I’m very excited for Frazzled Lit to open again in October because one of the things I love more than anything is reading other people’s work, especially poetry. To open a piece we’ve been sent and be dazzled by the wit and imagery, the perfectly crafted stanzas, the richly textured layers of meaning… well, all I can say is that it is a priceless experience, and we can’t wait to read your work!
So I’ve been pondering what it takes for me to want to visit a poem again and again, and what it takes to get published in Frazzled Lit. The best way for me to answer this is to tell you a story.
I wrote a poem for someone the other day. It’s not something I’ve done before, not directly anyway, and I must admit to being worried about letting them read it. Which is an emotion I rarely feel anymore. Sending a poem out into the world for the Lit community and sending a poem to a real live person you know is an entirely different animal. In the end, I decided three things, and I offer them below.
Poetry needs to be honest
I had written a true poem, straight from the gut, and I was worried how it would land. But the thing is that I don’t write anything that isn’t honest. I write nothing that hasn’t first hurt me a little or made me feel something, and I don’t enjoy reading work that doesn’t have some ring of truth to it either.
Don’t hold back, be brave, push yourself to the farthest regions of your emotions.
A poem tells a story, sure, but the best poetry is poetry that you wouldn’t want your family to read. Dark, jaggy-edged, visceral, risky, honest.
Tell A Little, Show A Lot
Poems work best with a mix of show and tell and with any extraneous words removed.
For many years, I’ve been writing for a Twitter poetry prompt called Top Tweet Tuesday, where the focus is on using imagism. This includes using carefully chosen synonyms, metaphors, similes, non cliched comparisons, kennings and a variety of other poetic devices. These poems are always short and stripped back to their most imagistic form, allowing the reader to imagine what the writer is trying to deliver without being told what to see. I think the ability to do this is key to being able to write a good poem.
Keep it short, snappy, visual, and use as little telling as possible.
This doesn’t mean that we only want to read short poems. Some of the best work we’ve published has been forty lines long, but within those forty lines there is true magic, well crafted stanzas that shout from the rooftops with imagism and luxurious language that transports the reader without telling them where we’re being taken. A little telling is also sometimes required, of course, and what’s it’s really about is striking a balance.
Understand Your Audience
You must write what you must write, this I believe. The poem that is born from you cannot be changed or be anything else. BUT you must also understand the audience to which you are delivering the poem.
The poem I wrote the other day was not the usual tone or style I would send to a lit mag or publisher. But there would have been no sense in sending the person a literary poem, so I carefully crafted it to deliver what I wanted, and in the best way possible. It contains all the elements above, but it is a simple narrative prose style poem that is true, came from the gut, and isn’t telling.
Here at Frazzled Lit, we are happy to read anything; it has always been so and will always be so. We have a wide readership and love the fact that we also have a wide range of writers and poets.
So, what are we looking for in poetry submissions?
Honesty, imagery, your pain and your joy.
Make us think, make us cry.
Hurt us a little. Please.