The Entire 30 Poems in 30 Days Series — 2008

Here is the whole 30 Poems in 30 Days series in order.

• PD30 Day 1: I Believe in Poetry
• PD30 Day 2: Generally Be Specific
• PD30 Day 3: A Review of Meter
• PD30 Day 4: Poetry — the Writer’s Bridge to Music
• PD30 Day 5: Poetry and Pain
• PD30 Day 6: Poets and Parables
• PD30 Day 7: Embrace The Person You Are
• PD30 Day 8: The Occasional Poem
• PD30 Day 9: How to Write in Meter If You Have Two Left Feet
• PD30 Day 10: The Mighty Mighty Pantoum
• PD30 Day 11: Poets as Storytellers
• PD30 Day 12: The Poetry Journal, From Notebooks to Blackberries
• PD30 Day 13: Writing a Tanka
• PD30 Day 14: Poetry Under Pressure
• PD30 Day 15: Found Poetry
• PD30 Day 16: Editing Your Poetry
• PD30 Day 17: Capturing the Quiet
• PD30 Day 18: Fun with Hyponymy
• PD30 Day 19: A Glossary of Rhyme
• PD30 Day 20: Rhyme, Sound and Repetition
• PD 30 Day 21: Moving Beyond Imitation
• PD30 Day 22: Travelogues
• PD30 Day 23: Ways to find Inspiration
• PD30 Day 24: Improving Your Imagery
• PD30 Day 25: Poets are Liars
• PD30 Day 26: Events and Emotion
• PD30 Day 27: Poetry and Prizes
• PD30 Day 28: The Basics of Poetry Submissions
• PD30 Day 29: Creating Your Own Chapbook
• PD30 Day 30: My Final Say
• PD30 Wrap Up And Other Thoughts

PD30 Day 30: My Final Say

Today is the last day for 30 Poems in 30 Days. Summer has turned to fall. The modifiers have turned from evaluative to descriptive. The metaphors are glistening with dew. The air is filled with hyponyms and slant rhymes. The grass is has become iambic and the chapbooks are flying south for the winter. Welcome to the end of the project.

I hope that those of you who played along enjoyed yourself, learned a little something, and wrote a few poems that you can be proud of. If I can sum up the knowledge I hope you gained from this month, it would be this way…

Be honest and be specific. If you can’t be honest, lie as boldly and imaginatively as you can. Lie with pride. Embrace meter, it can do great things for you, but discard it frequently and without regret.

Let poetry help you relieve your pain and work through your emotions. Everybody gets the blues, but expressing it well is an art. Description trumps evaluation. Stories may not lead to wisdom but they tour the neighborhood once in a while.

Write poems to celebrate, commemorate and eulogize the moments of your life.   Keep a journal. Listen to the way other people speak but write in your own voice. Poetry can be found almost anywhere if you just look hard enough and edit sharply enough. There is more to sound than rhyme. Patterns can come from anywhere.

Pressure builds poetry but quiet helps you create. Travel often, and imitate only when you need to. Inspiration can be found anywhere for those who look. Send your poems out into the world. Victory comes from the satisfaction of knowing you wrote well, but a little outside validation is always nice.

When all is said and done, write a book.

Today’s Poetry Prompt

Start your poem with a piece of advice.

PD30 Day 29: Creating Your Own Chapbook

As you near the end of PD30, you may be wondering what to do with all of the poems you have written. You can submit them to contests and publications, or course. You can also create a chapbook. Chapbooks are very common among self-publishing poets and small presses because they are both easy to create and inexpensive to produce, especially if you have some desktop publishing skill.

