How to Pick Your Best Poems for Submissions
This article is for: Beginning and Intermediate Poets
You've got a deadline and a folder full of poems. Which ones do you send?
If you want to make progress in the poetry world, submitting your work regularly—to journals, magazines, and competitions—is one of the best things you can do. And the single most important part of submitting is the part you fully control: which poems you choose to send.
You might think this is the easy bit. Don't you just send your best poems?
Well—you certainly don't want to send your weakest ones! But deciding which poems are your "best" is trickier than it sounds. We poets are often very, very bad at judging our own work. And "best" for a competition or a particular journal isn't always the same as "best" for, say, reading aloud to your poetry group.
So let's slow down and think about it properly.
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First, a reality check: is the poem even eligible?
Before you get to "is this poem good enough," ask a more basic question: is this poem even allowed? It's amazing how many strong poems get disqualified before a judge or editor reads a single line, simply because they broke a rule.
So check the guidelines for three things:
Length. Many outlets set a line or page limit. Your best poem is no use here if it's forty lines and the limit is thirty.
Theme. Some competitions and journals want work on a particular subject or in a particular spirit. A brilliant poem that ignores the theme is just a brilliant poem in the wrong place.
Prior publication. This is the one that catches people out. Most outlets want work that hasn't appeared anywhere before—and "anywhere" usually includes your own blog, a workshop forum, or social media. That poem you posted on Instagram two years ago may count as "published," and therefore be ineligible.
Run this eligibility filter first, on every poem, before you fall in love with any of them. It saves heartbreak later.
1. Don't rely on your own judgment alone
Now to the real difficulty. As I said: we are often terrible judges of our own poems.
Sometimes we become deeply attached to a poem—because of its subject, or its ambition, or how hard we worked to pull off a difficult form—and so we're sure it's one of our best. Sometimes we're right. But very often we see more in that poem than our readers do, and it simply doesn't land for them the way we think it should.
And the reverse happens too: we fail to recognize our own best poems, because they came too easily, or because they don't sound like our idea of what "good poetry" is supposed to sound like.
I once had a student who spent a whole course writing lively, spunky poems about everyday life in her own natural voice—clearly heading for an A. Then, for her final assessment, she handed in a plodding piece of blank verse about grief that sounded as though she were trying to be Wordsworth instead of herself. I couldn't give it more than a C. She thought she'd submitted her best work—because it was "serious" and sounded "like poetry," and she'd labored over it for weeks. She hadn't realized how good her other poems were, precisely because they'd come quickly and without a struggle.
It happens to all of us. Years ago I wrote a short sequence I thought was weak, because I'd let the language stay close to my ordinary speaking voice rather than making it "poetic." I showed it to my teacher at the time, Charlie Simic, honestly only because I had nothing else to bring him. He loved it, and told me to finish the sequence. Those poems became the core of the submission that won me the Maureen Egan award.
So the first rule of choosing poems is: get a second opinion.
Always have someone who knows poetry read your work and tell you honestly whether it's as good as you think. You don't have to abandon your own instincts—but you badly need a reality check, because your instincts about your own poems are the least reliable ones you have.
And here's an outside signal you can trust even more than a single reader: a poem's track record. If a poem keeps getting longlisted, commended, or placed in contests, that's the world telling you it's a genuine contender. Similarly, if a poem receives personalized rejections from journal editors, that’s also a sign that it’s a strong piece (as I discuss in this article). Either way, keep sending it. Near-misses aren't failures; they're data. A poem that's brushed the shortlist twice deserves your confidence more than the new favorite you can't yet see clearly.
2. Look for poems that do something a bit different
Here's something worth remembering: spare a thought for the editor or judge.
You might imagine choosing poems for a journal or a contest is a treat—days spent reading lovely poetry and picking your favorites. But if you've ever read hundreds of poems in a short window, under a deadline, knowing you have to declare some of them officially "the best," you'll know it's genuinely hard. It is surprisingly difficult to keep truly taking in poem after poem when the stack is enormous and your attention is fraying.
Under those conditions, plenty of worthy, well-crafted poems get skimmed and set aside—unless a poem does something to make itself stand out.
How might a poem do that? It might have a quirky, unexpected voice or layout. A striking, unusual title. An opening image so original it stops the reader cold. It might veer off in a direction you didn't see coming, or land on an ending that's a real surprise.
Let me show you what I mean. In a cut-up poetry workshop I once led in the UK, a poet opened a poem with this line:
After he left, she buried her eyes in the compost pile
The poem went on from there—a short account of the end of a love affair, built from image after surreal, unsettling image like that one. It won second prize in a competition shortly afterward, and I'm not remotely surprised.
