Metube and a Poetry Festival

In my last post I suggested that we could all pitch in and help in a variety of ways to build the audience for poetry. One of my suggestions was that you hold a poetry festival for literary journals. And I mentioned that I've done this for the past four years. That festival includes twelve journals, most from New Jersey but some also from New York and Pennsylvania. I invite the editors and then ask each of them to invite two poets who have appeared in the journal. So we end up with twenty-four poets. The editors set up their tables in the reference area. They provide subscription and submission information and their journals are available for purchase.

In a separate area, the Community Room, readings are held throughout the four-hour event. Each poet reads two poems. Poets who have books put them in the book sale area which is manned by library volunteers. There is also a freebie table where people can place bookmarks, fliers, workshop information, and so on. We get around 250 visitors each year and a goodly number of journals and books are sold. There's no budget for this, so everybody does their thing without an honorarium. For the editors it's an opportunity to get their journals some attention. For the poets it's an opportunity to give back to the journals that have supported their work. Everybody seems to have a good time.

I've been learning how to make movies with iMovie. I don't have a video camera, so I've been making slideshows with photos. Below is one of my early efforts, photos from last year's festival. It's perhaps not the best movie ever made, but it will give you a sense of the festival.

I've noticed some loss of quality results when uploading to Google Video and then downloading into blogger. Any tips? Like don't use pink for titles. I used Google rather than YouTube because the latter only accepts 100MB while Google provides you with a link that allows you to upload larger videos.

So get some popcorn, pull up a chair, and enjoy (just two minutes).

Widening the Audience for Poetry

If you're a poet and you're thinking about New Year's resolutions and if you've ever complained about the minimal audience for poetry, why not determine to do a few things to increase the audience. Sometime ago, with the assistance of several of the poets on the Wompo list, I compiled a list of easy activities that poets can do to spread the good word. I've done #1 for the past four years and have recently organized a #12 called Girl Talk: A Women's Poetry Reading, to be held on March 15.

Widening the Audience for Poetry

1. Hold a Poetry Fair or Festival at your local library or on the campus where you teach.

2. When teaching a poetry class at a college, university, or conference, use books from living and recently published poets.

3. If you are associated with a press, reach out to professors and teachers. Move beyond English teachers.

4. Make use of local book groups. Check your local bookstores and libraries for a list of book groups and what they are reading. Contact such groups and offer to give a poetry reading and discussion. Consider dispensing with a fee but instead ask that each member purchase and read your book ahead of time.

5. Create a Poetry Gift List. See Kelli’s holiday list as an example (Find November 25, 2006.) Give books of poems as birthday, holiday, or hostess gifts. It’s another avenue to share the work of favorite poets with others. Post on your blog.

6. Host an at-home salon to promote the work of a poet you know, perhaps for a new book. Invite guests outside the usual circle of poets. Mingle the arts.

7. Grab whoever is around you and take them to poetry readings/events. You might be surprised by the result.

8. Get poetry on the media whenever you can—tv reading, radio reading and/or interview.

9. Try to get your local newspaper to run some poetry and some poetry articles. It’s possible that if you send something, the editor will be interested. If you’re feeling ambitious, ask the editor if he/she would be willing to let you run a weekly or monthly poem feature. You could add commentary, but not required. Think Ted Kooser.

10. Try the above with magazines that typically don’t run poetry. Let’s let the editors know that poetry is relevant in contemporary American society.

11. If you have a blog, post poems and see if you can get some non-poetry blogs to link to your poetry entries.

12. Plan and host a themed reading at your local library, eg, for Women’s History Month. Ask each poet to bring as many followers as possible, plus at least one person who has never been to a reading.

13. Create an email list of your friends and acquaintances who are not poets and occasionally send them all a poem.

14. Take your excess journals to your doctor’s or dentist’s office. Leave them on the table.

15. Print poems on small squares of paper and tape onto mirrors in public bathrooms. Leave a stack on the desks at your library. Think of other places.

16. Those who teach—invite your colleagues from different departments to join you at a reading. Send them poems related to their field of study.

17. Place "Poetry in Public Places"—bumper stickers, postcards, buses, bookmarks, t-shirts.

18. Put poems on posters and place them in stores. Put them in your local library. Put them wherever you find bulletin space available.

19. If you live in an apartment building or condo complex, stalk the manager or president until she agrees to hold an annual poetry reading in the lobby or community room. Make it a poetry party.

20. Organize a poetry run. See Kelli’s blog for photos and details. (Go to June 13, 2007)

7 Things You Should Know about Being a Poet

Okay, I'm responding to Deborah Ager's challenge to make my own list.

1. Black velvet is elegant and lovely, but not mandatory. Oftentimes, the best poets don't look like poets (you know, the berets, the beards, the capes).

2. There's no money in it. None. That's why poets are more generous than other artists. Usually.

3. You must love words, must collect them the way some people collect coins or shells. And you must always be on the lookout for new ones.

4. Any day when a new poem is underway is intensely exciting. The poem goes everywhere you go. There's something obsessive about this.

5. Real poets read poetry. Voraciously. It's how we go to school each day.

6. You would write poetry even if no one published you. But you might not revise so carefully.

7. Poets must sit on their poems the way hens sit on eggs. There's no way to rush this.

Submissions by Email

Each time I go to the post office to mail out submissions, I come home with an enhanced appreciation for those journals which accept submissions via email. With the cost of postage, mailing envelope, SASE, paper, and printer ink, sending out can get costly. Fortunately, a number of good journals now accept via email, some only that way. Here's a short list of journals that accept by email. All of these accept simultaneous submissions unless indicated otherwise.

Print Journals That Accept Email Submissions

Barn Owl Review—new journal

Bateau—new journal

Cranky

Kenyon Review—no simultaneous submissions

Many Mountains Moving ($2 fee)

Meridian ($2 fee)

The Normal School—new journal

Pebble Lake Review
no multiple subs (which in my book means don’t submit more than one packet at a time—if the editor means no simultaneous submissions, that needs to be changed)

Ploughshares

Rattle

Redactions

Third Coast Review


There's a much lengthier list maintained online by Louie Crew. There are a few drawbacks to this list: 1) it does not indicate which are print and which are online journals 2) there is a huge variation in quality of the journals. So do be sure to check guidelines and past issues carefully.

Poetry Publishers Who Accept Electronic Submissions

Let me know if you have any print journals to add to my list.