It is an act of madness.
You’ve written a poem. You’ve sat with it, spoken with it, chewed it over, chosen (and rechosen) each painstakingly refreshing word. You’ve polished it, repolished it, and stared at it, wondering, did I really make this?
And then, in an act of even greater madness, you think: I must publish it.
You find a literary journal, read the stats. There’s a 1.3% acceptance rate and a six month wait to discover if you’ve been accepted. Perhaps there’s even a submission fee. Still you gather your work and create a manuscript. You give it a clever title, enter Submittable, write a bio and cover letter, and send it off.
The publishing industry is madness. Poetry publishing is madness. And yet again and again I find myself hitting submit. Why? Why put myself through this?
The Path to Poet
In the beginning, the answer was easy: I wanted to be a poet.
Words rattled in my head. I liked the taste of them. I liked how they steadied my pulse, how they helped me become a more careful witness to my inner and outer worlds. Notebooks littered my bedside table; notes cluttered my phone.
But one can still be a poet without sharing their work with the world. If a tree falls in forest and no one is there to hear it fall, it is still witness to its own sound.
Why, then, had I become so set on publication?
At first, the answer was validation. I needed someone else to tell me the secret I already knew but was not surefooted enough to admit: that I was a poet.
I had sought to be so many other things, had lost myself down so many rambling paths, that I needed to know. I needed this reassurance. I needed someone to say Yes, this is poetry. Yes, you are a poet.
And I needed to believe it.
To See and Be Seen
It is not easy to convince oneself of what one really is, especially when that is a poet.
We are all so many different things, of course. So many roles and facets. Poet is just a part of us, but it is a part that is not always easy to integrate into our identities.
Poetry is impractical. Art is impractical. This is ingrained into us in the state of our world, in our STEM-heavy educations, in the very fabric of our quantifiable realities.
Poetry is also raw, intangible, and incomprehensive. It changes you in ways that you are not always ready to be changed. It cracks you open, leaves you vulnerable, unclothed. The deeper you go, the more visceral it becomes.
I had been published. I had won a few contests. I had received the external validation that I was, indeed, a poet. Why, then, did I continue? Why keep sending out manuscripts, keep waiting, keep collecting rejections, keep submitting myself to this madness?
I soon came to realize that beneath the need to be validated as a poet was something far deeper, something that took me time to admit to myself: I wanted to be seen. Not seen in the way that I had been seen in the many other roles in my life – titles and accolades and hollow praise. Seen in the way I see the world, in my simple and singular way of being, in my nakedness.
I was not ready to show myself fully, of course. I am still learning this – how to be unafraid. It is not easy; it takes time to tear away our defenses. We must be eased into being the way a turtle eases itself into the water.
Publishing my poetry became a means of doing this. It was my way of announcing myself to the world. This is me, I said as I discovered it for myself and delighted in this recognition.
An act of ego? Absolutely. But I believe it also goes deeper.
There is a part of all of us that longs to be seen, heard, and witnessed. It is not always easy to admit this. It is not always easy to tether ourselves to this softness and ensure that what is born of it remains sacred, to avoid getting enveloped in the me, me, me, the insecurities, the pride. But I believe that within us all is an urge to simply exist, to remain testament to this existence and share in its sacredness.
Poetry is a means of doing this.
Publication as Exploration
There were other less poetic reasons I kept submitting, of course.
A part of me wanted to see if it was possible. Could I send these poems – these unique combinations of words – to publications and have them accepted? What happens after they say yes? What happens after they say no? What does it feel like to get a rejection? An acceptance? A nomination?
I am a curious person; the world fascinates me. The literary world fascinates me just as much. How do words circulate? Who makes this happen? How does it work?
And so my inner researcher came out to play.
This was a well-worn part of me. I have a Ph.D. in Translation Studies. My research examined how literary works cross borders as both translations and film adaptations. I find this so interesting – how art moves in the world. And so I began to ask: how do our words reach the world, and what increases the chances of this happening?
I sought to understand how poetry publication works – the players and capital and complexities and stakes. I sought to make it tangible. To quantify. To label. To earn. It was a game, I realized, one that could be strategically played to maximize one’s odds.
I researched. I made spreadsheets. I categorized and developed an intricate system for submitting.
It worked. A steady line of acceptances trickled in. I started to earn money off of my poetry. It was nothing spectacular, mind you, but I began to get a better grasp of what it takes to publish poetry, the grit and persistence.
I also became a volunteer reader for The Mud Season Review and got to see how a poetry journal works behind the scenes. It was, I will admit, exactly what I had expected: countless manuscripts, some subjectively weak, some subjectively strong, and the occasional gem that o objectively took every reader’s breath away.
