POETRY Magazine

Thank you for sharing your work with Poetry. We look forward to the opportunity to engage carefully with your work. Due to the number of submissions we receive each year, we will likely get back to you within eight months. We appreciate your patience.
Gratefully,
Adrian, Angela, Holly, and Lindsay
 

How to Submit
Poetry magazine welcomes personal and idiosyncratic prose pertaining to poets and poetry. We appreciate experimental forms, as well as playfulness and a sense of humor. These pieces should demonstrate poetry’s role in the wider culture and its manifestations in the writer’s lived experience. This is not a form for straightforward literary criticism or academic prose. Please see our general submissions page for other prose-related calls (book reviews, roundtables, etc). In this form, we are seeking:
 

• Essays that explore unique or unexpected connections between poetry and the wider culture (pop culture, politics, internet culture, art, etc.). Previous examples include:         
  • “A Politics of Mere Being” by Carl Phillips
  • “Exhaust All Poisons” by Brian Kim Stefans 

    
   

• Essays that resurface a poet worthy of closer consideration or that shed new light on a poet/poem via compelling personal narrative. Previous examples include:         
  • "Heart to Heart” by Noah Stetzer
  • “Mostly His Apocalpytic Star Glitters Wondrously” by Chase Berggrun
  • "Differing Freak Wonder” by Nick Sturm

    
   

• Immersive dispatches or literary reportage that illuminate poets/poems, canonical or otherwise.          
  • Previous example: "In a Foreign Land” by Mairead Small Staid

    
   

• Creative personal essays on the craft of writing poems or poetic lineages. Previous examples include:         
  • “Among Every Three Fathers, One Will” by Jennifer Tseng
  • "Impossible Word: Toward a Poetics of Aphasia” by heidi andrea restrepo rhodes
  • “Writing Beyond the Human: Divining the Poetics of Divinity” by Joy Ladin

    
   

• Roundtable discussions or conversations between a group of poets on a specific topic related to poetry or the craft of poetry. Previous examples include:         
  • "Grief in Three Bodies: A Conversation" by Victoria Chang, Prageeta Sharma, and Khaty Xiong
  • "Disability and Poetry: An Exchange" by Jennifer Bartlett, John Lee Clark, Jim Ferris, and The Cyborg Jillian Weise

    
   

Our typical essay  length is about 1,500 - 2,500 words. As a maximum, please submit no more than ten pages; if the work is longer than that, please note that in the cover letter and we will ask to see more if we are interested.
IMPORTANT NOTES:
 

1. Please send only one submission at a time per category, and wait until you hear back from us before uploading a new submission. We are eager to provide ample time and space for everyone’s voices to be considered, so if you do send multiple submissions, they will be archived unread and will receive no response.
2. We have a small staff that reads over 100,000 poems per year. Because we strive to give every submission careful review, our response time can be up to eight months. Thank you for your patience and understanding.
3. If you have published your work in Poetry during the last year, please wait until next year to submit any new work.
4. We consider only previously unpublished work. Writing that has appeared online for any reason, including social media posts, is considered to have been previously published and should not be submitted.
5. Poetry is open to simultaneous submissions, but let us know immediately if work is accepted elsewhere by adding a message to your submission specifying the work that is no longer available.
6. All poets will be compensated for published work. We pay $150 per published page in print for prose.
7. To make sure you receive our response, set your spam filter to allow emails from submissions@poetrymagazine.org.
8. We close for submissions annually from June 15 through September 15. 
9. If you have further questions, please visit our detailed FAQ on our website.

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Thank you for your interest in Poetry magazine!