How to Find a Poetry Market

Cover of Walking to Martha's Vineyard

Aspiring poets need to find markets that would publish the fruits of our loving labor. Here's one trick:

Go to the library, your bookshelf, or a bookstore. Pick up a recent-ish volume of poetry where the material isn't too different from your own. Then skim the front and back matter for a list of acknowledgements.

For example, the Pulitzer Prize-winning collection Walking to Martha's Vineyard by Franz Wright was published in 2005 and it contains a single page of acknowledgements. Wright thanks a number of publications for publishing the peoms that ended up in this book:

• Can we have our ball back
• Field
• Gulf Coast
• Long Shot
• nowCulture
• Perihelion
• Salmagundi
• Slope
• The New Yorker

Now, we hit the Web with searches like (perihelion poetry) and ("Gulf Coast" poetry). As it turns out, a couple of these publications have closed down entirely, and others no longer accept new submissions. Bummer. How can you tell? Some journals post a final "goodbye" and others just freeze up. Can we have our ball back was last updated three years ago, so it's a safe bet that the submission window has closed.

But a select handful are open for business and have proper submission guidelines posted on the Web. The links above go directly to those guidelines for your convenience.

So there you have it -- a short list of poetry fora that are actively accepting submissions and may appreciate my voice.

Have any other market-finding tricks to share? Please let me know in the Comments below.

Superb Submission Missives

Image by Aaron Gustafson via Flickr

Some submission guidelines are better than others.

These are a few of my favorite freelance submission guidelines from magazines and journals. Some are witty. Others are refreshingly honest. And how often do you see a magazine giving you a list of articles on which to model yours?

N+1

We will do our best to answer all queries, but if you don't hear back from us within 6 weeks, assume the worst.

The Believer

The Believer invites correspondence from one and all, give or take.

The Sun Magazine

Please, no journalistic features, academic works, or opinion pieces. Other than that, we're open to just about anything. Surprise us; we often don't know what we'll like until we read it.

Narrative Magazine

We want writers to have every possible opportunity for success, so we're willing to risk losing a story we want when someone at another magazine may have done their reading before we have, and in that case we'll be sorry to lose the piece but happy for the writer.

Sierra Magazine

Examples of feature articles that display the special qualities we look for include Daniel Duane's "Savoring Wild Salmon" (May/June 2008); Paul Rauber's "Life in Abundance" and Matthew Taylor's "Burned Out on Burning Man" (July/August 2008); and Tomas Alex Tizon's "Rotten Fish Tales" and Debra Jones's "Six-Dog-Power Engine" (November/December 2008).

The Pedestal Magazine

We are currently accepting submissions of slam, spoken word, poetry with music, and performance poetry. For this category, we are not interested in "straight" or "traditional" readings of poems.