Merion West: Poetry Gold Star Program Gold Star Free Tip Jar Option

We look forward to reading your poetry. Please follow our submission guidelines:

Merion West only publishes first serial rights. We do not publish poems that have been appeared elsewhere, including on websites and social media. We want to be the first to unveil your grand and beautiful Poem to the world. After publication, rights revert to the poet. Merion West requires that you credit our magazine with the first serial publication of the poem in future publications or books.

Whether the verse is formal, experimental, or “free verse,” we appreciate poetry that adeptly uses a poetic line and stanza and explores the tension that exists between the sentence and the line. A poem is an artifact—a made thing—wrought from words and separate from everyday speech. Colloquial speech, of course, appears in many great poems, but somehow it is exalted into something memorable to human sensibilities. It is wholly possible to make a cliché fresh—just not easy by any measure.

At Merion West, we believe that form precedes content. Merion West welcomes a vast range of themes.

We have a keen appreciation for skill with prosody—i.e., the music of a poem—whether that music is sweet or hard and clashing. The use of consonance, assonance, alliteration, enjambment, and a feel for the drama of the sentence broken by the line is encouraged. We believe that poetry is written first with the ear, second with the eye.

We enjoy a balance of imagery versus rhetoric, with pride of place going to sharp, memorable images. When a poem is discursive, one hopes the discourse is subtle. Even outrage may be sung—thus, opera.

Poems ideally are serious, but not self-serious. As such, we invite wit and satire.

We do not stipulate length—just ensure the poem is as long or as short as it needs to be. One to three poems per submission is about right. Please provide a short bio.

For a greater sense of the magazine’s stance on poetics, please read some of Austin Allen James’s essays on poetry in Merion West, as well as those of our guest poetry essayists and former arts editor Johnny Payne. We are contributing to an international conversation about poetry. Please also refer to the poetry that Merion West has published. Give us your best!

We welcome translations of poetry into English from any language. Please provide the original text in the source language if possible.

Publishing with us no more than once per year is the norm.

While we permit simultaneous submissions, please inform us if it is accepted elsewhere. At that point, please decide which publication you desire your work to appear in. If it is someone other than Merion West, please withdraw your work from us in Duotrope and notify us. The literary world runs on good etiquette.