Op-ed by Victoria Spires
Upon being commended for the Ledbury Poetry Competition, and shortlisted for Aesthetica arts, poet Victoria Spires shared some wisdom about submitting your work to prizes and submissions windows.
“It was almost certainly Chen Chen, in his inimitable wisdom, who summed up the flummoxing paradox at the core of many writers’ psyches. Here we are, turning out our very souls onto a page on a frighteningly regular basis. And here we are, hiding our best work away in notebooks and Google docs, too afraid of being ‘seen’ to submit it anywhere. Or maybe we believe we are not good enough yet, not developed enough as a writer – we’ll wait another six months, or a year, or two years, before we start submitting in earnest. Or maybe we think our work is too niche, or isn’t sophisticated enough for the big name lit mags featuring the poets we most admire. Or maybe we have written something a bit sentimental, a bit goofy, and we’re worried about how it will be received. Will the poetry community be secretly laughing at us?
Will our canon be taken seriously if we try some things that might not work out?
This is where I think we need to be reminded that poetry is play. Of course, it’s many other
things besides that. But there is something about it that is essentially play-like, experimental. I
don’t know about anyone else, but one of the things that most appeals to me about poetry, as
opposed to other forms of writing, is the lack of rules. Want to pepper your work with a liberal
sprinkling of em dashes? Go for it. Found a really interesting-sounding Old English word for
hare that you are just desperate to bring to the wider reading public’s attention? Why not (maybe
that one is just me). Want to play around with white space, with enjambment, with starting all
your lines with ‘and’ just because it feels like that’s what the poem needs? There is, literally,
nothing stopping you.
We can qualify the idea of poetry-as-play by adding another word to it: serious play. By serious,
I mean that there is an end goal to it. Words carry meaning, beyond themselves. We are all trying
(I think) to find the perfect expression for some thought or feeling found deep within ourselves.
There is a craft at work, in poetry, that we can instantly recognise, even if we might have wildly
different ideas of what good craft is. It’s something we can work on, develop. We learn by
reading other poets, by studying how they do it, by emulating, by discussing and unravelling and
putting back together.
If poetry is play – how high, really, are the stakes involved in putting it out there in the world?
Next to zero. Every time we write something new and submit it somewhere, it’s part of the
experiment. We are simply trying to find out what works and what doesn’t work. Submitting is
just another part of the life that poems take on, beyond our own brains and hearts. We may worry
that our words will not find favour – that they will be misinterpreted, passed over. It doesn’t
matter. There will always be more words, and more places to send them. There are whole
websites, newsletters and apps that have been developed for the purposes of helping writers to
keep up with all the new lit mags, journals, anthologies, and competitions out there.
Submitting work does take a level of effort and organisation that can feel daunting.
I often struggle with the idea of spending time on ‘admin’ when I could be writing. Especially when
time for writing is hard-won to begin with. But it’s time incredibly well spent. Every hour that
you spend on editing and polishing up your own work, ready to send off somewhere, helps you
as a writer to develop. So does reading past issues and competition shortlists, to get a feel for
what kind of work has been successful and why. So does learning how to package your work up
into themes, ideas, possible collections for the future. So does having a go at writing a blurb –
what is it that’s unique about your poems? Who would be interested in reading them?
And don’t be put off from entering the really big competitions, or submitting your work to the
most prestigious magazines (as you see it). Your writing is just as worthy of being read as
anyone else’s. It belongs there, in the judge’s pile. While you will very, very rarely get any
detailed individual feedback if it’s unsuccessful, you will learn to intuit, over time, what it is
about a poem that’s not working. When it comes back, just re-edit it and send it out for
something else. Famously, a lot of poems, even some very well-known novels, are rejected many
times before finding a home. Some journals do offer personal feedback, usually for a fee – make
use of it, if you feel you need to. Many will offer encouraging words with a rejection if they can –
by letting you know that your piece was shortlisted, or enjoyed by the editorial team. Hold onto
these little snippets and re-read them when you are feeling dejected.
You will get a lot of rejections. It’s OK. Remember, poetry is play and everyone plays differently.
Still, it’s almost impossible not to take some rejections personally. The things you
care about are going to sting the most. I have had a couple of rejections this year that really
knocked the stuffing out of me, because they were things I wanted so much, and had poured a lot
of myself into. Consequently, I had built them up and allowed myself to feel hopeful about them.
But hope is what you need. Hope, a big dash of bravery, a willingness to experiment, and most of
all, a sense of openness. Poetry is not a closed business, although individual poems can
sometimes be closed circuits of meaning. But the act of writing poetry, and of reading it, is an
act of opening ourselves up to the world, and seeing what it wants from us. Don’t you deserve to
be opened?”