APRIL SUBMISSIONS
London Grip: Been asked to re-submit a poem here for June issue so will do my best to write or find two other poems to go with it.
Frogmore Papers
Poetry Ireland Review
Amsterdam Quaterly
Briefly Write
Consilience
Interpreter’s House
Porridge
The Shore
Submitting poetry to magazines these days seems to be akin to buying a lottery ticket or as I remember as a child filling in the football coupon with Xs….
Here are March Xs on the coupon…
So far the score is not good
Magazines Submitted to Jan- February- 10
Rejections – 10
However the average success rate of submission windows that run into thousands literally is below 10%…..according to the magazines themselves nice to let me know..here examples from two replies..
We print less than 1% of the poems sent in each call,
We received a large number of submissions, only 10% of which will comprise the next edition.
So on that basis the best hit rate mathematically is 10 acceptances for every 100 mags submitted to…..at most in fact nearer 1% or 0ne in a hundred acceptances which says it all really..
I do only do online free submissions so at least there not the cost of stamps as in the old days.
Over a two year period 1992-4 I kept records of paper submissions.
The hit rate then was about 10 in a hundred so it looks like chances due to volume are bout one tenth of what they were in 1990s if I being optimistic my feelings is it now really about 1% of what it was ten there more poets out there now than potholes…
This because of pure numbers the increase in people self-identifying as poets has probably increased by a factor of a thousand plus.
MARCH SUBMISSIONS
So here we go
Current SCORE
Potential Magazines this month = 14
Actual number submitted = 7 Rejections so far = 4 Open = 3
Banshee (Ireland) Instant hit as designed by someone who knows how to design a cover and it Irish..that enough to submit end of…
Firewords (Scotland) I like Scotland it produced better writers over last 100 years than England and that a self-evident truth…
London Magazine X (Poetry Prize submission £10 a poem ) No I do not pay to enter anything …too mean and too sensible. They rejected me politely last month for a free submission I do not need to pay to be rejected when I can get it for free…free market economics..
Magma X (Themed ‘Grassroots’ not a good theme ) Very worthy but I don’t write social work poems….or do therapy worksops…or save whales very often..I do what I can and like most sane people bemoan the mess the Tories have made of these islands…
Shearsman X
By the time you read through the fairly arrogant tosh that the editor throws at you you pretty much feel like torching the whole thing. Oh and if they have to tell you they publish more women now it says it all really…
Also the editor handily tells you that nobody gets published until they have evidence of a period of being published thereby establishing a fan base to sell the fucking things ( although 99% of all poetry sells fuck all..) which happened with my Salt pamphlet which contained 20 years of published poems and sold 62 copies.
So cheers at present rejection rate I be six feet under long before I have the smattering of published poems required. Which why I self-publish and say bollocks to that system….submitting is a fun game nothing more and there some good stuff out there just have to dig deep.
OneArt (usa) XXXXX
Cool faux pop art look even cooler response times which makes me suspicious. Overall design lacking is basic at best suggests grad student building own profile job. Ha not even that actually quite an operator and CV builder on own. This mag is pretty fake and a prop to his ambitions basically…..not unlike a few similar people this side of the pond.
Response within 24 hours was a stone cold auto-respond so suspect he (not they) read bio do not read work . Ah checked all their recently accepted work and yup Bio derived acceptances or they just so good at picking every acceptance with a good bio..ha ha ha ..no wonder they turn around so fast . Not a single poet (80% female by the way but that could just be state of play right now as no overt feminist flags) on their acceptance list had less than a fully developed CV .
Oh and he can help you be a better poet..indeed…
For that to be the case we have to look at his work
These three poems by ********** explore the subjective nature of reality…
I not going to present here but what follows are three pretty awful poems which figures…..made me laugh out loud.
I will not be troubling OneArt again …good thing is can dismiss as crap quickly and re-purpose to somewhere half decent instead 🙂
Full House Literary X
Very nice personalised reply good people to do business with will certainly send again in future.
Trans Non Binary friendly young guns mag part of Bad Betty/Broken Sleep wokeism. Terribly twee but then a generation that never worked and spends time networking has never really got its hands dirty. Closer to modern music than poetry as I knew it but that not such a bad thing. Submitted but would never expect to be published as for them it like trying to comprehend their grandfather’s point of view but then some grandfathers are still cool like Patti Smith ..
Ditto.
