Writing the Perfect Beast #37
Being ‘good enough’ to publish does not allow you to assume you are successful.
Starting in October 2025, I decided to talk honestly about the business of how I write poetry. There are people who teach how to create poetry, how to format it, how to submit and how publishing in general, works. I am not seeing that many people shining a light on what you need to do with your brain and mental attitudes to make all of that knowledge stick, grow and then evolve. HI THERE.
This should have been Sunday’s post. Pretend this morning that it’s yesterday :D
This pamphlet has its virtual launch on Friday:
This pamphlet also was, for a long time, submitted for a second contest. Having had it win once, I was curious to see if it was good enough to repeat the feat. It wasn’t so much validation, it is now apparent, but the means to start being more proactive with my own processes. When you make something that is good enough to be successful, can that action happen more than once?
I was in someone’s workshop loft, working on Art Trail gubbins, when I got the email informing me that it hadn’t managed a second win. I was relieved that it hadn’t, and in truth still am, because if that hadn’t been the case my summer would have played out VERY differently and there is the suspicion that, not for the first time, I would have regretted a decision that made sense at the time.
Absolutely, on reflection, I made a mistake in entering FM again where I did.
I spoke last week about how I am now acutely aware of a change in validation requirements. My industry has a pretty clearly-defined path for poets once they publish a second pamphlet: you’ve proven twice that you’re able to create something both saleable and which reflects your own poetic landscape. Go write a collection. That’s the logical next step. Don’t try and second guess the process.
Except, I’m VERY MUCH NOT DONE with the short-form approach. The caps are me knowing that all I want to do right now is fuck about with short-form storytelling under very specific terms and conditions. However, I have a collection submission out. Let’s be fair, little or no hope is held for its success, and that’s not because it’s not good enough, far from it.
It‘s because I don’t think anyone wants the narratives that I consider important.
I have been told in recent memory by someone who could have published my work that the perspective it presented was not relevant. Because there is no more detail than that (did you mean to the brief or a wider framework, what renders it irrelevant, there are a 10001 other questions that could be asked but you are not listening regardless) I could be left only with supposition. Except that’s not true.
The most recent pamphlet submission I attempted, which placed me in a shortlist pile, saw me fail to be successful with not one, but two sequences of work. Looking at what did get the nod, when the announcement was made, my brain is smart enough to be able to accept why, in this case, those pieces did not make it. Yes, it absolutely was solid work, but it was not what the publisher required.
Being ‘good enough’ to publish does not allow you to assume you are successful.
We find ourselves in the Apples/Oranges Paradox at this point in time. Yes, my work is absolutely poetry. But it’s not SAFE poetry, or really that lyrical, or indeed something that you’d expect a major to want to run with because all of them already have mental health and environmental poets on the books. You want a 25 year old poet with decades of life in them as a prospect, and never the dinosaur.
There is also clearly a lot of fear in publishing right now over a lot of things: be it political sentiment, nationalism in all its forms, the spectre of AI’s damage… but in the end, the bottom line is intractable. It’s why Mslexia dedicated an entire article to the process in their latest edition. In a world where it shouldn’t matter how much money is made from poetry, it totally does matter how you make it.
The only people I would consider successful run multiple gigs to break even.
The reality is that money shouldn’t ever matter, but we all know that’s fucking bullshit. I very recently discovered thanks to someone else, a lot higher up the food chain than me, what THEY consider as successful, and frankly I’m still in shock over it. That moment, paired with last week’s impressive rejection email, has altered an awful lot of what were, I now accept, misplaced beliefs.
It is impossible to explain to people who do not want to hear that their idea of progress and success might be inaccurate, and speaking as someone who, for a long time, was not prepared to accept anything but their own dream of progression, it’s also the most damaging thing you can do to yourself. In the face of the intractable, it is hard to accept the truth. However, it needs to be done.
There’s a fair chance you are not seeing your progress as valuable.
Valuable is really hard to properly quantify in an industry where, for the most part, you are expected to sell your own work, where publicity is minimal, where the onus is on you to work 3-5 times harder on promotion than anyone else, and the end result is nothing but a guaranteed success. There’s a number of pieces currently out on sub from me which consider this. It’s not talked about enough.
Yes, it’s lovely to make money from poetry, but there will be a point I’m confident that a lot of poets reach where the earning and the reasoning actively diverge. Sometimes things NEED to be written, and not to become your next bestseller. I’m sitting on one of those right now. What now happens to it is part of a larger set of considerations.
We will talk about this again once that particular decision has been made.