HI EVERYONE. There are ONE MILLION people subscribed to r/poetry, and more subscribers for whatever reason JUST KEEP SHOWING UP. That’s great. We love you. You love us. We all love poetry. Let’s do some FAQs.
What is this subreddit for?
Talkin’ bout the world of poetry and poets. Share your favorite poems, discuss how poetry works, ask for homework help, gossip about lit magazine drama. Hell yeah.
Can I share my own original poetry here?
No. Aaaaaaaaaaaabsolutely not. Very very no. Head on over to our sister subreddit, r/OCpoetry. (that would be “original content” poetry.) Make sure to read the rules before posting your stuff over there, as they have another fairly baroque system.
Why can’t I share my own original poetry here?
There was a massive amount of original poetry, and it clearly needed its own space. So about seven years ago, we made the decision to split, and create a dedicated subreddit for original poetry. So this subreddit is for the world of published poetry, and for discussing it.
What’s a tag?
It’s our categorization system. This is one of the ways we prevent the subreddit from getting flooded with spam and other irrelevant stuff. You will notice that every post here has a certain word in brackets, like [POEM]. Anytime you want to post here, you need to put a tag into the title of the post, or else the robots will remove it. It’s not case-sensitive, so you can type [pOeM] or whatever and it’ll work fine. The tags are:
- [POEM] – it’s for sharing poetry, duhhhh
- [OPINION] – for discussion. “I hate rupi kaur” is a perenially popular hot take, if you want to start a fight
- [ARTICLE] – news and fun facts about hot developments in the poetry world
- [RESOURCE] – a literary journal, poetry writing technique, or automatic scansion robot. This category might share significant crossover with the [article] tag, so just pick whichever sounds most suited to whatever it is you’re sharing.
- [PROMO] – If you have been published in a journal, or you have published a chapbook/collection, this is the one and only place you can promote your original work. You cannot use the promo tag for: self-published stuff, youtube videos, and the like.
- [HELP] – self-explanatory: call for aid from the randoms on the internet. what’s a lit device? What poem is on the tip of my tongue? how do I do my homework? And if you are asking for homework help, please for the love of god explain how much you’ve done. it’s not fair to ask the randoms to do your homework for you. The randoms have their own homework.
- [OPPORTUNITY] – Share contests, publishing opportunities, or other one-off commissions or requests to collaborate on artistic projects.
- [META] — complain about how the subreddit sucks
Is a tag flair?
No no no no no no
Can I share poetry in other languages?
PLEASE. Other languages are cool. It probably would help to post a translation though. It is completely okay to post original translations of published poetry. If you’ve translated the poem from your native language into English, just say so in the post.
Why was my post removed? It contained a really famous poem!
Probably because your poem is in our Hall of Fame: poems that got posted so often, that it started to get super boring.
How do I get into poetry?
Great question. “Poetry” is not really a single thing, but a vast and amorphous category of literature (and, kinda, music) spanning thousands of years. Sounds a bit daunting! So here are some of the best resources to make inroads and start appreciating stuff.
The Poetry Foundation has an excellent section just called “Learn” separated by age group (children, teens, and adults) with just scads of articles and podcasts teaching you how to appreciate poems. They also feature a glossary of poetic terms. .
Poetry 180 is a list of contemporary poems curated by former US Poet Laureate Billy Collins. It was intended as a way to give high school students a poem a day. They’re all really accessible, and it’s a great tool for discovering authors you might like. This is more helpful than, like, jumping into old stuff like Shakespeare, Wordsworth or Donne and expecting to know what the hell is going on. (Those are all great poets too, but c’mon, we’re modern dudes, we live in the modern-dude-world).
ModPo is a free online course with my main man Al Filreis at the University of Pennsylvania. He and his students take you through the modern poetry canon, from kinda mid-1800s (Dickinson and Whitman) all the way to the present day. The structure of the course is basically videotaped close readings of famous poems, and it’s a really helpful way of learning to think about poetry. This is a really great course and I cannot recommend it enough. There’s also a class forum which is active year-round. You’ll have to create a free account on the Coursera platform to access all the stuff.
If you’re more interested in learning about the classics, you can pick up a copy of the Norton Anthology . It’s two thousand pages long. It contains nearly every significant poem ever written in the English language.
We also have a large and slightly organized wiki that you can browse.
How are you even supposed to read a poem?
Fortunately, there’s a little article on exactly that subject.
How do I find other poems I might be interested in?
Poem-a-day from poets.org will, as promised, email you one new poem per day. Similarly, the Poetry Foundation’s newsletter will do the same. This is probably the easiest way to do things.
Poems are published in literary journals of various sizes and prestiges. (Please leave more suggestions in the comments if you have your own favorites — there are literally thousands of them.) Some great ones are:
- Iowa Review
- American Poetry Review
- Poetry Magazine
- Kenyon Review
- Penn Review
- The Paris Review
- Ploughshares
- Palette
- Glass
- Rattle
- Kissing Dynamite
- Split Lip Mag
How do I write poetry?
Uhhhh oh man, that’s a big question. I’d recommend getting a book like Mary Oliver’s Poetry Handbook, or a general writing advice book like Natalie Goldberg’s Writing Down the Bones. This article is a very good list of “first time” poetry writing books.
I highly recommend you either join the r/OCpoetry community, or you head over to the Discord. Finding a writing group where you can get feedback, and where you can learn to give feedback as well, is probably the most important step besides “read and write a lot of poetry.”
This is a google drive full of basically all the resources you’d need to get an MFA in poetry. Fair warning, it is suuuper academic. (It also contains a bunch of photocopied chapters from Mary Oliver’s book, which is very not-academic.)
What about getting published in one of those “literary journals” you speak of?
First, revise your poetry. Give it to a friend to get their impression. You are not going to get published without some editing.
Second; find a home for your work. You’ll likely have to submit your poem to a lot of different places.
Duotrope and Submittable are two apps that help you search for journals, and help you track what poems you’ve submitted to which places. Submittable is free, Duotrope is not. They are GREAT.
Poets & Writers has a list of lit journals, small presses, and writing contests. This is a great place to start. They also have a newsletter (monthly? I think?) listing all the presses and journals going into their submissions period.
Entropy Mag puts out a list of publications and writing contests going into their submissions periods every three months. Very useful.
Empty Mirror put together this Twitter list of lit journals and small presses, and they regularly post their calls for submissions here.
What if my question hasn’t been answered?
Feel free to either make a post, or post your question in the comments below. This is a live document and will probably be added to later.
AIGHT PEACE OUT
submitted by /u/dogtim
[link] [comments]
Go to Source
Author: /u/dogtim
