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Welcome to The Poetry Editor website! Whether you’re well-published or new to poetry writing, you can become The Poetry Editor for your own work. How?
Beginning Poet
Have you just written your first poem and liked the experience so much that you want to know more? Great! You will find tips on this site to help you write and revise your poems. You will also find poetry resources, the user-friendly book Poetry: Taking Its Course, and a poetry home study course.
Advanced Poet
If you have been writing poetry a while, you can take your poems to the next level by getting professional feedback. This gives you opportunity to improve the poems you have already written and also those you have yet to write.
For objective input on a batch of poems, chapbook or full-length poetry book, consider getting a critique.
If you have trouble with English grammar, syntax, punctuation, or spelling, you might need a professional edit of your work. [Note: The Poetry Editor provides light editing with a critique or poetry consultation, but if you need to rewrite or revise your poems or manuscript, the final edit should come last.]
Also, if you use your name to become a Follower of The Poetry Editor Blog, you can receive one free online critique of a poem to 25 lines. Just email the poem in plain text with your name and the subject, “My Free Online Critique.”
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 your poems around a single theme for a chapbook. If you have already had one or more chapbooks see print, you might have enough poems for a book. The difficulty then may come in deciding which poems to include and which to omit.
In a poetry consult, The Poetry Editor gives you a professional opinion with objective, practical suggestions to help you make your work more effective. A consultation also assesses the marketability of your poems by evaluating your theme and the reader identification you will need to gain an audience. If your readers are interested, a traditional publisher just might be too!
Self-Publishing Plans
Each of the above levels has to do with the quality of your work and the professionalism needed for your 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 experienced editor to check your poems or manuscript for mistakes.
As a well-published poet herself, The Poetry Editor can also help you to know if your work has reader-appeal and if your poems have any flaws that need to be addressed before your work sees print. So, to give your book of poems or poetry chapbook the quality you want, begin with a poetry consult or critique, then get an edit of the final draft before you self-publish. Your poems and readers deserve the most you can give them, and yes! So do you!
© 2010 Mary Harwell Sayler
All rights reserved
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