems written by BAME poets - poems of particular types/origins will tend to cluster.

Articles and reviews were studied too. The magazines have more control over this - most pieces are commissioned. White males dominate. It's tempting to stick to contributors who've not disappointed in the past - newer magazines have an easier time getting a mix of contributors. On the face of it, some magazines aren't doing well - the report states that "The London Review of Books has publised (sic) 70 articles by 33 different poetry critics. All 33 were white. Those 70 articles reviewed 86 different books. All 86 were by white poets. Of those 83% are male."

A submission schedule for the rest of 2020

The second half of the year seems to have fewer competition and magazine-window opportunities for me. Here they are -

• July -
  • 4th - VS Pritchett short story prize
  • 31st - Allegro poetry deadline
  • 31st - Winchester Poetry Prize deadline. 1st prize 1000. Entry fee 5.
  • 31st - Magma ("Dwelling" issue deadline - poetry)
• August -
  • 31st - Flash Frontier: Machines
• September -
  • 1-7th - Lost Balloon window (1000 words max)
  • 1-30th - Ambit fiction window
  • Troubadour International Poetry Prize. 1st prize 2000. Entry fee 5. Deadline 28 Sep.
  • 30th - Deadline of Bedford Writing Competition for Stories (max 3000) and for poems. 1st prize 500. Fee 6 (4 for students). See rules
  • 30th - Edinburgh Flash Fiction Award deadline. Max 250 words. 1st prize 600. See rules
• October -
  • Fiction kitchen Berlin reopens - 1000-word Flash
  • The Dinesh Allirajah Prize for Short Fiction Free entry. 1st prize £500 (shortlisted authors will be featured in an ebook anthology). Deadline 23rd October. 2,000-6,000 words with the theme of 'Home'.
  • 1st-31st - Interpreter's House window (poetry and prose)
  • 1st-31st - Envoi window (poetry)
  • 31st - National Poetry Competition deadline
• November -
  • 1st Commonwealth Short Story Prize (free entry. 2k-5k words. 1st prize 5000)
  • 1st Ambit (poetry) window closes (opens 1st Aug)
  • 1st-30th - Under the Radar window (poetry)
  • 30th - The South poetry deadline.
  • 30th - Flash Frontier: Doors (250 words)
• December
  • 2nd - Stinging Fly window opens
  • 1st-31st - Under the Radar window (prose)
  • Postbox - stories 1000-2000. Deadline Dec 31st. See https://www.redsquirrelpress.com/submissions

Spelk

I like Spelk. It's been going since September 2014. It prints 3 Flashes (max 500 words) a week. It allows comments and "likes". I suspect the stories are read by quite a few people.

Amongst the contributors are Angela Readman, Carrie Etter, Gary Duncan, Ingrid Jendrzejewski, Meg Pokrass, Michael Loveday, Paul Beckman, Robert Scotellaro, and Sandra Arnold. It has 3 pieces in Wigleaf's list of 50 best flashes this year.

I suggest you dip in and have a look around. There are links to all the stories on the front page. The Nominations page picks out some highlights.

Prose/Poetry - ten comments

1. Most of the time I don't classify texts - I just read and enjoy them.
2. If I buy a novel and it turns out to be haiku, I'd ask for my money back. If I enter a poetry competition and the winning entry looks like a Daily Mirror sports report I'd be grumpy.
3. Judging by many book lovers I know, the poetry/prose divide matters. Even experienced prose readers/writers often can't abide poetry. In books with mixed poetry and prose (John Updike wrote one) half the book would be waste of money for them.
4. Conventionally, if people have to classify a text as prose or poetry, they look at the vocabulary, sound effects, shape on the page, discontinuities, length etc. Clearly there are grey areas, and the classification shifts over the centuries, but for many texts the classification is clear enough.
5. People often classify so that they know how to interpret the text. Poetic features lend themselves to a poetry mode of reading - tolerance of ambiguity, awareness of linguistic effects etc.
6. When an author asserts that a text is "Poetry", the reader's likely to start reading it in a "poetry-reading" mode. If they discover that reading it that way is inappropriate, they might shift their approach, wondering what the author's game is. If they're a poetry judge, they might play safe and reject the piece categorically.
7. In the last decade or so, there's been an increasing amount of outlets for short texts, bridging the gap between prose and poetry. 20 years ago, a short anecdotal piece with a moral twist at the end had to be presented as a free-form poem to get published. Now we have Flash, etc. In the past anything with a form (e.g. abcedarian, shopping list) or a "Found" piece could only be published as a poem. That's no longer true.
8. Poetry magazines are more open to poetry-without-linebreaks than they used to be. And it seems to be a rule for debut collections that they should contain at least one piece without line-breaks.
9. Book classifications are looser now. Novels like Max Porter's "Grief is the thing with Feathers" has many poetic aspects (indeed, I'd say it was more poetic than Rankine's "Citizen", that won poetry prizes). Saunders' novel "Lincoln in the Bardo" has passages of multiple, unattributed voices.
10. Consequently nowadays writers have more freedom, and readers need to be more agile. With freedom come responsibility. For example, I think there's less excuse for producing texts that look like "prose with line-breaks". And readers are less likely to give poetic license to a work which though presented as poetry, seems to be like prose - they're likely to switch to a prose mode of interpretation. Experimental poetry may be fairly mainstream literary prose.