A thread on poetry magazine submissions: Before Jan 2018 I’d never submitted a poem into a magazine, despite writing for nearly eight years. Partly because I didn’t think my poems were good enough, and also I wasn’t sure I could handle the rejection.

After speaking with friends on the virtues of learning how to deal with rejection I started. The first few poems were turned down in a way that stung. I took it personally and for a week or so I was in a funk. Then I looked at the poems again I could see what the issues were.

I reworked them and sent out another batch. I was already reading the mags for years so was familiar with the kind of poems their editors were into. More rejections came in for poems I was planning on putting in After the Formalities. But soon I was finding ways to deal with it.

Redraft after redraft & eventually I got an email from Emily Berry saying she wanted to publish After the Formalities in Poetry Review. I was ecstatic. It felt like I’d reached a milestone by having a poem in such a prestigious journal, one I first bought when I was 17.

I gained a lot of confidence from that and from there began to see more editors respond quicker with emails of acceptance. Since then poems from After the Formalities have been published in Granta, Poetry, Poetry London, Rialto, Adroit, Oxford Poetry, Ambit & other places.

The point I want to stress is that editors are individuals with their own tastes and whims. There were poems one magazine said no to and another said yes to. Not everyone is going to be into your work, and that needs to be fine too.

The crucial takeaway is you learn from rejection, how to internalise it without letting it stunt your growth and experimentation. My closest friends are all wonderful writers who’ve been rejected more times than they’ve been published. It’s the nature of the thing we do.

Keep writing and working on the poems. Keep sending them in, keep the books open, and try not to get too attached to a poem until you see it finally living in a book. Try not to comprise yourself for the sake of winning someone’s approval and before long, it’ll all happen.

Compromise*