Submission Guidelines For “Poets Unlimited”

The Poets Unlimited publication on Medium is an eclectic mix of poetry from contributors around the world with diverse insights, perspectives and styles.

As far as we can tell, we are the most popular, and most active, poetry-only ‘publication’ in the Medium ecosystem.

If you’d like to contribute – and we’d love to have you – below are ELEVEN points on how to join and contribute.

1. Become a Contributing Poet? To be added as a contributor is pretty easy. You just need to read the points below, and have a poem on your Medium account that follows those requirements. Then, simply get in touch to request joining. Perhaps mention/link-to your poem if it’s not obvious in your Medium stream.
   Get in touch by tweeting to publication owner @ottaross on Twitter. (Alternatively see the ‘no twitter’ note at the bottom, if you don’t use that service). There are no judgements on content, as long as you meet the few rules outlined below. Once you are accepted, pieces can be submitted at will, and they’ll be shared with the world if they meet the style rules.
   Sometimes a bit of Twitter-based promotion will bring additional viewers to particularly notable contributions on the PoetsUnlimited feed.
2. How to contribute? The submitting of each poem for publishing (after you’ve been added as a contributor to the “publication”) is just a couple of clicks. Select “New Story” at the top right of the Medium page, and start writing. Choose “Publish” when you’re finished — that only means your poem is then published on your personal feed, and is viewable by the world. NEXT, you need to submit it PoetsUnlimited. Click the “…” button near the bottom right while your poem is on-screen — that will let you submit to the PoetsUnlimited publication. (More details) An editor will then approve it if it meets these guidelines.
3. Can you include a picture please? Medium’s presentation format is very visual, Try to find a pic that works with your piece, it becomes the background of the title on the landing page, and will help the publication be visually attractive. That’s nice for building a following.
   It can be fun too ! A pic that works for you need not illustrate your content, but maybe be one that evokes a mood or theme underlying your ideas.
   I like the site http://www.freeimages.com/ under their “FREE” tab to find free-use, open-rights pictures from good photographers, but there are many others. We leave it to you to ensure you can use the picture you choose. But you can go picture-less if you really wish your poem to be text-only.
   NOTE: If you do not add a picture, a coloured rectangle will be added to the end of your poem just to make the title page work. (That colour appears behind your title.) Feel free to change it into an image of your choice if you wish to later. 
   Publishing may be a bit slower to avoid situations where many pieces without images are back-to-back. (Pics need to be at least 200 x 300 px)
   - No animated GIFs please - tried it once with an open mind, but it was not very visually pleasant for the landing page.
   - Avoid Videos — Medium has a no-tracking policy so a YouTube video will usually show as a do-not-track policy message instead. Adding it as a link is a better approach.
   - No images with copyright watermarks on them. We’ll have to swap out an image if there is a risk of copyright issues.)
   - Not a photo essay - A picture (or two) is good - but we want to keep the focus on the written word.
   [See Medium’s help-page on how to put an images into a poem]
4. A Title. If you choose not to title your piece, that’s fine, but Medium’s way of formatting the front page is a title over a photo, so you should put “Untitled” into the title slot to accommodate that. With no title, Medium can sometimes squeeze poem text into the title area space because there is no title, and it looks ugly. So if you’re not using a title putting “Untitled” in that slot to make it work. If we see a piece come up messy we’ll probably stick that in to fix it.
   (Click for some great tips about formatting stuff on Medium)
5. Poetry not Prose. This could be a long discussion, so at the end of the day, the publisher has final say about where our prose vs poetry dividing line is, as we try to position the publication as poetry-centric.
   To provide some style guidance, our definition of poetry for this publication is a written form that employs or explores structure (like rhythm, repetition and/or rhyme) and where word-choice and word-placement are precise, deeply considered, and economical. Every word is selected and positioned for a reason, and meaning beyond the words – conveyed through imagery, metaphor and/or simile – is evoked.
   Example: “I was riding the bus in to my workplace last Wednesday and saw a beautiful sunrise” sounds like prose to me, whereas “Bus. Early morning yawns/Work awaits/Sunrise captures my breath” is sparse, economical, evocative and thus poetic. A simplistic example, but hopefully it’s helpful. 