Stone of Madness Press X
is a physical [online] and conceptual space for queer, trans, and neurodiverse writers. I not in that tribe but a clear masthead and purpose again thank you for clarity and all the best.
Swim Press X
is an independent publisher and magazine
established in 2021 by a group of four Lancaster University
friends. (clarity and honesty well done).
All women editors so probably slanted toward feminist perspective.
It reminded me of a Creative Writing course I walked away from where too many sublimated sexual desire stories being written by young women to be healthy ( Wolves tore my clothes etc)..whilst amusing I not going to send any such story to a theme of ‘Desire’ but all best…from small acorns mighty oaks grow could be new generation Virago in 10 years so don’t knock em..
Muleskinner Press X
Despite my kind words a kindly worded rejection which did not appear to auto-respond will try again.
Made me laugh which not a bad thing these days and so American it could be an Americana music journal even the name….submitted three ‘reckless’ i.e. unpublishable anywhere else pieces that maybe the Yanks get but probably not…the best editorial CVs I seen in a while and a fucking relief after wading through the usual BMCC stuff * (British Middle Class Cosy). What the hell they will make of me god knows but hell they got Trump to deal with..I should be easy 🙂
Thimble literary Online X
Same as above not much of a reply but not stupid or asking fro money which a bonuds these days woudl consider again.
Well designed know what doing another USA based magazine which mixes the music and art worlds into mix my kind of people…bit confused by submissions page and suspect already closed but sent them some poetry anyway. Likeably laid back submission page without the usual rigorous delineation of sending ..
Moss Puppy: XXXXX
Young uns with no sense of design values chucked together at WIX which means pretty unprofessional..in time maybe improves but looks like thrown together by 12 year olds ..actually most 12 year olds could do better.
Really am I going to submit to something that looks like a teenager’s bedroom..no…even the name is Twee Crap as is the stoopid themes idea…oh and the fanart section well words fail me…they really do…makes Deviant Art look interesting.
Propel:
Serious stuff which a relief after last farago…(which I believe was the name of a Poetry Magazine once will have to check).
So serious I doubt I stand a chance until Faber come knocking but worth further reading and as have two days to do so will investigate further….looks very good.
Hell I even heard of some of guest editors and they are my age …its a start and maybe a small shaft of light at the end of the tunnel 🙂 Submitted all six of my father’s things poems.
I wanna be Rejected….
I’m your top prime cut of meat, I’m your choice,
I wanna be rejected,
I’m your yankee doodle dandy in a gold Rolls Royce,
I wanna be rejected,
Kids want a savior, don’t need a fake,
I wanna be rejected,
We’re all gonna rock to the rules that I make,
I wanna be rejected,rejected,rejected.
Back in 1996 at the height of my poetry career (in Scotland not here!) I reviewed for the great Lines Review I not seen this in years but here a John Glenday and Richard Price review.
I posting as I starting to get my pencils sharpened for some more reviewing after a break of 30 odd years.
I feel like an undercover ‘sleeper’ activated behind iron curtain in a Len Deighton novel. I have returned to Poetryland with fake ID and a Walther PPK hidden in my Jacket (Poetry ref there peeps)..just so you know
Having dipped my toe in Poetry World UK again I starting to get my bearings.
Here a online statistics crib that may tell some of the story:
Source: https://wordsrated.com/poetry-book-sales-statistics/
It not great. The biggest news to me as a 65 year old male is that the demographics of actual purchasing are heavily slanted at under 34 and female (I knew female make up 75% of all book sales as Neil Astley (Bloodaxe) kindly filled me in about that in 1993 at a Norwich book fair as he handed me back my poems and it fair to say that he has produced more books with female authors than just about anybody in the UK ( pays the mortgage I guess). To be fair he also used that income to generate a list with some decent poetry and especially translations. Ditto Carcanet which although terribly embedded in selling to academic library shelves and students ( count the number of mid range OK academic authors on its list and you pretty much in 80% territory). In fact you probably not get an academic job in poetry in UK these days without a Carcanet/ PNR seal of approval. Like a snake eating itself academic authors then ensure academic students on the PHD production line get published its a revolving door.
SO what world do you live in?
There are several overlapping poetry worlds to deal with which roughly speaking are:
So where do I pitch old-fashioned slightly adventurous but well-crafted white male verse at these days?
Well it not a total disaster as amidst the floods of drivel there are some solid slightly dull places for solid slightly dull poetry which may actually be about something other than feelings and or Dolphins. Larkin would approve types.