A chapbook is a book that created by folding standard 8 1/2 x 11 (The size varies outside of the United States) paper in half so that you create a shape close to that of a common paperback book. By folding the sheets of paper, a single sheet yields four pages of a chapbook. These pages are well suited to the length of a fifteen to twenty-five line poem. Once the pages are printed and folded, you bind the multiple pages together by stapling along the crease of the sheets of paper. Using this method, eight sheets of paper can create a thirty-two page chapbook. Because of the limitations of the stapling and folding process, chapbooks tend to run about thirty-two pages and rarely more than sixty-four pages. In addition to standard sheets of paper, you may wish to create a cover using thicker (and perhaps glossy) cover-stock paper.

Chapbooks can be created cheaply using a computer, a word processing or desktop publishing program and a printer. Once the pages are set up properly, you can produce as many or as few books as you want. You can give them to friends or even sell them at poetry readings, open mike nights or through your web site. Poetry chapbooks are accepted in the poetry community and many book-length poetry competitions accept chapbooks as entries. Because of the low cost, you can afford to charge very little or even to give the chapbooks away.

The primary disadvantage of a chapbook is that most retail bookstores will not sell it. Because chapbooks do not have spine wide enough to print a title on, they cannot easily be found on the bookshelf. Also, if you wish to produce a chapbook, you will have to write, edit, design, print, and bind the book yourself. Many people lack the skill or the motivation to do these things themselves. It is possible to have a professional print shop produce the chapbook for you, but that will add to the expense and you will have to order a set run of books. You are better off finding a friend with more desktop publishing knowledge than you.

A poetry chapbook should follow the basic design rules of any book of poetry. You can pick up just about any published book of poetry and follow the example. Include a title page, a copyright page, a table of contents and your poems. Your poetry pages should have wide margins (At least an inch and a half) and include a page number in either the bottom or top outside corner. Copyrights, by the way, can be self assigned. You don’t have to file it anywhere. Just use the date of publication (month and year) and your name and city. If your poetry has appeared anywhere else (such as the comments on this site) you might want to make note of those publication dates as well. If they were in a formal publication, you should make sure you have the right to reprint. If they appeared here, don’t worry about it, your poems are your poems. I make no claim to their rights.

I hope you give chapbooks a try. It is a nice way to keep a record of your poems and to share them with others.

Today’s Poetry Prompt

Include the word right or rights in your poem.

PD30 Day 28: The Basics of Poetry Submissions

Submitting your poetry, either to a contest or for direct publication, is a relatively painless process. Once you’ve done it a few times and have your basic cover letter written, it will only take a couple of minutes to prepare your work for submission. Just remember that no matter what other guidelines I offer, the first and most important rule is read and follow the submission guidelines for wherever you are sending your poem.

In general the submissions guidelines will tell you:

• What subjects are reasonable or expected
• What styles are reasonable or expected
• Geographic or other limitations on the submissions pool
• Any length limitations
• Who to send your submission to
• Where to send your submission to
• Whether or not email submissions are acceptable and what file formats you should use

Their submission rules may also be different than the guidelines I offer below. Whatever their rules are, those are the rules you want to follow. Whenever possible, read the publication you are submitting to in order to get a feel for the poems they tend to publish and determine if they are compatible with your subjects and style.

The guidelines I offer below are unique to poetry submissions. Fiction and non-fiction have their own sets of rules and generally rely on a “query” process in which you first send them your idea. In poetry, unless you are sending a book proposal, you almost always just send your poems.  The guidelines below are aimed at the submission of one, two or several poems.

General Guidelines

• Include one poem per page
• Use single space, not double space
• Try not to split stanzas across pages
• Include your name in the upper right-hand corner of each page of poetry
• Proofread and spell check everything thoroughly
• Format your poem to look exactly as you would want it to appear in the publication
• Do not submit the same poem to multiple publications/contests at the same time. You may submit a poem elsewhere only it has been rejected by the previous publisher.
• Unless otherwise specified, limit yourself to three to five poems per submission.

Cover Letter Guidelines

• Include your name and contact information
• Include the titles of the poems you are submitting
• Briefly discuss your previous poetry publications (optional)
• Include a positive sentence or two about the publication/contest (optional)
• Do not include assessments or explanations about your work or reasons why you should be published. The poems should stand on their own merit.

