Should Beginners Submit Poems to Journals and Magazines? Yes! And Here’s How

This article is for: Beginning Poets

If you’re just starting out in poetry, you may have dreams of being published one day—but you might not be planning to send your poems to editors just yet.

Isn’t that only for experienced poets, who know all the forms and techniques, and have practiced for years?

I can see why you might believe that: poetry does have a lot of techniques and tools to learn about, and yes, competition to get poems published is often very intense, meaning most poems get rejected.

But I believe that, even as a raw beginner, it is never too early to start sending out your poems—or at least thinking about doing so.

So this article, I want to explain why I think this, and see if I can persuade you too!

Why submit your poems at all?

If you’re anything like me, and most people I’ve taught or worked with, you probably didn’t start writing poetry because you wanted to publish your poems in journals and magazines.

If you thought of publication at all, I’d guess you thought more about getting a whole book into the world.

But even more likely than that, you probably got into poetry mostly for the sheer pleasure of writing poetry.

In fact, you may not have looked beyond that at all! You may still be simply in love with words and the thousands of ways you can make them dance in a poem.

And that is fine! It’s extremely valuable to feel that joy, and to keep it as your main reason and reward for writing, for all the years and decades that you write.

But there are good reasons to submit some of those poems to journals—and sooner than you think.

The benefits of submitting

There’s a lot that you might gain from sending poems to publications and getting them published.

(Or getting some of them published, anyway—I’ll say more about that soon.)

1. Submitting is Exciting

Who knows, this submission you’re sending off now might be The One that gets you published! Wouldn’t that be amazing?

2. Submitting makes you feel more Professional and Serious

Even before you get any acceptances, submitting poems to publications can make you feel connected to the literary world in a new way. Instead of poetry being just something you do alone, scribbling or typing in solitude, your poems are going to be read by someone who knows what they’re doing.

That can be very encouraging, and may even motivate you to write more, or with greater effort.

Both of which are likely to make you a better poet!

3. Getting a First Publication is Thrilling… and Important

And of course, when you do get accepted and published, there’s nothing quite like the sensation of seeing your first poem in print, alongside the work of other poets.

It gives you an amazing feeling of validation: now it’s not just you who says you’re a poet, because someone else agrees enough to choose your poem!
It’s a chance to show what you can do to the world, and maybe to get some appreciation back.
It’s a milestone in your poetic progress, and an encouragement and incentive to go further.
And all of these things can help you grow your confidence as a poet.

But that’s not all.

Getting your first publications is also the first step in building up your “poet’s CV”: a track record of times when your poetry has been valued and wanted by someone who knows about poetry.

The more entries you get on your poet’s CV, the more likely it is that you’ll be taken seriously as a poet, including being accepted in more publications.

When to start to submit

In short, there are so many reasons why submitting poems is helpful, that I strongly feel it is a great thing to aim for.

But when should you start?

I think there’s a simple answer to that:

You should start submitting right now!

Are you saying, “But I’m not ready! My work isn’t good enough yet! I need to learn more!”

If so, that’s absolutely what I would expect. And I totally understand the reluctance and the doubts.

But here are four very good reasons why now is the best time to get going:

While you may be right that your poems aren’t strong enough for publication yet, it’s still a great idea to get into the habit of sending poems anyway. Then later, when you do start to write more polished pieces, you won’t have to make a special effort to submit them, because you’ll be doing it already anyway.
Maybe you should let editors decide whether your poems are good enough! You never know who’s going to like a poem—I often greatly surprise beginner poets by saying that poems they didn’t like are rather good! We are often not very accurate in our assessments of our work, so try not to pre-judge them: just send your work out, and let others tell you if they want it.
I’ll let you into a little secret that happens to all poets: you need to send out your poems before they feel “ready.” A lot of the time, they will never feel ready—I find this all the time. But I have learned to send them out anyway. You can always revise them later, and it does you no good to sit on a pile of poems, waiting for the mythical day when you suddenly feel they are all “done.” Much better to send them into the world, and find out how editors feel about them.
Finally, and most crucially, rejections don’t matter. Everyone fears them, especially at the beginning, but truly, they aren’t important. And they certainly don’t mean your work is no good.

This last point is so important, I want to say a bit more about it.

A word about rejections

Of course, some of the best things about submitting your poems depend on being accepted eventually —which is a whole different thing than merely sending them! And that’s because:

Most of your submissions will be rejected.

