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I’d like to offer some suggestions for putting a poetry
manuscript together. I have sent out many with varied negative results.
PREPARING THE
MANUSCRIPT
You need about 50 poems to begin with. If the contest
asks for 60 don’t worry because there are at least ten pages of junk in
the beginning: inside cover, dedication, acknowledgments,*
table of contents, and so on. It will be longer if you add arbitrary
divisions**
for each section. That should give you at least ten pages’ leeway.
This is where you list all the places you’ve published
the poems in the manuscript.
The editors/judges read it to see if you have published
in any decent magazines.
If your publications consist of Ergo, Argot, poetry.com,
etc., don’t use them. Since poetry is not creative nonfiction, my
advice here is to make up a list of publications. Use some decent mags
like The New Yorker, Ladies Home Journal Go to the local library and
get yourself a copy of Poet’s Market. Find some good places, ones with
four stars like Hudson Review or The Partisan Review. Chances are one
in a million they’ll ever check. Dazzle them. If you win, you can worry
about it then.
All the winning manuscripts have these sections in their
book. Usually you can't make the connection, but the titles sound real
good. Again, use your creativity. Naked on a Slovak Bus or My Russian
Orange. It doesn’t matter. Be truthful: have you ever looked at these
and had them make sense? Of course not. Use big words to dazzle the
readers. They’ll blame it on their own ignorance and why shouldn’t
they. This is the time to dip into your "poem bank" where you
file good lines that have no home in a poem yet. If you don’t have a
bank, start one now.
ORDERING POEMS
Put the best stuff up front. What do I mean by best?
Good question. By best, I mean poems that the grad students who read
the incoming won’t get. They’ll assume you’re smart and pass you up the
food chain. Use big words or words from another language they won’t be
familiar with — Serbo-Croatian or Bengalese. Doesn’t matter what you
use because no one will know but a few stray Bengalis or Serbs and they
don’t usually end up reading poetry manuscripts.
TITLING THE MANUSCRIPT
The advice for titling is pretty much the same as
supplying section titles. A catchy title with big words that few understand
off-hand. For example, "Pentiamento Pizza." No one knows what
Pentiamento means — maybe pimento in Italian or something and everybody
likes pizza so you can’t go wrong and it gives a nice working class
cachet. And if it’s, spelled wrong no big deal. How many people do you
know with an Italian dictionary nearby?
LASTLY
Make sure the page numbers and the table of contents
match. Academic presses get all bent out of shape about this. Language
presses don’t care.
GETTING THE
MANUSCRIPT IN THE MAIL
MAKING OUT THE CHECK
This is the most important part of the entire process.
Double the reading fee. It can’t hurt.
Do not double the entrance fee for academic presses.
They’ve taken vows of poverty and obedience.
PACKING THE MANUSCRIPT
Use a 9-by-12 envelope and seal it with strapping tape.
It will take lots of energy to open the envelope and possible injure
some pages and you’ll get bonus points if their energy damages the
manuscript.
Don’t bother with a SASE for their reply.
If you win, they’ll get ahold of you.
And if you don’t win, who cares.
Good luck out there in manuscript land.
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