Also not all academics are CV boosting narcissists and a few can actually write and probably would rather not be checking their Google Scholar ratings every day.
Academia is a bit like an open prison plenty of trips out if a good academic but break the rules you in solitary or worse assigned to a failing course and made to promote it.
I not given up entirely but I do feel low when wading through the poetry worlds out there now.
To make things better I would suggest banning all people over 30 from creative writing courses that would help. By then they probably never get any better and they could do something else useful to society instead of sitting in coffee shops discovering Joyce and Wolf.
A link to this article was shared onine by by Martin Malone former editor of Interpreter’s House which pre Martin I helped survive as a paper edition by creating a basic website.
The price of progress is that the magazine now now exists only online.
https://theinterpretershouse.org/
The article by Wendy Pratt of SPELT magazine
https://speltmagazine.com/
available to read here:
https://wendypratt.substack.com/p/notes-from-spelt-magazine-the-impossibility
My response in comments as follows:
I agree totally with your comments above although I have seen a lot of poor quality work riding on the coat-tails of the ‘so-called’ working class writing revolution which more a Bookseller PR stunt than actuality. The print medium died the day Oxford University Press tipped its lead type into the Thames or is that urban myth based on link below? (there is an eco-poem if ever there was one perhaps I should write it).
https://hyperallergic.com/181625/a-century-after-being-cast-into-the-river-thames-a-celebrated-typeface-reemerges/
It ended in early 1990s when a press I represented by actually hand set a poem of mine (I will find and share on my blog) in lead type. They had one of the last machines for creating type and a man came to mend it He was the last of the generation that had knowledge to mend them. The knowledge died with them.
A decade later I helped Oxford University convert ALL paper based Science publishing acquisition to computers and then a whole College’s library. Digital hit hard around the Millennium and since then a younger generation have developed entirely new habits of consumption, dissemination and interaction. Paper unless sold as anachronistic fetish object ( works for Vinyl records) is to all intents and purpose dead as a piece of type in muddy water. So forgetting the argument that internet is green (it is not the servers and electric generation to fuel it alone cost a few rain forests). Where do we go now?
Substack a good choice. I suggest you read the Jazz critic Ted Gioia (brother of poet Dana Gioia) he very cutting edge on where we are now and it isn’t good news.
https://www.honest-broker.com/
Your magazine looks great but it also looks like something I would have shelved at Poetry Library in 1990 (I been around that long). As for getting your messages across I returned to ‘the poetry world’ or rather the blizzard of new ‘worlds’ each tightly regimented and screened online (or paper) come to that. This is not because all magazines now are nepotistic (though a good few are or class interest based) but simply because the numbers now are frightening. Like music anybody with a phone and half a brain can be a poet if they want to (before AI made it even easier to simulate poetry) .
I grew up in an era of clearly defined gatekeepers ( Faber, Cape, Bloodaxe etc) which on the whole male dominated yes but because numbers far lower and generally standards higher it was easier to at least work out one’s place in the (singular) poetry world. Post world-wide web that no longer possible one has to find a nest that suits and defend your interests whatever your politics from that lonely tower as global capitalism basically runs riot below.
As a white (working class whatever that means these days and frankly in some cases not much) male aged 65 trying to re-enter the worlds (plural) I on a hiding to nothing and add fact that I been writing about the environment for nigh on 40 years it appears I am now almost unpublishable going by feedback I had so far. The reasons for that are generational (ageism) political (sexism) and demographic as I do not read or wish to engage with certain class ridden circles or even some younger circles of interest any more than they do me.
So Substack is a potential rabbit hole to another wonderland. It does work but if you enter this domain be prepared to post daily to make it work and engage followers and also to engage directly with thorny issues of political activism if talking Green we are no longer in village fete friends of earth stage we are in defined as eco-terrorism (pace Edward Abbey) territory now. Truly engage and it may be that Spelt finds a new niche.. paper is not dead its just not printed on any more..
Out of frustration I took a new tack towards ECO and Poetry on my substack is a long job but it seems to engage people far more than straight poetry offering. You may find of interest.
We are in for stormy weather
https://darkweather.substack.com/
My old style words on a screen and very occasionally a page although less so in the last 20 years than before here.
https://shaunbelcher.com/writing/?page_id=141
A lot self-published because I an early adopter and specialist in multimedia. I find the fetishism apparent in the ‘self-publishing’ wrong attitude symptomatic of those who should know better slamming the stable door shut after the horse not only bolted but also shot dead…..