Look at what that opening line does. It's concrete (compost, not "sadness"), it's violent and strange ("buried her eyes"), and it fuses grief with the garden in a way you've never quite read before. A tired editor or judge, forty poems into a stack of two hundred, hits that line and wakes up. That's the whole job of a standout poem: to make the reader lean in again.
So when you're choosing: look for your poems that do something a little unexpected—and if a good poem is playing it slightly too safe, see whether a fresh title or a bolder opening could give it that jolt.
3. Sound like yourself
Another thing judges and editors quietly reward, as they work through the pile, is a poem that sounds genuine.
By that I mean a poem written in language that's truly yours—you being yourself, not you impersonating some other poet whose work you admire. That doesn't mean you can't experiment (experiment can be deeply you), and it certainly doesn't mean you have to write about your own life or use the word "I." But a poem you don't wholeheartedly believe in—one you picked because it felt clever, or fashionable, or like the sort of thing that wins—rarely rings true to an experienced reader. They can hear the hollowness.
So as you choose: favor the poems that are real and true to you, over the ones that merely look impressive.
4. Favor poems you've had time to live with
In general, I'd steer you away from submitting poems you've written very recently. There are two reasons.
First, a brand-new poem is exactly the kind you're most likely to over-value—which is the whole problem from point #1. You're too close to see it clearly.
Second, a new poem hasn't had time to have its small faults ironed out. And small faults matter more than you'd think, because of another feature of the difficult task of editors and judges: when the pile is huge, they start hunting for reasons to rule poems out, rather than reasons to keep them in. It makes the job manageable. So a single weak line, a slightly tired image, even one unnecessary word can be enough for a poem to be set aside—with a small sigh of relief.
That's why polish is so important. Which brings up an apparent contradiction—didn't I just warn you against over-valuing poems you've slaved over? Yes. So let me be precise: the thing that helps you isn't effort, it's time and distance. Time lets you polish the poem and gives you the perspective to judge it honestly. A poem you've had in a drawer for six months has both. A poem you finished on Tuesday has neither.
So: choose poems you've had time to redraft thoroughly and then see clearly. Your dazzling new poem may well be dazzling—but it'll still be dazzling in six months, and you can send it then, once you actually know.
5. Shorter is often stronger
It's tempting to think the bigger and more ambitious the poem, the more it'll impress. But that's often not true.
The longer the poem, the harder it is to keep the quality up all the way through—and the more chances it has to develop one of those weak spots that gets it ruled out (see point #4). A shorter poem where every single line is watertight will frequently beat a longer, higher-reaching poem that doesn't quite sustain itself.
And isn't poetry meant to say the most in the fewest words anyway?
So when you're deciding between two candidates: favor concision and polish over ambitious length that's still a little rough.
For journals: choose a set, not just single poems
Everything above applies whether you're entering a competition or submitting to a journal. But journals add one extra wrinkle that competitions usually don't: most journals ask for a small batch—often three to five poems at once, whereas most competitions want single poems judged individually.
So for a journal, you're not just choosing good poems; you're choosing a good group.
A few things help here:
Lead with a strong one. Editors, like judges, are reading fast. Put a poem that grabs them at the top.
Show some range. Five near-identical poems make you look like a one-trick writer. A little variety in tone, length, or subject shows your reach.
Make sure every poem can stand the company. One weak poem in the batch can drag down the editor's sense of the whole.
I've written more about assembling these batches in my article on putting together submission packs—so I won't repeat it all here. The key idea is simply that, for a journal, the combination is part of what you're choosing.
A last word
Here's the reassuring truth underneath all of this: you can't control whether you win or get accepted.
You can't control the judge's taste, or the editor's mood, or which other poems yours happens to be up against. What you can control is which poems you send—and how honestly you've chosen them.
So do the part that's yours to do. Choose well, get an outside eye, send your truest and most polished work—and then let it go, and start the next poem.
Next Steps
Make a shortlist. Gather six to eight poems you think might be ready to send out. Don't agonize yet—just pull the candidates together in one place.
Run the eligibility check. For the outlet you have in mind, confirm each poem fits the length and theme rules, and hasn't already appeared anywhere—including your own blog or social media.
Get one outside read. Send two or three of your shortlisted poems to a fellow poet whose judgment you trust, and ask them plainly: which of these is strongest, and why?
Choose. For a competition, pick the single poem that's most polished, most you, and most likely to make a tired judge look up. For a journal, build a small set—lead strong, show range, no weak links. Then submit it, and get back to writing.
And if one of your poems keeps coming close—long-listed, commended, placed—keep sending that one out. The poetry world is quietly telling you something. Listen to it.
