Photo by Alex Towle, 2018
Have you ever attended the Dodge Poetry Festival and wondered, How do those poets get chosen to be up there? Are you a poet who wants to read at the Festival and is wondering how to submit or make your submission stronger?
This post is meant to help demystify our submission process.
First, if you have submitted to read in the past and were not invited, please remember that this doesn’t mean that we didn’t like your poetry. Every Festival, our greatest challenge is narrowing down the number of poets we want to invite from submissions to the number of opportunities we have to offer.
Second, if you submit to the Dodge Poetry Festival, you can be certain your work will be read and considered carefully. We take discovering poets we have not heard before very seriously. Even though we receive hundreds of submissions from around the country (and from international poets, too), every single submission is carefully reviewed by a panel of three anonymous poets. Although this review process takes months, we refuse to cut corners, and we are always inspired and encouraged by the number of gifted poets we discover from all across the country who are doing powerful work.
Third, don’t forget that we are curating a live event. We ask for video and audio recordings because, unlike editors of print publications, we must consider how poets engage with their audience. For this reason, each panel poet begins their review of a submission with its video and/or audio recordings. If you’re submitting, it’s important to include at least one video or audio clip of you reading your work, preferably before a live audience. This does not mean that we favor performance poets or any particular style, but we do favor poets who appear to care about communicating and connecting with their listeners and readers. Some of the most riveting readings at the Festival have been given by poets who read with quiet, focused presence.
(Side note: Please don’t go to any great lengths or expense to record a professional-quality video. We know video and audio quality varies, and care more about you and your work than about your video production capacity. You can learn more on our Submission FAQs page.)
Fourth, your writing sample should provide some sense of the scope of your work beyond what’s offered in the recordings. Of course, it’s always helpful to see the text of a poem we have a recording of, but the guiding principle behind additional poems you include should be what you want us to know about your work. Only after reviewing the video and/or audio will the panelists turn to the writing sample, and then on to chapbooks or full-length collections. Some poets read at the Festival all four days, Thursday through Sunday, multiple times per day. These poets have enough material that they can keep their readings varied and fresh from session to session.
Fifth, the cover letter is your opportunity to help the panel get a sense of the perspective and experience you might bring to conversations offered at the Festival, and those you would be interested in. One of the highlights of the Festival is having the chance to see and hear poets with widely divergent backgrounds, points of view and styles reading together, having conversations and sharing stories. Our panel is always excited to invite poets who can help us offer a more inclusive sense of what’s happening in contemporary poetry.
Finally, your resumé or C.V. will be the last part of your submission that the panel reviews. Press packages and book reviews will go unread. The Dodge Poetry Festival is not an academic or professional conference, where the credentials and degrees of presenters are heavily weighed. We’re a festival, and experiencing a direct connection to poetry and living poets is at the heart of what we do. We’re more interested in you and your work than in your credentials and degrees.
To learn about the logistics of how to submit to read at the 2020 Dodge Poetry Festival (scheduled for October 2020, exact dates to be determined), please visit our Submission Guidelines and Submission FAQs.