It generally white middle class that promulgate that attitude of ‘I don’t want my poems online’ because they dream of standing in a bookshop with that object in their hand feeling pleased with themselves along with the other 5000 recently cheaply published (thanks to digitisation of the production line) authors feeling the same ..
It is complete nonsense.
I look forward to the podcast…..they are hard work….I ran a music one for a year.
Yesterday evening I submitted to all these with varying degrees of success with the exception of Belle Ombre (which I had never heard of and which seemed a contender for the new Agenda up its own (hare’s) arse award). I got something off to all the rest even the one that I was not supposed to get to i.e. London Review of Books which I worked out later drops subs in the genre they trying to make money on through a competition…nice little capitalist ploy there LRB.
I sent three poems anyway to annoy them.
The rest especially those using submittable were all good. Clear guidance and appeared to know web from elbow. Except Allegro which should win an award for bad usage of out of date blogger and no comprehension of design or fonts. (The editor kindly rejected me already so we evens). The good thing is some decent poems rejected already on the recycle route to be flung elsewhere.
I submitted a whole pamphlet to The North because it a good magazine and it did not say you couldn’t.
London Grip I had heard rumours of through Neil Fulwood and John Lucas connection.
Poetry submitting is a bit like going out to bat without a bat..you take a defensive stance and wait for the hundred mile an hour hard ball of rejection to bounce into your sensitive spot.
The balls get bowled back on average six months later it appears so not losing sleep over some of the more arcane ‘self-publishing and social media’ rules which frankly bullshit invented by people still working out what the internet is.
More frightening is the references to NO AI which like horse and stable door frankly too late most of the crap I seeing around the magazines and the hell for leather publishers is probably already AI induced.
Looking back at those difficult years now, do you feel that the silent
stretches were detrimental to your work?
If I hadn’t been fighting battles on other fronts, I might have been scribbling boring middle-aged verse – like MacNeice who twittered on for a decade until the miraculous final poems. It seems that the Muse favours the young and then, if you can weather the middle stretch’, the pensioners. Silence is part of the enterprise. Most poets write and publish far too much. They forget the agricultural good sense of the fallow period. The Muse despises whingers who bellyache aboutwriter’s block’ and related
ailments.
One of the best things ever said to me about poetry was John Hewitt’s off-
hand remark: `If you write poetry, it’s your own fault.’
JODY ALLEN RANDOLPH – Michael Longley in Conversation
This interview is taken from PN Review 160, Volume 31 Number 2, November – December 2004.
I was relieved to see that I not the only middle-aged poet who had a fallow period. Until now I thought my future was more akin to a Larkinesque slump as he detailed in the majestic yet sad refrain on this late poem…
by Philip Larkin
Most people know more as they get older:
I give all that the cold shoulder.
I spent my second quarter-century
Losing what I had learnt at university.
And refusing to take in what had happened since.
Now I know none of the names in the public prints,
And am starting to give offence by forgetting faces
And swearing I’ve never been in certain places.
It will be worth it, if in the end I manage
To blank out whatever it is that is doing the damage.
Then there will be nothing I know.
My mind will fold into itself, like fields, like snow.
So maybe like Longley (still alive at 81!) the best is yet to come….or some is yet to come ….
Sometimes all it needs is a trigger and Kit de Waal’s excellent piece in the Guardian yesterday brought together a lot of things for me that been bubbling under the surface.
Her article ‘Make room for working-class writers‘ touched a nerve…..
read it here https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/feb/10/kit-de-waal-where-are-all-the-working-class-writers-
Also she made a comment about how the Proper v Performance Poetry debate basically divides along class lines and that really rang true for me.
It is the reason I leapt to the defence of McNish and Tempest. Adrian Slatcher’s comments about the experience of being a working class writer also hit home.
In 2011 we were both published by SALT as Salt Modern Voices but throughout I felt an outsider at that particular party.
I was reading next to very affluent new poets from privileged backgrounds who frankly I had nothing in common with.
Most of the audience were from their background not mine and in a particularly depressing reading in Oxford I actually felt antagonism for raising my subject in their presence.
A mostly white female middle-class leftist audience did not like to hear about the destruction of the working class communities of Oxford which allowed them to enjoy their academic privileges.
Some inconvenient truths are not wanted even by allegedly left-leaning liberal elites.