Rules for standard mail submissions

• Use standard sized (for your country) white paper for your submissions
• Use an envelope large enough for the poetry to lie flat rather than be folded.
• Use standard postage
• Include a self-addressed stamped envelope for return of your poetry. This envelope can be smaller.

Rules for email submissions

• Your email can serve as your cover letter
• Use standard file formats such as .txt, .rtf or .doc for your poems

Today’s Poetry Prompt

Write a poem as if it were a letter to a friend

PD30 Day 27: Poetry and Prizes

If it looks too good to be true, it probably is.

Before I discuss the good side of entering poetry contests, I want to get the basic warnings out of the way:

• Contests offering big money for poems ARE too good to be true
• Any “prize” that requires payment by you is not a prize
• Any gathering of “finalists” is a glorified vacation package
• Contests with “reading” or “entry” fees use that money for the prizes (and keep what’s left over)
• Beware of any contests that “suggests” you use one of their editors or teachers

Most legitimate poetry contests are sponsored by newspapers, magazines, colleges and the occasional corporation. Some foundations also hold contests, but the prize money in any of these contests rarely exceeds a thousand dollars.  Poet’s Market has a good list of contests, but a listing there does not guarantee legitimacy; always keep the five points from above in mind. A good online source is C. Hope Clark, but the same rules apply.

If you are looking to make a lot of money, poetry contests aren’t going to do it for you. Winning even a small poetry contest is no easy task, and winning a major contest is only slightly easier than winning the lottery, even for truly great poets. Poetry is subjective. Two sets of equally qualified judges could look at 1000 poems and come up with a completely different group of finalists.

The benefits of poetry contests are:

• They give you a reason to send your best work out into the world. Too many people who write poetry never get around to sending it out. They keep their poems in their desk or on their computer and never share. Contests are a way of interacting with the larger world of poetry.
• Publishers do notice winners. If you win a contest that has a good reputation, the people who publish poetry will probably see your work. Again, poetry is no roadmap to riches, but having a publisher show enough faith in you to put out a book is quite an honor. Just remember that there are as many scam publishers as there are scam poetry contests.
• Even second or third prize can offer a lot of encouragement to a poet. The grand prize might be nice, but it feels good to be mentioned at all.
• If you do happen to win some money, that’s always nice too.

Don’t stake all of your hopes and dreams on winning a poetry contest. I encourage you to enter them, but don’t take any losses personally. Just send your poetry out into the world and see what comes back.

Today’s Poetry Prompt

Write a poem about a contest, a win, or a loss.

PD30 Day 26: Events and Emotion

I write poetry when I’m sad. I write poetry when I’m angry. I write poetry when I’m happy. I do my best though, not to write poetry about being sad, angry or happy. I believe that the emotions in poetry must come from what happens in the poem. People want to smell, hear, taste, feel and see things when they read. If they understand from the imagery and the descriptions what is being felt, it will have a far more lasting impression than if they are told that you are sad, happy or angry.

I am not advocating a cold approach to poetry. Poetry should be emotional and it should evoke strong feelings. If I get to the end I should have a pretty good idea of how the poet felt. I just want to make up my mind for myself about that, not have the emotion simply identified for me. This goes back to my discussion about descriptive versus evaluative modifiers. Description informs and guides the reader. Evaluation leads the reader around by the nose. Readers want to go on the journey with you, but they don’t want to be lead.

There are no hard rules in poetry. You can write about what you want. If you want to say you are sad, happy or angry, it isn’t wrong to do so. The risk though, is that you will leave no room for the reader to think and interpret what you wrote. If the reader has nothing left to think about when your poem is over, your poem will soon be forgotten.  Description and imagery are what stick with people.

Today’s Poetry Prompt

Write a poem that demonstrates strong emotion without ever stating what that emotion is.

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