![\"\"](\"http:\/\/www.therialto.co.uk\/pages\/wp-content\/uploads\/mike_mackmin_line-150x150.jpg\" "\\"mike_mackmin_line\\"")
\u2018A writer has to spin his work out of himself and the effect upon the character is often disastrous. It inflates the ego.\u2019 Elizabeth Goudge, A City Of Bells.<\/p>\n\u2018A writer has to spin his work out of himself and the effect upon the character is often disastrous. It inflates the ego.\u2019 Elizabeth Goudge, A City Of Bells.<\/p>\n
I wish I could tell you. A poem on any subject, in any style, might succeed. When we started the magazine we wanted it to be open, \u2018deliberately eclectic\u2019 was a phrase we used – \u2018eclectic\u2019 was a popular word a few years back – and we also wanted it to become part of what John called \u2018the republic of poetry,\u2019 a wider state that was not content to promote an orthodoxy of style or coterie of friends. We wanted poems that \u2018succeed in their own terms.\u2019 From time to time I get letters, provocative, telling me about \u2018the typical Rialto poem,\u2019 but I don\u2019t believe there is such an animal. If there was it would be easy for me to tell you how to get into the magazine.<\/p>\n
However after nearly twenty five years I\u2019ve noticed that there are some poetry areas that I\u2019ve become wary of. Maybe if I list them it will help? And there will always be exceptions – look back through the magazine and you\u2019ll find them. So, the following are poems that probably won\u2019t get published in The Rialto.<\/p>\n
1. Poems about pets, their births, deaths, loyalty, kittenishness etc. Horses aren\u2019t pets and they interest me.<\/p>\n
2. Poems about paintings. I think this may be a Creative Writing Exercise in somebody\u2019s book. They often turn up – they describe the work of art and say how interesting it is and what it reminds the poet of. I don\u2019t know why, but they don\u2019t work for me – maybe because the poets borrow a great artist and then stick their own name to the work. WH Auden has a poem with a Breughel painting in it and Lorraine Mariner has a poem with Bonnard\u2019s work in it, but these are a different matter.<\/p>\n
3. Postcard poems – what I did and where I went on my holiday. Travel is supposed to broaden the mind, but these poems show little evidence of this. They often slide into<\/p>\n
4. Boasting poems. These are often by males, and the boasting postcard poem goes on and on, something like<\/p>\n
It was dark in Brogdgibn Street as I, drunk,
\nlumbered down to Splatny Square,
\nsomewhere there, last year, I\u2019d had a
\none night stand. The girl was beautiful:
\nI forget her name. The last tram swishes past…….<\/p>\n
The Heroic Boast is of course entirely another matter, but it\u2019s not often attempted.<\/p>\n
5. Beware the Eternal Verities. Those poems that set out to Explain The Meaning Of Life. There is a useful Creative Writing Maxim which says \u2018show don\u2019t tell\u2019. I\u2019m very happy to know life\u2019s meaning, but I\u2019d rather you showed me how you discovered it than bashed me over the head with it.<\/p>\n
In General.<\/p>\n
Please remember that the experience you are putting into a poem, though special to you, may not be unique. If you\u2019ve seen a broken windmill or been for a walk in a dark wood others will have been there too. Your poem will need to hold an editor\u2019s attention because of the energy it puts into describing the windmill experience. This will involve you writing the poem, and probably re- writing it (and maybe even throwing it away, all but a phrase or a notion – keep a notebook full of brilliant flashes of inspiration to use up in other poems). In the process your windmill has to become, in the space in which the reader reads, the only broken windmill in the world.<\/p>\n
Please pay lots of attention to the shape of your poem (strict form, when it was\/is practised does mean that the poet has to pay attention to shape). And please pay lots of attention to the words you use. For example, there is a beekeeper in the garden of the windmill. You might think it good to have the beekeeper looking like an astronaut in his whites and helmet. If you edit a poetry magazine you\u2019ll know that astronaut beekeepers turn up quite frequently – though, interestingly, there haven\u2019t been many beekeepers on the moon. Don\u2019t try too hard. But do think about whether an image, an adjective, a whatever, might have been used by another poet before: this is one of the reasons people like me and Peter Sansom are always going on about the importance of reading, particularly poetry magazines – it helps you refine your vocabulary, it helps you to want to write something special and different.<\/p>\n
For \u2018windmill\u2019 in the above two paragraphs you can, obviously, substitute love, heartbreak, death, any of the experiences poets typically write about. Why not write a poem about something that\u2019s never been written about?<\/p>\n
Check out the Editor\u2019s Blog pages on the Rialto web site for further clues.<\/p>\n
Further help with the How to Get Published question is at hand in the latest from Helena Nelson\u2019s Happenstance Press, How (Not) To Get Your Poetry Published ISBN 978 1 905939 32 9, \u00a35.00 a pamphlet with 52 very useful pages. Contact Helena at www.happenstancepress.com<\/a><\/p>\n Alternatively you could study Helena\u2019s own skilful and funny prize winning poems Starlight on Water is available from The Rialto price \u00a37.95 from our online shop.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" \u2018A writer has to spin his work out of himself and the effect upon the character is often disastrous.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[74,76,75],"class_list":["post-626","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blogs","tag-how-to-get-a-poem-published","tag-poetry-magazines","tag-poetry-publishing"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.therialto.co.uk\/pages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/626","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.therialto.co.uk\/pages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.therialto.co.uk\/pages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.therialto.co.uk\/pages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.therialto.co.uk\/pages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=626"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.therialto.co.uk\/pages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/626\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":12160,"href":"https:\/\/www.therialto.co.uk\/pages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/626\/revisions\/12160"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.therialto.co.uk\/pages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=626"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.therialto.co.uk\/pages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=626"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.therialto.co.uk\/pages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=626"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}