   Generally if you employ a few of those techniques: rhythm, rhyme, structure, imagery and/or interesting language, and especially economy of word use – you’re on the ‘poetry’ side of the dividing line. 
   [Typically about 1 out of every 10 or 15 submissions is declined for being more on the ‘prose’ side of that dividing line. No harm in submitting if unsure. A decline doesn’t hurt too much - it doesn’t mean bad, it just means outside our chosen focus.]
6. Just The Poem, Please: Poems should also be submitted on their own without intros, interpretations, background stories, graphical widgets, poem analysis, pleas for followers, or explanations of your inspiration or your muses. Let’s leave them to stand on their own merits for the reader, shall we? 
   A one-line link to your poetry page elsewhere? No problem.
   And while Item #3 says ‘a picture please’ the focus should be on the words, so photo essays of many pictures are not the style-of-interest for the publication.
   If you wish to explain something about the poem or its inspiration, try the “Response” feature below the story after you’ve clicked “Publish.” 
   Please also, no promotions for other activities, advertisements for personal businesses or commercial additions of any kind please. If we allow that, then in a few weeks we will be knee deep in MacDonald’s e-coupons and Pepsi promos. ;)
7. Multiple Submissions? If you have several pieces to submit — that’s great. Note that poems need to be submitted as separate pieces, not as several poems in a single post.
   We like to break up posts by the same poet by intermixing with the works of others, just for variety, and so the site doesn’t look like someone’s personal blog. Sometimes there may be a bit of delay in posting all of your pieces. It will depend on when other poets have submitted something. If there’s a slow period, I may post a couple of your poems back-to-back after a day or so to keep the site moving along, and readers interested.
   On a busy day when everyone is submitting, I might defer a few until tomorrow to avoid swamping readers, and to avoid your piece being lost in the flurry.
8. Content Limits? Other than the site being an English language publication, there isn’t much of a limit (that’s the UNLIMITED part). I hate to have to say it explicitly, but yes, some content isn’t going to make it in — hate-speech, gratuitous pornography, or long meandering political or religious diatribes aren’t going to be enjoyed by the readers here, so we’ll take a pass on the opportunity to share those, thanks (that’s the hypocrisy inherent in the system).
   Your poem should be a minimum size of a haiku, and maximum of a few pages. So just a couple of words, nor a novella-sized poem are good fits for PoetsUnlimited’s style.
9. Edits and Repairs. I might occasionally ask a question if a word looks like a possible typo or spelling error. I might just fix it, if it’s obvious like “I saw tge rising sun that morning.” But if you want to write a piece on the enjoyment of typos, by all means we can leave it in too :)
10. Original, Recent, Work. Ideally the pieces published here are unique works you’ve just written. But really, nobody reads everything, everywhere, so if you’re really chuffed about a submitting a piece you wrote and posted elsewhere too, okay then. 
    Oh — original — yes, we expect you to have written the piece yourself. We won’t publish any ‘here’s a great poem my friend wrote” or “isn’t this a great piece by Leonard Cohen.”
    Oh but, Leonard, dude, you’re welcome to submit your work here too.
11. I Hate this. You are stupid and everyone is dumb and stuff. Sometimes a contributor may forget that they are not required to write poetry for Poets Unlimited. They might be interested in a different style, different rules and sure we may well be the stupidest publication EVER. Anyone can start a website or a publication at will. Please DO start your own rather than vent at those who volunteer their time to carve this one out in a certain shape for the thousands of people who seem to like it.

Take a look back here occasionally. There might be an addition or two as we learn how to make things even better. I’ll even try to fix the typos and grammar fails on this page as I notice them.

No Twitter: Not on Twitter? That’s okay, you can choose a get-in-touch method: 1. write a request in a “response” below; 2. highlight a bit of text in this article with your mouse, then click the comment-bubble; or 3. more privately, you can highlight and then click the bubble with the lock in it (“private notes”) — your message with your request will not be public then. Your choice. 
(It’s rare, but if you get no answer to your request after a few days, prod me again, perhaps I missed you. Typical response is within a day or two.)

Do promote your poem if you can take a moment to do so! Use the hashtag #poetsUnlimited on your social media platform of choice, and you’ll help both yourself and your fellow unlimited-poets to connect with more readers.