Tag: a guide to getting published in UK poetry magazines

Blog/

Poetry Magazines submissions windows update

If you’re already on my mailing list for poetry magazines submissions information, you’ll be getting an email in the next day or so with a reminder about opportunities closing at the end of this month. Then the newly updated spreadsheet will be on its way to you midweek. If you’re not on the list, now’s a good time to subscribe.

Thank you for being on my list, for buying my booklet A Guide to Getting Published in UK Poetry Magazines, and for your kind words of support. I’ve kept the spreadsheet going for several years now and try my best to make sure when I update it all the details are correct. I may not lay claim to having 400 mags on the list but it’s growing all the time and in my mind quality beats quantity. Thank you for your recommendations of new mags too. Poetry journals do rather come and go so your support in terms of subscriptions as well as submissions is much appreciated by hardworking editors!

audio/

New podcast, plus new updated ‘Guide to getting published in UK poetry mags’

Eeek!

I’m trying to fight a sense of overwhelm at the moment even though it’s all good things that are overwhelming me. Keeping my weekly work commitments going and doing all the reading and cogitating required for my course, which this term is a whistle-stop tour of the English Lit canon (week 3: Virgil & Ovid, Week 4: Chaucer and Dante, etc), plus thinking up a topic for my first essay. Finishing up the updated version of my 2018 ‘Guide’ – see below – I KNOW, why do that now? But there you are, it’s done. And of course the Planet Poetry podcast (see below) about to launch on the apparently auspicious date of October 21. Help!

Recent reading

Although I have the latest issues of Poetry, The Poetry Review and The Frogmore Papers to read, sadly they have been scarcely opened.  At the moment I’m tackling Chaucer’s ‘The House of Fame’ – now that’s a great title! – my first bit of Middle English untangling since school, where I think we spent an entire year reading just the Prologue to the Canterbury Tales. Then there’s Dante’s De Vulgari Eloquentia which I need to be ‘ready to discuss’ on Monday morning. Gawds.

Before the madness really set in I did enjoy Rachel Long‘s My Darling from the Lions (Picador), which is up for the Forward Prize I think. I struggled a bit with Shine, Darling (Oxford Road Books) by Ella Frears, also up for the Forwards and now also on the TS Eliot shortlist, so maybe I should give it another go. Lovely to see Sasha Dugdale on that list too – I haven’t read her latest collection but I really enjoyed Joy (Carcanet 2017).

A Guide to Getting Published in UK Poetry Magazines - 2nd edition

Updated ‘Guide to getting published in UK Poetry Magazines’

It’s been two years since the first edition, which sold out rather quickly, so I felt the time was right for an update. If you didn’t buy it the first time, or missed out, now’s your chance.

If you do have the 2018 book and are wondering whether its worth getting the new one, I can tell you that much of the content is the same, BUT

  • I’ve consulted more magazine editors and have included their insights
  • I’ve updated and expanded the magazine profiles (some have gone, others are in) and the resources section
  • The layout and organisation is (I think) improved and clearer

The cover price is £6 including UK postage – see this page for all the info about what’s in it, and to buy. Publication date is November 1st but you can preorder now.

If you’d like it sent to an address outside the UK, or would like to order more than one copy, do drop me a line first and I can confirm what the postage will be. Many thanks.

Planet Poetry the new podcast from Robin Houghton & Peter Kenny

The Podcast!

It’s here… well, the trailer is up, Episode One to follow very soon… Planet Poetry is a wee project from myself and Telltale poet pal Peter Kenny. We’re on a learning curve figuring out stuff like ‘why does Robin sound like she recorded this in the bathroom’ and ‘what the heck is that whining sound and how to we nix it’. But the main thing is, we’ve managed to pin down some fascinating poets for a chat, and that plus Peter’s and my musings on things poetical means we’re hoping each episode is an entertaining 40 mins or so. I hope you are enticed to have the odd listen, or even subscribe!

It’s a bit frightening, putting our voices out there, but we’re having fun doing it (so far!)

 

Angst/

Poetry & alcohol, contentious essays and more

Ah, December. The month when I may be found stressing over the kerning and leading of some choir’s concert programme, editing singers’ lengthy blogs and updating the Christmas card list. Yes! I am still a Christmas card aficionado, despite every year it becoming yet another soul-search about whether the negative impact on the environment of all that paper, print and roadmiles outweighs the social benefit of sending and receiving something with physical presence handwritten by a human being. I’m sure my parents must have faced similar moral dilemmas but I can’t imagine right now what they were.