Adrian’s very erudite piece on the subject here:
http://artoffiction.blogspot.co.uk/2017/12/a-working-class-writer-is-something-to.html
Since then I have noticed that academic poetry and performance poetry have started to separate in a alarming way. This is an outcome of a deliberately devisive education policy by government that increasingly appears to be a ‘pay to play’ approach to education.
If your parents invest a £100 k plus (BA+MA+PHD fees)you will one day get the payback of an academic career before 30 in return . An American privatised model.
These factors stopped me writing..I gave up..I felt nobody cared..that there was no audience for what I did..and I was right….the middle-class ‘proper poetry’ area isn’t interested in me..isn’t interested in the truth of working class lives and experience as a subject.
PN Review and others are not interested in working class experience one iota.
You want to play in the Premiere League magazines better hide all that personal shit and start writing about your foreign holidays, how difficult it is being a middle class person post Brexit or at worst make up shit about Impressionist painter’s wives you have no knowledge about but it feels authentic enough to your equally pretentious and middle-class readers sitting in their sun lounges drinking martinis to swallow.
Poetry for me has always been a means of articulating my anger at the class system in the U.K.
It has always been polemical even when it appears to be purely personal. As Raymond Williams wrote about the Romantics ‘the personal is political’.
So I have the impetus and hopefully in a few weeks a book to go with it…..I feel that inspired. I have been silenced for too long.
I am coming off the subs bench……I may not make the first team but I will put in some hefty tackles especially on Simon Armitage …the David Beckham of poetry;-)
Poems written in London and Oxfordshire. Published in early 1990s in Last Gasp pamphlets. Last Gasp was a poetry open mic I helped run with poets Giles Goodland and Bridget Kursheed in Oxford.
From 1986 I was heavily influenced by Raymond Carver and especially his book FIRES. Indeed I attended his memorial readings event in London and saw Edmund White, Richard Ford and Salman Rushdie read in his honour.
I think this volume is the ‘lost volume’ as I was living at home in Didcot and totally cut off from literary world from 1988 until 1990.
I did do some readings through the Last Gasp group until I moved to Edinburgh in 1993.
None of these poems have been seen apart from in these hand made pamphlets.
This was the volume which would ‘break me’ I thought the world was my oyster…..I would outwrite Simon Armitage…
Well hindsight is a wonderful thing I am unemployed and he is Oxford Professor of Poetry..
I read with him in Reading in 1990..he was arguing with the arts officer over money..he a little more pushy than me.
I was unemployed and dressed like Yeats and hadn’t got a clue that it was a poetry ‘business’ …
BUT I could write…fuck lot of good it did me…..
But this was all done off my own back.. no University Department objectives to tick box ..no influential friends..nothing but words..and in the end words is all there is….
Its as good as it gets maybe one day I get some recognition for all this but I wouldn’t bet on it…..
Ironically I got recognition in Scotland……should have stayed there but that another story and the next volume ..Landmine…
Och Aye…
Style note all hand written then typed on my mother’s old typewriter.
The last few pages of the document as pdf have originals and some uncollected poems.
The blue pen and line through a poem are from Giles Goodland when selecting for a pamphlet…I did not have second copies as everything had to be typed by hand …so here it is..
Diesel on Gravel…..1990
My first poems from 1981-1985 after art college. Some were published in the first volume of a’The New Magazine’ then just started by Gerard Woodward who  went on to be a well known poet and novelist.
Unsure of my writing I used the  ‘David Bell’ alter ego.
32 poems including the sequence ‘The New Country’ from 1985.
1981-5 never shown these to anyone since. Post art college first poems..reading Pasternak and Heaney…Bunting and W.C.Williams…and a hefty bit of John Masefield and Edward Thomas..love poems to a non-existent mythical England…32 poems including the mad The Moon Over Henley my version of Bunting and T.S. Elliot..I kid you not…with some Echo and The Bunnymen in there too:-)
32 poems because same number as Hughes ‘Hawk in th Rain’…along with Heaney a major influence the only four poetry books I owned at art college were Heaney’s ‘ Death of a Naturalist’, Â Hughes’ book and Sylvia Plath’s’Colossus’ and Thom Gunn ‘Sense of Movement’Â .not a bad start:-).
I still have all four..
The Tithe Machine by Shaun Belcher on Scribd
Visit OPEN BOOK WEBSITE AND FORUM
For latest info on readings at The Organ Grinder monthly
Visit SHORT CUTS
the short story blog
© 2024 SHAUN BELCHER
Theme by Anders Norén — Up ↑