I think it’s vital that you know this from the outset, so you can prepare yourself emotionally. But you also need to know that:

**Rejection isn’t something personal to you—it’s just how the poetry world works.**

There are many thousands more poets writing than there are journals to publish them, so editors have to be very selective, taking only a small fraction of the poems they receive.

For example, last year my acceptance rate was 5%. So I needed to send roughly twenty submissions to get just one acceptance. This is actually higher than the previous year, when it was 4%! And I’ve been writing for decades, with two degrees in writing, and a couple of contest wins under my belt too!!

So does this mean the situation is hopeless? After all, if I can’t get many poems taken, what chance does a raw beginner have Rest assured, the situation is not that bad.

Even as a beginner, there are strategies you can use that will considerably increase your chances.

They still won’t guarantee success, and you’ll always get more rejections than acceptances, but over time they should lead to a steady accumulation of publications.

How to submit so you get accepted

Make the hierarchy work for you

The most important of these strategies depends on the fact that not all journals and magazines are equal.

Rather, there is a hierarchy of poetry magazine and journals, with a few prestigious ones at the top, and many smaller ones at the middle and bottom.

The “top” ones tend to be bigger, older, and relatively well-known (at least in the literary world). The New Yorker might be at very top in America, and Poetry Review in the UK. Others that you might have heard of are Poetry, Ploughshares, Magma, or The Paris Review.

Getting published by these top places is a very big deal.

So for that reason, thousands of poets submit to them, including the very best and most experienced writers.

That means the editors of those outlets receive thousands and thousands of excellent poems for each issue—making these places almost impossible to get into!

This is partly why my acceptance rate is so low: I send my poems to all those top places, more in hope than expectation—and so, I get lots of rejections.

As a newbie poet, sending to these places is not your best strategy for acceptances!

You can of course send your poems anywhere you want—and I don’t want to discourage you from ever submitting to the top tier. You never know, after all!

But the best way to get your first publications is to look toward the other end of the spectrum—the smaller and less-well-known journals.

These outlets don’t receive anywhere near as many submissions, so your odds are much better.

Moreover, more experienced poets are less likely to submit to them, because getting published in one of these places doesn’t give them as much “poetry cred” as somewhere like Ploughshares.

So, for your first steps into submission, they are the ideal target!

Some ways to find suitable publications

OK, so how can you find these smaller, more accessible publications? Here are some tips

Work the local angle

Magazines and journals that are local to you can give you a great chance for your first publications.

Often, these publications are small and not very well known in the national poetry scene. So naturally they get fewer submissions. (This also makes them worth considering even if they’re not located near you.)

Some even restrict their submissions to poets with a local connection—which limits things further!

And even if they’ll take poems from anyone, anywhere, they may have a preference for publishing poets from their area—in other words, you!

All these factors make them very much worth your time.

Here are a few examples, so you know what I mean:

Smoky Quartz is a publication of my local writers group, the Monadnock Writers. It is small and accepts work only from poets with a connection to New Hampshire. However, the quality is still high, so it’s a good one for a beginner's CV!
n America, state Poetry Society publications in general are a good bet. These usually fly under the national radar, making them a suitable target for you. In New Hampshire we have Touchstone, from the Poetry Society of New Hampshire. This is open to anyone, including from outside the US, but because it’s not very well known, it doesn’t get a huge number of submissions (I know because I used to be an editor for it). But again, the quality is high enough to make it a credit to your CV.
Here’s one I don’t know, but found just by searching “Northwest poetry journals.” Timberline Review is published by another writers group, the Willamette Writers, and my guess is that it’s of decent quality, but probably not overwhelmed with submissions! Well worth a try.

I hope you get the idea. It’s easy to search for publications close to you, and you might find some gems!

Remember local radio, news, and anthologies

The local angle also goes further than just journals and magazines.

In my experience, local radio stations want poetry more often than you might think!

NHPR here in New Hampshire often puts out calls for poetry, such as this one or this one. This Poetry Parlor poet was featured on Arizona’s NPR station. And a few years back. another Poetry Parlor poet got her first publication through BBC Radio Solent in the UK.

Also look out for calls for local anthologies. Many poets here in New Hampshire were published in Covid Spring: Granite State Pandemic Poems.

