2022–2023 Loose Words Submission Guidelines

Last Updated October 6, 2023

Photo by ian dooley on Unsplash

Thanks for your interest in Loose Words. One thing you have to understand about this process is that we are a highly curated poetry-only publication. We don’t care about followers, following, and follow-for-follow. We care about poetry, words, mental health, emotions, boundaries, fairness, and we care about our poets.

We want to write next to the best poets, not those looking to try it out. If you don’t read all the way to the bottom of this post, we will know and we will not respond to your request. We take this very seriously and if you don’t, that tells us all we need to know about you.

We took a long break from accepting new poets, and from publishing, but we are back. We will not respond to all of the submissions we get because Medium is full of people writing for the wrong reasons. If you meet the guidelines at the bottom, we will respond.

What is Loose Words?

A poetry publication brought to you by Assemblage to capture all of your disconnected thoughts and let them find their form.

The Vision

Poetry is a rogue subculture on Medium. Loose Words is a cooperative addition to Medium’s poetry enclave. Our focus is on unique poetry in all forms (except haiku), including, but not limited to: free verse, micropoetry, narrative, and ode. (Quick descriptors below)

• Free Verse is free from the limitation of regular meter or rhythm and does not rhyme with fixed forms, yet still provides an avenue for artistic expression.
• Micropoetry is a genre of poetic verse which is characterized by its extreme brevity. In other words, a micropoem is a short poem.
• A Narrative tells a story. It has a storyline with elements that may include characters, plot, conflict and resolution, setting and action.
• An Ode is a tribute to its subject, expressing emotion, and is usually addressed to someone or something.

Poets need more outlets than traditional writers based on length alone. But length is not indicative of the mental acuity it takes to write poetry day after day. This publication is for poets and those who truly appreciate poetry.

In everything we do at Assemblage and our sub-publications, we strive to help our writers achieve maximum growth while being supported by our community, collaboration, and creativity.

This is Loose Words.

The Backstory

Assemblage was originally created as an alternative multi-author blog to Medium, on its own website created using Squarespace. The submission and publishing process was much more time consuming than on Medium and in the end, the determination was made that writers would be better served with the publication on Medium. So, we came back to Medium on August 21, 2019.

Since we’ve been back on Medium, our growth has been steady and very promising. In response to that, as well as feedback from our writers and readers, Assemblage created sub-publications to further our mission. Loose Words was the second publication created specifically with this in mind.

Assemblage was a hotbed of poetic inspiration and that did not stop just because this stand-alone poetry publication was created. However, Loose Words was created to give poets another outlet for their words, as well as even out the ratio of poetry vs. stories on Assemblage. We created this publication on March 28, 2020.

Assemblage is the continuation of the now-defunct Medium publications, Redoubtable and Uncalendared. And now, Assemblage is the publishing arm of A Work of Fiction, Know Yourself, Loose Words, and Recollection.

In 2020, we published 1,115 poems on Medium from 109 different poets. Our most-read poem had 1.3k views and 774 reads. We had one poem with more than 100 fans. These numbers are great, but we don’t write for the numbers. We write because we have to.

In 2020, we also had to remove our submission requirements and shut down intake because of the digital barrage occurring on Medium, as well as the widespread plagiarism and encouragement to apply everywhere. You can educate yourself on why we did it below. Really, if you want to write here, you should read about why we stopped adding writers.

Why Assemblage Had To Remove Its Submission Requirements

Photo by Mia Baker on Unsplash

Do you want to write poetry for Loose Words?

Submission Guidelines

By submitting work to Loose Words, you are agreeing to all of the following conditions:

• We only accept unpublished drafts. We do not accept works already published on Medium or anywhere else, including personal blogs. We want your best work. Your fresh work. Not something that was never good enough to send anywhere else. If it was only published in a small, paper publication, we will consider that.
• We don’t accept sloppy seconds. If you submitted your piece to another publication and it got rejected, we don’t want to be your backup. We want you to write poems just for Loose Words. Period.
• Submissions must be properly tagged with at least one of the following: Free Verse, Micropoetry, Narrative, Ode, or Poetry. We encourage you to use just one (or two) of these and then (three or) four that match your content.
• Submissions will only be edited for obvious spelling, grammar, and format errors. We will never adjust your words. If we have comments or questions, we will send you a private note. Because of new time constraints, we will be trusting you and publishing your work without the stringent review that we used to have. We are only admitting you to publish here because we know you can edit yourself.
• Submissions must be made through Medium. Here’s how.
• All submissions must include a featured image with proper attribution. If you aren’t going to use Unsplash through Medium, make sure your attribution is correct.
• We don’t publish everything. All poems that are not a good fit will be returned with a private note.
• Once a poem has been published in Loose Words, we expect it to remain there. If a poem is removed, without prior notice, we reserve the right to discontinue our relationship immediately. If you want to remove the poem, just ask first. It’s your work. We would just want to know why, but we aren’t trying to hold the work against its will.
• We do not support the removal of works for republishing to get better metrics. This will result in immediate removal as a contributor. We aren’t a testing zone to see what works and what doesn’t.
• We will publish only one poem per writer per day.
• We will accept only one submission per writer per day.
• Our turnaround time is quick, usually within 24 hours. If you have an intended publication date and time in the future, please include it in a private note on the title. We intend to publish every day of the year, but the time may be different each day. If your submission comes in after our publishing run for the day, it will be published the next day.
• If we add you as a poet and you don’t produce a draft in the first week, we reserve the right to discontinue our relationship immediately. We want poets who are excited to write for us, not to add us to their list of publications.
• Some supplemental info for poets to consider:

A Comprehensive Guide To Publishing Poetry On Medium

Quality Guidelines

Poetry is an art form. We have no interest in touching your art without permission. With that said, our job is to help you publish the best piece of poetry possible. To that end, we will leave you private notes to help. Some of these are suggestions. Some of these are notifications of word choices or potential typos. Some of these are spacing or format issues. But the goal is always to help you.