This, too, became a way a way to transform to my craft. I learned what makes a strong manuscript. I learned what makes some poems stick, what makes others fall flat. And I learned even more reasons why we publish our poetry.
For MFA’s, MFA candidates, and those on an academic path, publications credentials are a necessary part of their careers. For others – like a man who had recently been diagnosed with cancer and was sharing his journey through his work, or a woman who was writing to her soon-to-be born daughter – it’s a matter of posterity.
It was about this time when a friend from my college days and I began meeting to share our writing. I told him about my system; he used it and got his work accepted.
But he had a very different approach to publishing, one that will never cease to delight me: he just wanted to be published in journals that would lead to the funniest-reading bio.
Whisk(e)y Tit. Drunk Monkeys. Meow Meow Pow Pow Lit.
It was a middle finger to my mental establishment, a bucket of cold, whiskey-bitten water. And it was just what I needed to come back to my senses, to remember another sacred reason why I write, why I submit.
This playfulness.
To Open Yourself Up
It is not easy to ensure our work remains sacred and playful. Publishing makes this all the more difficult.
When you submits poetry you have to ask yourself: what is this publication looking for? What style do they gravitate towards, what themes? And you must do your best to send the work that fits this.
As I learned more about publication, I found myself unconsciously trying to adapt my work to what I imagined would be accepted. My poetry is often quite simple, quite soft; it’s not for everyone. And so I thought: what if I tried to make it courser, more grounded? What if I changed my voice so it would be better heard?
This was a mistake.
The funny thing about rejections is that they’re unpredictable. You can send a perfectly themed poem to a perfectly themed journal convinced it will be accepted and it isn’t. You can put a weaker poem in the center of a manuscript as a filler and the editors love it. You can have one of your best poems rejected 37 times to later watch it win a contest.
Rejections sting; there’s no denying it. They sting even if you shoot for them. But there’s one rejection that cannot be dismissed, and that’s when you reject what you need to be writing to begin with.
This is the tightrope of the ego. In our need to be seen, we forget to see ourselves, forget why we write. The rejections will come. The acceptances will come. All of this is superfluous. What cannot change is our sacredness and our need to write from this.
And so I took a step back. My system was already in place; the research had been done. I let myself be for a while, let myself refill the well.
And then something strange happened.
I still felt the need to share my work and to play, even if it meant no financial gain, no credentials. It came as a sudden tug. I don’t know where it originated, but it said: you must open yourself up to reaching more people.
But how? I wondered. I am no spoken word poet. I live in Spain, write in English. And I keep my distance from social media the way an Instagrammer keeps a distance from a bad camera angle. It just isn’t pretty.
But again and again, the nagging intuition came back. Instagram. Just try it. My curious brain became excited to understand how it worked. Some poets had made careers of this; how was this even possible? My inner scrapbooker wrung her hands with delight. There are so many creative ways to present your work. And I began to play.
It wasn’t as easy as I thought. It still isn’t. I don’t have many followers and don’t post or go on often. The algorithm is fickle; the poems shared by others aren’t always my cup of tea. My poems aren’t everyone’s cup of tea. I tend to share work that’s been already published in journals to give it a new life, or the type of poem I know would never make it in literary print – the kind of poem that’s neither Instapoetry nor literary, a hybrid reflection. Insta-worthy.
I have no idea where this is going. As long as it remains fun, I’ll keep at it. Once I thought about giving it up, but then something strange happened.
I received a message from a woman across the world. I love this poem you shared, she said. I’ve framed it above my bed.
And this left me speechless.
To Embrace and Be Embraced
The other day I was speaking with my poetry partner-in-crime. We were talking about what would mark a good career as a poet. A book every two years? A sold-out reading? A Pushcart Prize? And he said: “To see my words in the epigraph of someone else’s poem,” by which he meant, to know I have reached someone.
And so I came to realize that publication is also a means of doing this for me. Of reaching.
It’s a means of sending my words out in little glass bottles and seeing where they land. Of saying yes when a poet in Australia connects on Instagram asking if we can write something together; of delighting in this. Of thanking those who comment on my work and commenting back. Of opening myself up to a global community. Of embracing, and letting myself be embraced.
To Carry Your Words into the World
There are so many reasons to publish your poetry, none of which make sense and all of which are life-changing.
To announce yourself as a poet. To see your words in print. To witness. To play. To embrace.
Meanwhile, publication teaches countless lessons. There are the obvious: staying organized, handling rejection. And the less obvious: how to put your work out there, open and heartful and exposed, and hope that the words that have changed you will also change someone else.