Having just emerged from a ‘dry November’ – no, it wasn’t for charity, just for a challenge – I feel just a tad liberated. I mean, to return to alcohol. I wonder if the occasional injection of alcohol actually loosens up my brain in a way that allows me to think poetry – rather like allowing one’s gaze to soften and see those 3D ‘magic eye’ images that had their moment in the 1990s. It feels that way, anyway. I’m sure it’s not a scientific fact, otherwise there would be no teetotal poets. Which I’m sure isn’t the case.

Read this please

I came across this piece by the big-thinking Jon Stone, on how we could be re-thinking the traditional poetry book blurbs and steer clear of the dreaded ‘ceaselessly inventive and original, utilises precise, finely wrought language, deft musicality’ etc etc stuff that we read every day. This appealed to me greatly. I try to suppress the copywriter in me but It’s very hard when yet another claim about ‘clear-eyed poetry that demands to be written’ or whatever makes me want to be sick into a bucket. Although I admit I also fall into this particular bucket from time to time.

Jon’s essay is a fab read on its own, but don’t miss also part 1 in the series, on Prize Culture, sure to quicken a few pulses (“If the Forward or the Eliot mysteriously stopped producing spikes in sales for shortlisted books, a serious reform would be undertaken immediately, as a matter of emergency”). I can’t find parts 3 – 5 of the series, but I’m waiting for them with bated breath. These essays were written in 2014, so why have I only just discovered them? Conspiracy theories on a postcard, please.

Readings, launches

A couple of weeks ago I went over to Chichester to read at Barry Smith’s excellent Chichester Poetry Open Mic. Twas a fairly foul night, but the small audience had a big heart – not only was the open mic element one of the best I’ve experienced, but the lovely people bought a few of my pamphlets as well as my ‘Guide to Getting Published in UK Poetry Magazines’ (yes! another plug! But if I can’t plug it on my own blog then what kind of a marketer would that make me? No need to answer that one.)

A few nights ago I attended the launch of Antony Mair‘s wonderful new collection, Let the Wounded Speak. Antony had invited two other poets to read from his collection, and the whole event had been impeccably planned. Having others read his poems was a bit of a masterstroke. I love hearing Antony read, but giving the poems to another voice meant we got a different slant on the work. I admit I was surprised to find it so moving, although I’m not sure why I was surprised, because I’d been to the launch of his first collection performed partially by the actors of Live Canon, and enjoyed that immensely.

Antony has a theory that my poetry-related doo-dads such as the quarterly windows updates and the ‘how to’ book are displacement activities designed to stop me getting on with the first collection. There could be something in that. But there’s also the pleasure of dipping in and out of diverse projects.

One thing’s for certain, I need the relative quiet of January to get on with thinking about the collection. Music for now. I’m still enjoying laying out the programme and learning the music for our upcoming concert…

Blog/

Small milestones

'The Other Foot' by Robin Houghton, from 'Foot Wear' (2017)At the end of October it was my birthday, and over a boozy supper my dear husband suggested we do a ‘dry November’. I couldn’t think of a reason why not – no social events planned, Christmas to look forward to, and I certainly couldn’t face giving up alcohol for January, the most depressing month of the year. So November seemed like a good time to try the Ultimate Detox. I wasn’t fantastically optimistic we’d manage it to be honest. But here we are, 16 days in and holding strong. Fingers crossed!

It may seem like a minor thing, and perhaps a bit sad, but if my willpower keeps going to the end of the month it will feel like a mighty achievement. Other things I’m celebrating other than half a month without a drink: two and a half years so far free of cancer (without having taken the drugs), and my ‘how to get published in UK poetry magazines’ booklet selling out in ten days. This was amazing to me – and I wish I’d had more copies printed in the first place because it would have been so much more cost-effective than having to do a second print run. On the plus side, I’ve tested the market and (so far) have had some wonderful feedback. If you’ve bought it, and if you’re one of the lovely people who’s shared it and endorsed it on social media, thank you so much!

Having had my head down working on ‘the book’ my poetry writing has been a bit inconsistent lately. I received a rejection from Rattle – not entirely unexpected as it would be amazing to have a poem accepted there. Poems I sent to a couple of comps crashed and burned. Meanwhile the Poetry News theme of ‘the abstract space’ had left all of us in the Hastings Stanza a bit bemused. Having said that I did send a couple of poems in the end. I was quite pleased with one of them, so even if doesn’t work for P News I have hopes for it. I also sent three poems to Magma on the theme of ‘work’ – would be ridiculous if I did not, having banged on about my work-themed poems for so many years. An interesting thing: as I bundled these three together I realised there was another unifying theme, and something I’ve spotted elsewhere in my own poems. It’s starting to look hopeful for the much-talked-about first collection. Now that WOULD be a milestone. I almost daren’t say it!

