Poetry submission windows that are open right now

Poetry submission windows that are open right now - August 2019

Toni Morrison has died, which sucks, because she was an amazing writer, but I'm also excited to see the writers who carry her torch forward to light up the world. She taught that it was important to use whatever you had to bring others up with you, and we need so much more of that. So, if you have some inspiration, some creativity, even some little glimmer of magical wierdness, here are just some of the submission windows for poetry that are currently open. Tbh, I have been super busy recently, so I'm not as up to date as I'd like to be, and there are not as many opportunities as usual, so this is all I have for just now, but I'll update it if I come across anything else later in the month.

Magazines:

The Poetry Village - they're lovely people, because they've just published one of my poems. Two poems a week online, and it's so worth following.
Southlight - based in the South of Scotland.
Obsessed with Pipework - four issues a year, but submissions are always open.

Also check out Josie Alford's brilliant video on How to Get Your Poetry Published, and indeed her YouTube channel generally.

If you're submitting stuff, remember to get familiar with what the potential publisher likes, and what they stand for first, or you might as well just throw your poetry through an actual window and wait for someone else to pick it up.

This post has been written whilst listening to the washing machine and interrupted by a puking cat. Next I'm going to try to find my desk under all the nonsense I've been dumping on it!

Comments

February update!

Hello! Please see above for a screenshot (not sure who the photo is by) from the lovely Fragmented Voices website which has my poem, Escaping Pheasants, as their featured poem today. This poem is inspired by the pheasants which are brought in to our local country house for people who are that way inclined to shoot. Sometimes I see them flapping down from the estate wall and on to the busy road, making a break for it toward the moors. Good luck pheasants. Escaping Pheasants also features in my book, Little Gods, published by the marvellous Roswell Publishing and available from booksellers and Amazon, or get in touch to get a signed copy from me. Other recent successes include two poems in Obsessed with Pipework #105, a Haiku in Coin Operated Press ' Haiku Zine, The Libraries came out in Culture Matters' Bread & Roses Anthology, and, as I mentioned last time, When you slow a bit you can see the way , another poem from Little Gods, came out in Butcher's Dog #19. I have ...

Happy New Year!

I can still wish you happy new year before January's out, right? Having spending a while doing research and convincing myself I can't write, I'm back in the room in 2019, sending my little baby poems out into the world. I have broken up the chapbook I was trying to get published, I've rewritten lots of stuff, and I'm happily sending them out to places where I hope they might find a happy home, while supporting some of the fantastic poetry magazines out there. One of those fantastic poetry magazines - Picaroon Poetry - run by the marvellous Kate Garrett - has already accepted one of my babies. It was one of the ones that I'd started to feel bored by, so I tore it to bits, rewrote it, and sent it off to Kate, who will be sending it out into the world in Picaroon Poetry #16 in May (which is terribly organised if you ask me, I don't even know what I'm doing tomorrow!). Thanks Kate! Hopefully I'll be letting you all know about more successes soo...

discovering Iain Crichton Smith

I think I don't like poetry. In fact I'm pretty sure. What I like is a brick of a book with well rounded characters, who can take me on a journey with them. I find that for me poetry can be navel gazing, twee nonsense, so caught up in its clever cleverness that it drives me to distraction. But then again, I like lots of songs for their lyrics, and sometimes, just sometimes, I come across some poetry which just blows me away. I came across Iain Crichton Smith recently at my writing group. I live in Scotland, and the other members of the group were all saying that Smith is so much covered in Scottish English (and Gaelic) classes that people don't tend to notice the beauty of his poetry. I didn't go to school in Scotland. The poets I studied at school were people like Wordsworth, Shakespeare, Shelley. I don't recall ever coming across anything like this. That said, I'm not sure that as a teenager I would have noticed it. Perhaps you have to have some i...

Skeleton Architecture

Search This Blog