Please respond to the private notes and do not dismiss them until we have published the piece. This way we can be sure that the adjustments were made. The more we work together, the more we will come to understand your poetic style and the easier it will be for us to publish. Please never take offense to the private notes, they are only sent to help you. Sometimes the piece will be sent back to complete the notes, sometimes it will remain until complete.

Some Extra Tips

• Please proofread your piece multiple times before sending it in. It will make our process much smoother and will also help with time spent as we receive several submissions each day. If you have something in your poem that is intentionally spelled differently or may be unexpected, leave a private note to let us know so we don’t have to ask you about it.
• Please use images that complement your poem. This is a bigger deal than you may think. Don’t just use what comes up on the first page of images. Find an image that truly represents what your poem is about. People are so visual these days and a compelling image can make or break our words below it, whether we like it or not.
• Don’t send us your secondary poetry. Send us your best. We want our readers to get your best effort. This is not a publication to send your castoffs to. We want quality work.
• Check your tags. Your first tag should be representative of your submission. The rest can be whatever you want but know that when we share your work on Twitter we look to your tags to create hashtags on Twitter.

Some Formatting Tips

• Your title is a title. In most cases, it should never have a period at the end.
• Your subtitle is also a title, a complement to your title. For poets on Medium, we often use this as a spot to declare it a poem, or a free verse, etc. This is totally fine. But please use the Medium buttons to format your subtitle to the correct size. You do this by highlighting the entire subtitle and then clicking the small T that comes up — that’s subtitle font.
• Please use standard single spacing in your poetry and not paragraph spacing. The default on Medium is paragraph spacing and you can use Shift+Enter after each line to adjust to single spacing when writing poetry. We understand this is not possible if you write on your phone, but it will reduce our editing time if you correct it on a desktop before submitting it. If, however, you have a reason for paragraph spacing, please leave a private note as to your reasons. We respect your style, but also want your poem to look the best to our readers. We will adjust paragraph spacing on a limited basis, for smaller poems. Others will be returned for proper formatting.
• Please do not overuse the formatting features in your poem. While we appreciate that Medium is a bit limited in terms of formatting, too much of it can detract from your words. Full use of large quotes for a poem should only be done for micropoetry or shorter verses as it can be too distracting for longer pieces and unnecessary. If you have specific reasons for extra formatting, please leave a private note. The more we know about your process, the better.
• Please limit your links at the end to 1. Personally, we feel 1 is always best as more make the reader choose from too many options — but it’s up to you. We will ask you to remove any more than 1 link to your other works.
• If you want to link to social media or your mailing list, please make sure it is small and visually pleasing. We suggest only using text such as, Follow me on Facebook (linked word), etc. To read beautiful poetry and then get a big block asking for a follow or a sign-up takes away from the aesthetic value of your words

Photo by Thought Catalog on Unsplash

Read This Before Submitting

1. Read this whole thing before submitting the form. There are easy signs to know when you have not read every word. If you fail to read the whole form and we can tell, based on your responses or your profile, we will not respond to your request.
2. If you are including Loose Words in a spam sham of applying to as many publications as possible, please don’t waste your time or ours. We can tell and we won’t respond.
3. If you want to write for Loose Words to grow your following first, we are not a good fit for you.
4. If you don’t have a favorite Medium poet and/or do not read other people’s poetry on Medium, you don’t have the commitment to the community that we are looking for.
5. If you haven’t been writing on Medium consistently for the past month, please check back after you have at least 5 published poems before applying to contribute. We like writers new to Medium, but a lot of people leave. We want writers who have already adjusted to how Medium works.
6. If you are worried about how many followers we have, how often our stories get curated, or are interested in pulling works from the publication if they don’t “do well,” we are not the publication for you.
7. If you publish poetry at publications on Medium that are clearly pyramid schemes, we will not respond to your request.

Request to Write for Loose Words

We are different than many publications. We don’t want to have 100+ poets so all of your loose words get lost in the shuffle. We direct-recruit many of our poets by reading them on Medium. That is our preferred method of adding poets. However, we are always open to new poets.

Poets who have not been asked to write for Loose Words will need to fill out the embedded form below. By requesting to be a contributor to Loose Words you are agreeing to all of the above Submission Guidelines. New poets are added on a rolling basis.

We do not want an open stable of poets who don’t produce. We want a small group of dependable and honest poetry writers who are willing to produce stories weekly to monthly.

Please fill out the form below or click here.

Questions?

Feel free to email Jonathan Greene at jonathan@trustgreene.com with any questions.

This is not an invitation to add him to your email list.