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From Under the Slush Pile by Helen Ruggieri   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. *ACKNOWLEDGMENT PAGE 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. **ARBITRARY DIVISIONS 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. Readers may send comments to madhattersreview@gmail.com, Subject line: From Under the Slush Pile. Comments may be published. to top - from under the slush pile

. . Readers may send comments to madhattersreview@gmail.com, Subject line: From Under the Slush Pile. Comments may be published. to top - from under the slush pile