Autumn is when most UK pamphlet competitions open their reading windows, which means the manuscript you post in October is really made in June, July and August. That fact is useful. It turns a vague intention — I'll send something out this year — into a calendar with a handful of tasks on it, and tasks are easier to keep than intentions.
What follows is a four-month plan for a pamphlet of roughly twenty to thirty poems. Shift the months to suit your own deadline; the order of the work matters more than the names of the months.
June: Take Stock Before You Tidy
Before you polish anything, find out what you actually have. Spend a fortnight collecting rather than writing. Check the folder of finished poems, the notebook you carried around last winter, the three files called drafts and drafts new and drafts new 2. Where a poem has appeared in a magazine, copy the published version, not the one you remember.
Then make three piles:
- Poems you would defend in an argument.
- Poems you still like but haven't solved.
- Poems you are keeping out of loyalty.
The third pile is the interesting one. Loyalty is not a reason to give a poem two pages of a twenty-four page pamphlet. Move those into a folder marked later and close it. By the end of June you want a single working folder, every poem in the same font with the same spacing, no comments left in the margins. Tidiness now saves you a fortnight in September.
July: The Cold Read and the Cut
Put the folder away for a fortnight. It feels like procrastination; it isn't. Come back and read the poems in one sitting, in order, aloud if you can bear it — as though you had bought the pamphlet in a shop and had no stake in it.
Note where your attention dips. It will dip. A pamphlet is a run of small rooms, and some of them are too alike: same tone, same length, same closing gesture. Three poems about a grandmother's kitchen in a row do not make the third one stronger.
Then cut. Ask of each poem: does the pamphlet need this, or do I need it? Cut the ones where the answer is the second, and keep them in a next time folder. Nothing is wasted; it is simply not here.
While you cut, note the limit of the call you are aiming at. Page counts vary, and many sit somewhere between twenty and thirty pages. Write the number on a sticky note and put it where you work.
August: Order the Pamphlet as a Reader
Sequencing is where most manuscripts improve fastest. There is no single correct order, but there are three approaches that work, and you should try at least two of them.
- The arc. Open with a poem that establishes voice, close with one that earns its quiet. Put your two strongest poems first and last, and hide the third strongest in the middle, where nobody expects it.
- The chord. Group poems by preoccupation rather than chronology — the sea poems, the poems about work, the elegies. Within each group, vary the length so the rhythm doesn't flatten.
- The shuffle. Print the poems, lay them out on the floor, and move them by feel. Photograph every arrangement you like, then rebuild the best one at the desk.
Whichever you choose, read the sequence aloud in one go and time it. A pamphlet read at a launch should run somewhere around twenty to thirty minutes. If yours runs to fifty, you may have a book rather than a pamphlet, which is a good problem to have — just not this autumn's problem.
Late August: The Furniture Around the Poems
Poems alone do not make a submission. The surrounding pages take longer than you think.
A title, and a contents page. The title should do some work; a phrase lifted from one of the poems usually beats a word you like the sound of. The contents page must match the running order exactly, including any section breaks.
Acknowledgements. If a poem has appeared in a magazine, list the magazine. Most editors are relaxed about previously published work, but they want to know, and some competitions require poems to be unpublished, so read the rules on this before you send anything.
A short biography, third person, two or three sentences. A cover letter only if the guidelines ask for one — brief, plain, no apologies.
Finally, check that you hold the right to reprint anything previously published. If a magazine took first publication only, you are usually fine; if you are unsure, email the editor and ask. It takes five minutes and prevents an awkward withdrawal.
Early September: Readers Who Are Not You
Send the manuscript to two or three people whose judgement you trust, and give them something specific to do. What do you think? produces politeness. Better questions:
- Read it in one sitting and tell me where you got bored.
- Which poem feels like the odd one out?
- Does the first poem make you want to read the second?
- Does the order ever confuse you about who is speaking?
Give them a week and a date. When the notes come back, look for what two readers mention independently; that is usually real. Act on those and leave the rest. A manuscript revised by committee reads like one.
Submission Week: Read the Guidelines Twice
Most avoidable rejections are procedural. The poems were good; the file was anonymous when it should have been named, or named when it should have been blind. Before you press send, work through this list:
- Page count and poem count within the stated limit.
- File format, font and file name as specified. Plain is safest.
- Anonymity rules — strip your name from the file, the header and the file properties if the call is judged blind.
- Simultaneous submissions policy: some allow them, some don't, and some ask you to withdraw if you place the pamphlet elsewhere.
- Any fee, and what it covers beyond consideration.
- The deadline in the organiser's time zone, not yours.
- Whether acknowledgements or a cover letter are required.
Keep a simple record — title, competition, deadline, fee, result — in a spreadsheet or the back of a notebook. By November you will have sent to four or five places and you will not remember which asked for what.
Keep the Plan Loose Enough to Survive
Build slack in. Something will go wrong: a reader will vanish, a poem will refuse to settle, work will eat a fortnight. Give each month's task a week of cushion and nothing important breaks.
Two habits to end on. Submit a few days before the deadline, because servers slow down and forms crash, and nobody is forgiving at 23:58. And decide now that the pamphlet you send is the best version you can make by that date, not the perfect one. A pamphlet that is finished and posted will teach you more than one still being improved in a folder.
Photo: Vika Glitter / Pexels
