Most advice about submitting poetry falls into one of two unhelpful categories. The first is too vague to act on: "find journals you love and send them your best work." The second is relentlessly cheerful in a way that does not survive contact with reality: "believe in yourself and the acceptances will come." Neither prepares a poet for what submitting actually involves, which is a long, uneven process built mostly out of waiting and rejection, punctuated occasionally by the thing that makes it all worthwhile. Here is the honest version.
The real odds
The first thing to understand is that the acceptance rates at most reputable poetry journals are low — frequently under two percent, sometimes well under one. This is not a reflection of your work. It is arithmetic. A respected magazine may receive several thousand submissions for a handful of slots per issue. Even excellent poems, poems that will eventually find homes, get declined repeatedly along the way simply because there is not room.
This matters because it reframes what rejection means. If the base rate of acceptance is two percent, then receiving a rejection tells you almost nothing about the quality of your poem. It is the expected outcome the overwhelming majority of the time, for everyone, including poets whose names you would recognize. The poets who get published are not the ones who get rejected less. They are, almost without exception, the ones who submit more.
“The poets who get published are not the ones who get rejected less. They are the ones who submit more.”
Build a habit, not an event
The single most useful shift a poet can make is to stop treating submission as a special occasion and start treating it as routine maintenance. The poet who submits when they "feel ready" submits rarely, because the feeling of readiness is unreliable and tends to arrive never. The poet who submits on a schedule — a set number of journals every month, regardless of mood — accumulates the volume that the low acceptance rates demand.
Pick a cadence you can sustain. For many working poets that means keeping a fixed number of submissions in circulation at all times: when one comes back rejected, another goes out the same week. The goal is to make submission boring, frictionless, and continuous, so that it no longer depends on confidence or inspiration. A spreadsheet helps enormously here — one row per submission, with the journal, the poems sent, the date, and the response. It removes the guesswork and turns an emotional process into an administrative one, which is exactly what you want.
Simultaneous submissions
Most journals now allow simultaneous submissions — sending the same poems to multiple venues at once — and you should take full advantage. Given the long response times (three to six months is normal; a year is not unheard of) and the low acceptance rates, submitting to one journal at a time is a recipe for sending the same five poems out twice a year. Send them to six journals at once instead.
The one obligation simultaneous submission creates is prompt withdrawal: if a poem is accepted somewhere, you must immediately notify the other journals still considering it and withdraw it. Most submission systems make this a single click. Honor it without fail — editors talk to each other, and a reputation for leaving editors hanging is not one you want. Always read each journal's guidelines, since a small number still prohibit simultaneous submissions, and respecting that is part of the courtesy the relationship runs on.
On reading fees
Many journals and nearly all contests charge a reading fee, typically three to twenty-five dollars. This is a genuinely contested subject among poets, and reasonable people disagree. The case against fees is straightforward: poets are rarely paid much for publication, and asking them to pay to be considered can feel backward. The case for them is also real: most literary magazines operate on almost nothing, run by volunteers or near-volunteers, and modest fees keep them alive and sometimes fund the payments to writers.
A reasonable middle position: be willing to pay modest fees to publications and prizes you genuinely respect and would be proud to appear in, and be skeptical of any operation whose fees seem disproportionate to what they offer or who appear to be running a contest primarily as a revenue source. Look at who has won before. Look at whether the prize money and the production values are real. A legitimate contest is transparent about all of it.
How to take rejection
You will be rejected far more than you are accepted, and the only sustainable way through is to strip rejection of its emotional charge. A few practices help. Treat the rejection as information about fit and timing, not about worth. Notice the "higher-tier" rejections — the personal notes, the "please send again," the "this was close" — which are genuine signals that you are in the right range, even when the answer is no. And keep the poems moving: the best antidote to a rejection is to have the poem back in the mail to somewhere new within the week, before the sting has time to settle into a story about yourself.
It also helps to remember that you are submitting to a moment as much as to a journal. The same poem that gets declined by an editor who just accepted three poems on a similar theme might be exactly what the next editor is missing from their issue. So much of this is contingency. The poet's job is not to win every time. It is to keep enough work in circulation that contingency has room to work in your favor.
Where to start
If you are early in this process, start small and build. Identify a handful of journals whose published work you actually admire and read — not the most prestigious names you can think of, but the ones whose aesthetic genuinely overlaps with yours. Send your strongest poems. Then widen out, mixing reach venues with realistic ones, and keep the spreadsheet running.
Contests can be a useful part of the mix, particularly ones that offer publication alongside any prize money, since they put your work in front of a named judge and can give a poem a meaningful home. The LemonLight Prize, which we run each spring, is one example of the kind of low-cost, publication-focused contest worth considering — but the broader point holds whatever you enter: choose the venues you respect, send your best, and above all keep the work moving. The poets who break through are simply the ones still submitting after the others have stopped.
