Editor Interview: Naugatuck River Review

narrative poetry

Naugatuck River Review is a journal of narrative poetry only, differing from other narrative journals in that we don't publish short stories or reviews. I hope this makes us unique in the echelon of poetry journals out there. Some poetry journals I admire because of the level of poetry they publish are Rattle, Cutthroat, Alehouse and The Paris Review.

We are looking for poetry in the tradition of great narrative poets such as James Wright, Philip Levine, Jane Kenyon, David Ignatov and Gerald Stern.

We look for poems that are well-crafted, exhibit a high level of poetic language and have a compressed narrative combined with a strong emotional core that stops short of sentimental. There is also a certain level of accessibility to the poetry that makes Naugatuck River Review a great read for poets and poetry fans alike.

Please read poetry in a copy of the journal before submitting your work, so you have a good idea of the types of poems we're looking for. Also, be sure to read the guidelines on the website and follow them carefully. We only accept narrative poetry, which includes prose poems, but we will not consider fiction or purely lyric poetry.

A good submission is a file of no more than three narrative poems (a pure description is not a narrative) 50 lines maximum each. We accept many styles, including prose poems. The ideal poem has lines of 60 characters or less, since very long lines don't look good in the format of the journal. Mainly, the ideal submission has excellent poems which meet our standards for narrative poetry.

We accept only electronic submissions through our Submission Manager online. The most prominent errors come from folks who don't read the guidelines. You are limited to 3 poems per submission. If a poet sends more than three poems in a file, we will only consider the first three. If they send by mail, the submission will be sent back or discarded. Sometimes submitters disregard the guidelines completely and send work that isn't narrative poetry, or isn't even poetry. We don't publish fiction (prose) or reviews. It's all in the guidelines.

We use an online submission manager, which records a poet's basic information. You are welcome to put more biographical information in the notes section if you like. Upon acceptance we will ask for a short bio for the contributor bios section of the journal. We don't take into consideration your history of publications or awards. Your poetry will be blind-read by my editors and in the case of the contest a final judge. Send us your best work. We are looking for great narrative poetry.

We usually read the poems all the way through. As with all processes, reading poetry is both an intellectual and subjective process. We do read all three of the poems in a submission, because you never know when a gem will surface.

The poetry will be blind-read by an editor, then if given a "yes" will be re-read by myself or another editor before being definitely accepted or rejected. We can only take so many poems, so we usually need to cull the "yeses" at the last round. We get a large number of submissions (usually around 900 poems to read) so quite a few "good" poems will be rejected, unfortunately. Our contest in the summer (for the Winter contest issue) has a slightly different system. The poems are still blind-read by editors and the top 60 are picked the same way, but there are 20 finalists that get sent to the final judge for ranking for the contest, still without identifying information for the poets.

I am a teacher and a poet myself, so the journal takes up a great deal of my vacation time, especially in the summer. I spend hours logging poems into my computer, which I need to do because poets still put their names on their work, despite being asked not to, and then sending groups of poems to my editors until we have a final group of tentatively accepted poems to cull. We usually take the accepted poems and have a meeting to figure out the arc of the Summer issue, which is great fun. I also have the task of sending out all the acceptance and rejection letters and responding to inquiries. We take the journal to the AWP book fair and other venues. I also have readings for my poets in various cities, AWP off-site and the Massachusetts Poetry Festival. This is a lot of fun and helps to publicize both the journal and the poets. Somehow, I also find time to write, teach, grade papers publish a newsletter, go to critique groups, and, oh yes, I also have a life.