Your Name
1000 Street Address
City, State Zip (and Country if sending outside USA)
phone number
email address
60 lines
POEMS ARE DIFFERENT
As with prose pieces, you may either use all
caps or caps and lowercase for the title.
You may either put the title flush left,
as I have done here,
or you may center it as you would with prose.
The latter looks a little funny if
your lines are short.
And please don’t think that it’s necessary
to center every line of your poem.
That usually just makes it harder
to read
because your eye has to jump
around.
In almost all cases, your poetry for
submissions should be single-spaced and the poem itself
should be flush left. There are many exceptions,
of course. Sometimes
the jumpiness
is part of the point,
as with Becker and Emanuel.
Skip a line between stanzas.
If your poem contains a very long line that runs over from one physical line to the next, you can
indicate that by indenting it.
The large width of an 8 ½ x 11 piece of paper, fortunately,
means you won’t have to do that often,
but be prepared for editors to use that technique
because the widths of journals is often half that of a page.
Once a poem has been “finalized” and you are ready
to submit,
Your Name
[POEMS ARE DIFFERENT, Page 2, continue stanza]
you’ll have to go in and indicate
whether or not
the end of the page
also represents
a stanza break.
My “[POEMS ARE DIFFERENT, Page 2, continue stanza]”
means that the stanza
continues.
If it didn’t,
I would say “[POEMS ARE DIFFERENT, Page 2, new stanza].”
There are various ways of doing this.
Some writers
indicate [break] or [no break] at the bottom
of the first page. Because strategies
differ, it’s best to check
submission guidelines (or ask
your teacher)
what’s preferred in a given instance.
You may also want to use your course number and
teacher’s name when you’re in classes rather
than your personal address, phone number, etc.
Remember that your line count
does not include these extra lines or the run-over long lines.
Another thing to watch for
is that tricky old
word processing programs
like to automatically
capitalize at the beginning of every doggone line,
which you may or may not want to do.
Change your automatic formatting settings
to make your life
as a poet easier.