Submissions/

Poetry City reads all submissions, solicited or unsolicited, without personally identifying information on the poems. We believe that knowing the identity of a poet can change how one reads a poem, and we want to publish the poem first and the poet second. Submit all poems via Submittable. The link here will be active when the reading period is open. We will also post open-reading periods on the homepage.

Solicitations/

It may be that our anonymous reading policy changes what, in a traditional sense, “solicitation” means—that not giving special consideration to those we ask to send us poems is something less than what soliciting has always been. If that’s the case—if our sense of solicitation makes the word more elastic—we’re okay with that. Our editors read widely, in print and online journals, looking for poems they love, for poets to add to our list of “those we hope to solicit submissions from.” The list of poets we solicit from is a balance of the diverse voices and constituencies that comprise contemporary poetry.

We hope that what we do would receive the approval of Harriet Monroe, our forbearer in these endeavors, who said, and we concur, and attempt to follow in the tradition, that “The Open Door will be the policy of this magazine—may the great poet we are looking for never find it shut, or half-shut, against [their] ample genius! To this end the editors hope to keep free from entangling alliances with any single class or school. They desire to print the best English verse which is being written today, regardless of where, by whom, or under what theory of art it is written. Nor will the magazine promise to limit its editorial comments to one set of opinions."