Haiku Society of America
.haiku column
The Haiku Society of America is pleased to host this ongoing column.
.Haiku: a place to share tools available to haiku writers and fellow haiku fans (like how to use Twitter, Facebook and Scribd for building community, self-publishing and marketing). The column will also feature interviews, blog spotlights and occasional multimedia presentations.
Gene Myers
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.haiku column 22
.haiku column number 22 • 10-7-2013
by Gene Myers <poetgene@gmail.com>
The maddening process of submitting poems
Back in the day, submitting to poetry magazines was a very different beast. We formed support groups for each other because of the processes that editors required.
We used to need spreadsheets; we used to keep lists. Every other year, I bought that expensive Poet's Market book. All that book consisted of was editor contact information. The desire for publication!
The publication process brings every poet down at some point. But how happy I was in the late 90s when magazines started accepting email submissions.
It seemed like such an obvious thing! Why must I pay for a pile of stamps, business envelopes, return envelopes and paper for cover letters?
On top of all of that, do poets really have the time and money to send query letters first? It seemed like each editor expected that I was put on this earth just to be some of the chaff from which they could cull the golden wheat that made up their very special magazine.
Of course, even into the 2000s, the most hoity-toity of magazines refused to come down to my level. They would scoff at the idea of email submissions for a while yet.
But now we have a generation of poets who have always been connected and paper submissions are requested by a smaller and smaller minority. Some magazines exist only in spaces like Tumblr.
One of the first decisions a friend and I made when we took over our lit mag, nowculture.com, was to make email submissions the primary way things got done.
It made submissions easier to track for us as editors and it does the same thing for poets.
All you need these days is an email address. Instead of using a spreadsheet to keep track of what poems were sent where and when, you can simply search your email sent box for keywords. It's a streamlined, cheaper and less maddening process.
I no longer need a support group.
Still, I must admit that some of my fellow editors like to do things the old fashioned way. And these are also good magazines with good editors. I begrudge them nothing! I may even, in fact, highlight some of them in a future column.
For now though, I'd like to focus on the ones that encourage email submissions. Here are a few of my favorites. Feel free to email me with your own favorites!
Frogpond
https://www.hsa-haiku.org/frogpond/submissions.html
Francine Banwarth, Editor
fnbanwarth@yahoo.comant ant ant ant ant
http://antantantantant.wordpress.com
Chris Gordon, Editor
mrcr3w@yahoo.comAcorn
Susan Antolin, Editor
http://acornhaiku.com/submissions
acornhaiku@gmail.comChrysanthemum
http://www.bregengemme.net/chrysanthemum/pages/en/submission-guidelines.php
Beate Conrad
haiku.chrysanthemum@gmail.comThe Heron's Nest
http://www.theheronsnest.com/submit133.html
Associate Editor: Scott Mason
beachstone444@yahoo.com
Associate Editor: Ferris Gilli
treefrog.house@comcast.net
Associate Editor: Paul MacNeil
theheronsnest@yahoo.com
Associate Editor: Fay Aoyagi
cloud.Heronsnest@gmail.com
Associate Editor: Billie Wilson
akwilsons@gci.netR'r Blog
http://www.roadrunnerjournal.net/pages_all/submissions.htm
Scott Metz, scott[@]roadrunnerjournal.net
Paul Pfleuger, Jr., mrflooger[@]yahoo.com• • •
Is there something you would like to see in a column? Email me at <poetgene@gmail.com>.
• .haiku column number 22 • 10-7-2013 •
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