Blog/

The new ‘How to’ guide is finally done…

A Guide to Getting Published in UK Poetry Magazines by Robin Houghton

Things have been a bit quiet on this blog for the last month, mainly because I’ve been full-on with the new booklet which arrived from the printers today – hurrah! More about that below… a quick zip through other news:

Workshops, readings etc

Last month I went up to London for a Coffee-House Poetry workshop with Anne-Marie Fyfe over two Sunday afternoons. The subject was ‘snow’ and all its freezing friends. We were asked to write a ‘lyric essay’ as homework, which resulted in my researching the myriad words for snow according to (no, not Inuit – that’s a myth) SKIERS. It took me back to my snowboarding days (sigh) and phrases like ‘crud’, ‘corduroy’ and ‘mash potato’. There were a number of new ones on me too. ‘Sierra Cement’ for starters. Great fun. Did I write anything that could be worked up into anything? Not sure really but at least it got me writing.

I’ve been to some lovely readings this month: at Needlewriters the very talented Liz Bahs read from her pamphlet Greyhound Night Service (Maquette) (which is on my pile to read, together with about ten other books) and announced that very day she’d just heard that Pindrop Press are to publish her first full collection next year. Great news and long-deserved. Then a triple launch for Lewes writers Jeremy Page (London Calling published by Cultured Llama is a book of short and flash fiction and what I’ve read so far has been very funny), Kay Syrad (Inland – Cinnamon Press – and another on my to read list!) and Clare Best. Clare’s memoir, The Missing List (Linen Press), has been many years in the writing. Clare’s beautiful prose, her presentation of the narrative through fragments, lists, descriptions of cine films and the melding of the distant and near-pasts is mesmeric. The slow revealing of the truth painfully mirrors the process of the author as she tries to recall conversations and make sense of what happened. Extraordinary.

On 29th October I read a poem at the Troubadour in London –  we’d been asked to write something especially for the evening so since it was my birthday I went with a little ‘found’ poem gleaned from the Hallmark.com website. I was inspired by knowing that Zaffar Kunial used to work as a copywriter for Hallmark. Anyway, DESPITE my having stumbled on the last line (I believe it was the poetry reading equivalent of ‘stacking it’) I had at least half a dozen people come up to me during the evening to say they enjoyed it. Unprecedented!  Maybe my stumble was still on my mind last Friday when I read alongside Jeremy Page and Peter Philips at Camden Poetry, a regular poetry event to raise money for the London homeless. It was a small audience, and rather quiet – I felt my confidence wavering somewhat, and didn’t sell any books. Perhaps I chose the wrong poems to read.  Later this month I’m off to Chichester Open Mic hosted by Barry Smith, which I’ve been told attracts a warm and full crowd, so I shall look forward to it.

Declined … again

So my carefully (I thought) composed ‘Develop your creative practice’ application to the Arts Council was rejected. I was asking for a modest contribution towards the costs of mentoring, to help me put together a first collection. The judgement was that they ‘preferred other projects’. Poor old page poetry just isn’t exciting enough I guess. It’s a minor setback but of course a bit annoying. Meanwhile I’ve had work rejected from The Poetry Review (am still trying!) and there are poems still on the slush pile at three other journals – one since February. Ho hum!

The Booklet!

Yes I’m calling it that, rather than ‘book’, so as not to raise expectations unreasonably. Although I’m rather proud of its 32 pages. A Guide to Getting Published in UK Poetry Magazines is now published on the Telltale Press imprint and orders are being taken as I type, thanks to some lovely people retweeting it (thanks chaps!). I had a lot of fun compiling it. Asking magazine editors for their thoughts on various things and reading the replies was one of the funnest things. Wrestling with the layout, edits and other tech issues was less fun, BUT I had the eagle-eyed and massively supportive Sarah Barnsley on my side, finding stray spaces and querying dodgy grammar in her thorough but very polite fashion. I hope you like the result!! I’ve got a landing page up here where you can buy it. Please forgive all the ‘about the author’ puffery, but I felt the need to parade my creds, as it were, in order to sell the darn book.

If you’re on my list for the quarterly submissions windows updates, you’ll get an email about it this week. Now for the really tricky bit: selling the bejesus out of it. It’s a groovy stocking filler! Tell your poetry writing friends!