The whole issue of whether print media poetry editors consider various
forms of on line appearance to be "previous publication" is very
confused, and in general editors have done little to clarify it.
Most submission guidelines simply specify "previously unpublished."
But there's no common sense or generally accepted answer to whether
"previously published" includes internet publication, since there's
no common sense or generally accepted definition of what "internet
publication" is. For instance, a poem might appear on the internet:
1) in an email sent by the poet to an individual
2) in an email sent to an email dist list maintained on the poet's email account
3) in an email sent to a centrally maintained email dist list which is
not archived anywhere
4) in an email sent to a centrally maintained email dist list the
archive of which is only available to registered members
5) in an email sent to a centrally maintained email dist list, the
archive of which is not indexed by Google but is available to anyone
who knows where to look for it (like poetryetc)
6) in an email sent to a centrally maintained email dist list, the
archive of which is indexed by Google so that anyone can find the poem
by a Google author or title search
7) on an internet poetry web site where anyone can post their poems
(like poemhunter.com, which is a particularly good example of the
uncertainty, since that site has characteristics of both an on line
anthology and an on line workshop)
8) on the poet's own personal web site
9) on someone else's hobbyist literary web site
10) on a formally edited on line poetry magazine web site unconnected
with any print magazine
11) on the web site of a print magazine (while not being included in
the print version)
12) on a web site of any one of the types mentioned above that was
taken off line five years ago, so that the poem is no longer available
on the internet
13) any combination of the above
14) other situations I haven't thought of
Which of the above constitute "previous publication on the internet?"
Almost no one, I think, would include 1) or 2), almost everyone
would include 10) and 11), and there would varying degrees of
disagreement about the rest.
If you ask print media poetry editors about this, they will usually
just say glibly, "If it's on the internet, it's been published,"
because that's the easy answer to a messy question and since they get
so many poems anyway, they're glad to have one more category to
summarily weed out. This means that poets who want to submit poems
to print journals need to keep those poems off the internet while they
are being considered by those print journals; and since response times
are typically measured in months, and many poems are only finally
accepted for publication after being submitted to a series of print
journals, this could easily mean keeping them off the internet for a
year or more.
I suspect many poets either tacitly follow their private definitions
of what constitutes "internet publication" when submitting to print
media -- "the guidelines say 'no previous publication' and this has
been on poemhunter but I don't have to mention that because that's not
really publication" -- or else look on this issue as one more reason
not to deal with the humiliating gauntlet of "submission" (what a
wonderfully albeit unconsciously apt word for it!) to print journals
and to just put everything on the internet themselves in the first
place.
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Jon Corelis http://jcorelis.googlepages.com/joncorelis
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