View a Free Sample of Poet Tips: Notes from the Empress

Today we are going to go over steps 1-5 and Step 9.

We will start our discussion with step 1- Prepare yourself, your work and your peers. What kind of preparation do you need to do? To prepare yourself, be sure that you are mentally, physically and emotionally ready to being this stage of your life, becoming a published poet. It takes a lot of preparation, a lot of planning, and lots of legwork if you are going to be performing publicly. You will also need to develop a thick emotional skin, because you will be asking for criticism of your work, and some folks are going to be more constructive in their criticism than others. Decide on a goal for yourself in the next year, and then break down your goal into a plan with manageable steps, so that you end up with a to-do list for every stage of your plan. For guidance on this step, we will be having a chat at our interactive Delphi site in October.

For your work, make sure it is presentable, and clear. You should also catalog and categorize your work. If you work on a PC, spell checks it. Format it the way you would like it to appear when published. Make a list of poems you are going to start out with, all from the same category, like love poems, or political poems. Then start visiting the sites where you will be getting your work published. If you are going to simultaneously pursuing publication off the web, buy a copy of the publication you want t o be in or check it out at the library. Will your work fit in? Can you meet the submission requirements? Sometimes that is the only reason your work gets rejected – wrong format.

The next step is perfect your work using the feedback of unbiased parties. Most people think immediately of friends and family. Sorry, this is not an objective audience at all. Try posting your poems to a forum or message board that has follow-up discussions. We have one at the Delphi address we supplied earlier. You might also enroll in a Poetry Workshop. You can find out about these in the happening performance poetry spots or publications in your area. In the DC area, try places such as Mangoes restaurant or The Caribbean Students Association at the University of Maryland in College Park. Most community colleges offer a relatively cheap creative writing class that focuses on poetry.

Step three requires you to proofread your work. This is an important step. Here’s a tip. Start at the end of your work and read it backwards, word by word if it is fresh in your mind; line by line if it is a poem you don’t know by heart. You would be surprised at how many mistakes you can catch that way. You can have a friend proofread it, too. A friend may know how you think, and what you mean to say when you write something. Even if they do not, it will still help to determine whether your audience will get the same mood from what you write that you intend.

Pre-releasing your work in a controlled environment is a simple process that few people do which will save you lots of heartache. In executing step four, you should find a small publication, mailing list or other places on the Web with less stringent requirements for publication, like the Starlite Cyber Cafe, which we are going to discuss later in this newsletter. Pick a place where feedback is encouraged, where you might be able to leave your email address for people to respond to your work. Why? Because the more you find out about reactions to your work now, the better you can fine tune it before it gets widely released, the better your chances in the long run. There is nothing like having a piece of work that you thought was finished evolve into perfect three months later. You have such confidence in that piece when you send it out to be widely distributed that rejections won’t depress you. You will Know that it’s not you and your work, it’s them, and their inability to recognize genius when they see it. And that, friends, is a Great feeling.

For Step 5 – go to the About page in New Afrika Empires. Here is the address - https://www.angelfire.com/hi/NewAfrikaEmpires/About.html .

Step 9 - Publishing with a Literary Art Collective, is a special step that most people don’t know about, or have not considered. Here are some frequently asked questions and answers that we thought we should give you so you can make an educated decision about finding and joining one. Click this link to find out more -https://www.angelfire.com/hi/NewAfrikaEmpires/lac.html .