Since many journals and magazines believe that even forum workshopped poems are “previously published,” this forum has limited access in order to protect our members’ poetic privacy.
1. Only the Welcome section is visible to guests. All other sections of the forum require registration for access.
2. All sections of this forum are hidden from search engines.
3. The member list is hidden from unregistered users.
Thank you for this, Christine! I’m not able to NaPo but hope to participate in the critique forums on occasion. I like that it’s private and new and connected to a journal with tastes that seem like a good guide for who and what to expect here. All the best to you, D
Deborah, you are quite welcome! I’m hoping that more people will participate and make it a good place for a poetry community. I’m always optimistic when it comes to poetry. -Christine
Hi Christine, I’d love to add a profile pic but can’t for the life of me. Could you help?
Christine, how do you feel about ignoring the rules of the publishers about not publishing poems that have been posted on forums, blogs and social media? At 72, I worry about dying with some of my poems unpublished, so I post all new poems on my blog. Initially, the blog was not being indexed by Google, although that seems to have changed. Even so, I have almost no visitors. I just can’t imagine a situation in which I wrote a really excellent poem and then died while it was still stored in just my person computer. I do have some ambitions to be remembered. Is it unethical to do what I am doing?
@rebecca-j Hi Rebecca, the profile picture is managed via Gravatar.
If you go to the My Profile tab at the top of the Forum, it will bring you to your forum profile.
Hover on your avatar (for you, it is blank right now).
You will get a pop up with the option to click on View Complete Profile.
When you click on that, it will send you to Gravatar.com. You can create a universal avatar there and that should set your picture.
Hope this helps!
-Christine
@caleb Hi Caleb! Goodness, no, it isn’t unethical to post your poems on your website. You can post whatever you wish on your website. You can even self publish a chapbook or a book of your poems. Many great poets have done this, including Walt Whitman who self published Leaves of Grass in 1855. Poetry has a long and interesting history of self publishing.
What do I think of the rules of publishers not accepting previously published work (including on blogs, forums, etc.)? I think it’s silly, and that’s why I accept previously published work on Autumn Sky Poetry DAILY, but then, I’m not selling poetry so it’s easy for me to do this. The reason many publishers do this is wrapped up in clicks, advertising, money, and status. Publishers want to be able to claim that they have exclusive access to poems the same way big news sites do this with news stories in order to sell their content.
Ultimately, it’s your choice to self publish or not. You can’t change the submission rules of magazines and journals; all you can do is work within the publishing environment that exists. If your goal is to share your poetry as widely as possible, by all means, post on your blog. Submit to journals that accept previously published work. And consider holding back a poem here or there from your blog and sending those to the journals who only accept non-published works. There’s no reason you can’t do all of these things.
-Christine
Hi Rebecca, there’s another way to upload an avatar. If you click/tap on the Edit Account Information button on the upper right while on your member profile, it will bring you to a page where you can upload a custom avatar from your computer or a URL.
-Christine
@chrissiemkl — Christine, thank you for your response. What I was really asking is if it is unethical of me to try to “fool” some publishers by not telling them that a poem has already been posted on my blog (in the hope they won’t do a search and discover that it has been). My blog is getting almost no visitors, but if a publisher were to do a search for [Caleb Murdock + Name of Poem], they would find the page — although, by then, I might have unpublished the poem, so the page would be blank.
If I weren’t 72 with multiple health problems, I wouldn’t be posting everything on my blog.
There is a poet named Robert Lavett Smith who is so prolific that he often knocks out a poem a day, or even two poems a day, and I think he feels similarly, since every new poem goes right onto his Facebook page.
@caleb Caleb, as a publisher, there are few things more frustrating than when people don’t follow the submission guidelines. My guidelines are simple and my response time is extremely fast compared to most poetry publishers, so my opinion is somewhat skewed. I know many poets who ignore the “no simultaneous submissions” rule.
However, submitting a poem that is already published to a journal and not telling them is much more complicated because of the complex system of copyright rights that small publishers follow. I personally would not submit a poem that is published (via whatever means) to a journal that doesn’t accept published poems. Here is a link to what the various rights mean: https://www.pw.org/content/copyright
As for “unethical,” that is a moral judgement that only you can make.
I think, at the heart of it, what you’re frustrated with is your lack of audience. This is a problem that all artists must face. Everyone creates art (paintings, poetry, etc.) because they want to share something with the world. The world is largely uncaring and indifferent. The result is unhappiness. My advice would be to create for the joy of the creation itself. I know that’s not easy, but it’s the only part of the process that is under your control.
Thanks for all you’ve said, Christine. Because I could die at any time, all new poems will go on my blog. I won’t submit those poems to publishers who don’t want blog-posted poems. Thanks for clarifying all this. By the way, I never do simultaneous submissions.
For what it’s worth, there’s a move very recently afoot to stop worrying about the nuances of “previously published” on blogs, in forums, etc. and switch the measure to “uncurated” — i.e. not previously selected for inclusion in a journal, a published book, etc. Hopefully more and more editors will sign onto that as the standard.
The post laying out the call for this, with links, is here: https://litmagnews.substack.com/p/uncurated-the-case-for-a-new-term
@anne-m Anne, yes, I saw that post. I also hope that more editors start to accept poems that have been workshopped, etc. It’s time the literary world caught up with web poets.
-Christine
