above: The Library at Alexandria
A LINK TO A VERY USEFUL LIST OF JOURNALS
Once I got past my The New Yorker phase, I went looking for online lists of literary journals that would be more likely to accept my work. The first list I worked with was the one over 1,000 titles long that Professor Emeritus Louie Clay (née Louie Crew) created and maintained. Sad to say, he is no longer with us. Somebody else may be maintaining it now, but the link to it that I had no longer works and I have not been able to locate it. He called it Poetry Publishers Willing to Receive Submissions Electronically. When Professor Clay started his list in 1996, it was far from common practice for publishers to accept online submissions—my first submissions to journals were by snailmail. But by now online submission is nearly universal practice. Times have changed.
Another practice that has become common is requiring submission/reading fees. At one time that would have guaranteed exclusion from the professor’s list. He was adamant about that. He explained why in an article that is also no longer available. Again, times have changed.
Next, I needed criteria for screening candidate journals—my indiscriminate scatter-shot approach was wasting both my own time and editors’ time, as well as risking the placement of my poems where I might later wish they weren’t. I will try to steer you clear of the many blind-alleys I have traveled up and provide you with the map I wish I’d had at the outset.
—Jeremy