No matter what the circumstances, you do you. Almost all Lit mags tell you to read past issues to get a feel for what they want. That’s mostly true. There’s a pattern there, sometimes subconscious, of what the editors are attracted to in a poem. We all have our likes and dislikes, our biases, and prejudices. We try to be aware of our faults and put our predispositions aside. It doesn’t always work. We’re human,…
Bless me oh poetry gods, for I have sinned. I gave my poem a boring, abstract title that even made me lose interest in it. How many poems have you seen with a title like ‘Love’, ‘Justice’, or ‘Morning’? Your brain is left scrambling even before you dive into the poem. It may set up expectations your poem doesn’t deliver. Worst of all is the dreaded, ‘Untitled’. Not only does it miss an opportunity to…
by Elya Braden, Assistant Editor While many of us have been to enough poetry workshops over the years to assemble a notebook or, in my case, several notebooks of poetry prompts, one trick I’ve especially enjoyed from one of my favorite writing teachers, Tresha Faye Haefner, creator of The Poetry Salon, is that of creating your own poetry prompts. I’ve participated in many workshops where the only prompt is a particular poem or maybe a…
Revising your poetry. You’ve got a notebook (computer) full of finished poems and wonder “What comes next?” Do you slap the results in an email and rush to submit them far and wide? Or do you carefully revise your work, and create the strongest poems possible? Revising poetry is the way to go, more so now that I know the depth of my not knowing. It’s a rare poem that can make the leap from…
