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The Poetry Editor has been designed to help you at various levels, depending on where you are as a poet. So let’s consider these levels of professionalism:
Level One: Beginning Poet
Have you just written your first poem and liked the experience so much that you want to know more? Great! You’ll find tips on this site to help you write and revise your work. In addition, you’ll find helpful articles and resources on the Poetry Of Course website, including a poetry course you can take by mail or e-mail to study at home. You can also receive postings about poetry writing, revising, and marketing by becoming a Follower of the Poetry Of Course Blog.
Level Two: Advanced Poet
If you have been writing poetry a while, take your poems to the next level by getting professional feedback on your work. This gives you the opportunity to improve poems you have already written and those you have yet to write.
If you become a Follower of The Poetry Editor Blog, you can receive one free online critique for a poem of 3 to 25 lines. For objective input on a batch of poems, chapbook, or poetry book, get a critique.
Sometimes poems just need a little editorial help. For instance, if you have trouble with English grammar, punctuation, spelling, and syntax, consider an edit of your work. The Poetry Editor provides light editing with a critique or a poetry consultation, but if you need to rewrite or heavily revise your poems, the edit should come last.
Level Three: Published Poet
Have you placed poems in a poetry journal, anthology, poetry writing contest, or e-zine? If so, congratulations! You may be ready to collect poems around a single theme for a chapbook. If you have already had one or more chapbooks see print, you could have enough poems for a book. The difficulty then might come in deciding which poems to include and which to omit or revise.
The Poetry Editor provides professional feedback and objective input in a poetry consultation. This also assesses the marketability of your poems by evaluating the theme and reader identification needed to assure you of an audience. If readers are interested, a traditional publisher just might be too!
Self-Publishing:
Each of the above levels has to do with the quality of your work and the professionalism needed for poems to be accepted by a traditional or online publisher. However, some poets have the skill needed to typeset their own pages, the financial means to publish their own work, and the business sense and time to market their own books. If you do, fine, but this means you need an editor to check your work for mistakes.
The Poetry Editor can also help you to know if your work has reader-appeal and if the poems have flaws that need revising before your work sees print. So, to help your poetry book or chapbook be the quality you envision, begin with a poetry consult or critique, then get an edit of the final draft of the manuscript before you self-publish. Your poems and readers deserve the most you can give them, and so do you!
© 2010 Mary Harwell Sayler
All rights reserved
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