In particular, local Poets Laureate often initiate anthologies or other publication projects for their area—so if you have a local Laureate, try to keep up with their news (often they have an email list).

Finally, even news sites sometimes do poems—or they may even have a regular poetry slot. The Portland Press Herald in Maine has a weekly column Deep Water, for example.

Special interest publications

Another great way into early publication is to search for journals that cover a topic that fits with your work.

I know of two poets who have recently achieved their first ever publication in this way.

A student who uses my Critique service, and who is a doctor, had a poem taken by Intima: A Journal of Narrative Medicine.
And a new student whose career is in education got her first acceptance from Teach. Write., a journal that publishes work by teachers and about teaching.

There may also be subject-based journals that are not be primarily poetry journals, but if they’ll take your work, that doesn’t matter much!

So if you know of or subscribe to publications like these, it may well be worth sending them a poem.

Restricted demographics

Instead of restricting the topics they publish, some journals limit who they publish.

I guess I’ve already covered one case of this, which is outlets that only publish poets from a geographical region.

But there are other ways journals can do this. For example:

Passager Journal only publishes writers who are over 50.
Literary Mama takes work only by mothers.
Kinsman Quarterly publishes only writers who are “individuals of BIPOC and underrepresented communities.”

If you can find a journal that fits with a group you belong to, this could be a good place to try.

New magazines

New literary magazines and journals are being founded all the time.

And when they first start, they may not yet have a much of a “name” to attract poets, meaning they get fewer submissions.

For that reason, new publications are an excellent route to try for beginners.

Finding new publications is a little harder, though! An excellent resource for this is Duotrope, which can send you a monthly email listing new journals. It’s not free, but it is only US$5 a month, which isn’t bad. And they do a free trial!

Places that already publish new poets

My last tip is to hunt for places where many (or most) of the contributors are pretty new to poetry.

When most journals and magazines publish a poem, then also give you a bio of the poet who wrote it. These bios can tell you a lot, because they usually tell you places where a poet has been published before.

So by reading a few bios, you can get a sense of how experienced are the poets who appear in a particular publication.

For example, if I look at a poem published online by AGNI, I see that “Greg Santos is the author of Ghost Face (DC Books, 2020) and several other poetry collections.” Now I know that Greg Santos is not a poetry beginner! And most AGNI poets are like this. So AGNI is not a great place to shoot for as a beginner.

On the other hand, at Front Porch Review, a typical poet is J. Fox Bedford, whose publishing credit is “poems published in Blue Villa.” In other words, she has been published in only one other journal, and that’s not a big one. So Front Porch Review could be an excellent place to send your poems. And in fact I recommend that you read it and check out if it seems a fit for you. Blue Villa too, for that matter!

My last word: submit more than once

I hope that, if you’re relatively new to poetry, I have persuaded you both that it’s possible to get published, and that it’s a good idea to try.

My last thought is this:

Always submit more than once to every place you choose.

Getting a first rejection does not mean that journal hates you won’t take your work ever! They might well accept something of yours later on. So keep sending!

And this is even more true if editors send you an encouraging rejection, asking you to please submit more poems another time. If they say that, they really mean it.

So I hope you get out your best poems, polish them up (if they need it), and find somewhere to send them—maybe even today!

Next Steps: Putting together a submission

It’s not actually that hard to create a poetry submission—here’s how to do it.

Gather a number of your poems—up to about 20, if you have that many. If not, then as many as you have!
Divide them up into 3 simple groups:
—Ones you like
—Ones you sort of like
—Ones you don’t think much of.
From the ones you like, create two more groups:
—Poems that feel a long way from “Done”
—Poems that feel closer to “Done.”
Choose between 2 and 5 of the “Closer to Done” poems—these are your submission poems!
Put these poems in a single Word document (or equivalent).
Put your name and email in the header, UNLESS the journal says they want anonymous or “blind” submisisons.
Write a short cover letter in which you::
—Address the editor or editors by name
—List the titles of the poems you’re sending
—Thank the editor(s) for reading
—Give a short third-person bio of yourself. Keep this simple—where you live, work, a hobby, perhaps how you came to writing.
Send the letter and the poems to your chosen journal, using whatever system they prefer!

And well done on making your first submission!

And lastly…. make another! And another. And another. Until it becomes a habit for life and helps make you the professional, published poet you want to be.