Submission Guidelines
If you have written a poem for the current prompt and want to submit it to the site, please read and follow these guidelines:
1. Format your poem as you wish it to appear, but keep in mind that formats are often altered in the process of using e-mail, and we will cut & paste your poem as received.
If your poem is accepted, we will spell check and correct any obvious errors found. If there are other questions about the poem, we will e-mail you.
2. Send your poem in TEXT format, rather than HTML, if possible. (For example, poems copied and pasted from Microsoft Word will usually contain extra HTML code which may change the way your poem appears in our mail reader.) This can usually be done by using the "plain text" mode in your email program.
3. Put the TITLE of the poem at the top in all CAPITAL LETTERS
4. SINGLE SPACE your poem unless you are intentionally using line breaks or spacing for effect.
5. You must include a first & last name you wish to use at the end of the poem
6. If you want to have your name linked to your e-mail address or website, include that information after your name.
7. Please submit only one poem for consideration.
8. To submit your poem, send it in the body of an email to poetsonline@gmail.com with the subject line "submission" so that your mail is filtered correctly.
Submitting your poem gives us permission to post it online if it is selected, however, all other rights are retained by the poet. For more on your rights, click the copyrights link at top.
Submitting your poem includes the implicit understanding that the work is an original poem written by you and has not been plagiarized from any source.
Unfortunately, we can not respond personally to every poem submitted, acknowledge your submission or offer critiques of your work. Please check the site after the deadline to see when new poems are posted. Subscribing to our mailing list will notify you of this automatically. Poems are retained in the site archive for at least one year.
What is the most common reason that a poem is rejected?
Most poems that are not published online did not address the prompt. We will only consider poems that respond to the current writing prompt. From those poems, we try to select those of the best quality and poems that show a variety of responses to the prompt.
