07-07-2013, 07:23 AM
Realising you suck is the first step on the road to not sucking 
The appearance of myriad ezines and small publications, not to mention vanity presses like Poetry.com, have done poetry a great disservice. In a time when it's cheap and easy to publish your own poems or "do struggling poets a favour" by publishing their poems to your own creation for no reward except bragging rights, it makes poetry seem similarly cheap and easy. Market saturation means there's a lot to sort through before finding something that's truly worth reading -- and most people don't have the time to do that sorting, or the inclination.
If publishing something is your ultimate goal, there are several very fine journals -- some print, some electronic -- with good reputations for publishing high quality poetry. To maintain their reputations, obviously their standards are very high and not everything will be suitable even if it's excellent, because they also have preferences. Poetry is human and so are poets, after all.
I regularly read journals such as Able Muse, qarrtisiluni, Danse Macabre, Drunk Monkeys and occasionally the Loch Raven Review. I read The New Yorker if I want to know what's in fashion for the very pretentious this month
These are all worth trying (with the exception of The New Yorker, which smart poets know is only there to please Billy Collins), but not before you have purged all your poetry of bad habits: cliche, over-abstraction, poorly constructed rhyme and meter, hackneyed phrases etc (not your poetry specifically, by the way, that's the generic 'your'!). Learn as much as you can about what's already been written so that when you do submit, you stand out from the crowd. Editors are easily bored and hate to read the same poem over and over again, even if it's been written by different authors using different words. Subscribe to journals, support poetry, read, read, read.
And workshop. In a good workshop, not a praise generator.
The appearance of myriad ezines and small publications, not to mention vanity presses like Poetry.com, have done poetry a great disservice. In a time when it's cheap and easy to publish your own poems or "do struggling poets a favour" by publishing their poems to your own creation for no reward except bragging rights, it makes poetry seem similarly cheap and easy. Market saturation means there's a lot to sort through before finding something that's truly worth reading -- and most people don't have the time to do that sorting, or the inclination.
If publishing something is your ultimate goal, there are several very fine journals -- some print, some electronic -- with good reputations for publishing high quality poetry. To maintain their reputations, obviously their standards are very high and not everything will be suitable even if it's excellent, because they also have preferences. Poetry is human and so are poets, after all.
I regularly read journals such as Able Muse, qarrtisiluni, Danse Macabre, Drunk Monkeys and occasionally the Loch Raven Review. I read The New Yorker if I want to know what's in fashion for the very pretentious this month
These are all worth trying (with the exception of The New Yorker, which smart poets know is only there to please Billy Collins), but not before you have purged all your poetry of bad habits: cliche, over-abstraction, poorly constructed rhyme and meter, hackneyed phrases etc (not your poetry specifically, by the way, that's the generic 'your'!). Learn as much as you can about what's already been written so that when you do submit, you stand out from the crowd. Editors are easily bored and hate to read the same poem over and over again, even if it's been written by different authors using different words. Subscribe to journals, support poetry, read, read, read.And workshop. In a good workshop, not a praise generator.
It could be worse