You have the poems. Now you have a different job: turning them into a manuscript that somebody else can read without friction. A collection is not a folder of your best work. It is a piece of editing, and editing is where most submissions quietly fall down.
Poetry editors and competition readers open a great many collections. What stops them reading on is rarely the quality of the writing on page one. It is the accumulation of small frictions — a contents page that no longer matches, a poem orphaned across a page break, a thank-you to a magazine that is never named. None of these is fatal to the work. All of them are fixable in an afternoon, and fixing them changes how your poems are received.
A collection's order does more work than most poets expect. It is not a record of when you wrote things, and it is rarely best served by grouping every poem about your father in one block. The sequence makes a case for how the poems should be read together.
Lay the manuscript out — on the floor, on a long table, or in a spreadsheet with columns for title, theme, form, length and recurring images. Then look for the patterns that flatten a reading:
Short poems make excellent hinges. Place one between two longer pieces and the whole book breathes. Your first poem should invite rather than explain, and your last should close something without tidying it away. Read the manuscript in order, in one sitting, at least twice before you decide the order is final.
There are two different documents hiding under one word, and mixing them is a common mistake. Personal thanks belong in a short paragraph. Publication credits belong in a list, and they need to be accurate.
Keep a running record from the moment you start sending poems out — a simple spreadsheet with the poem's title, the publication, the issue and the date. Then the acknowledgements page takes ten minutes instead of a weekend. A clean entry looks like this:
"The Harbour Wall" first appeared in Magma; "Salt" was published in The Rialto and broadcast on The Verb.
Check each publication's contributor terms for what they ask of you when a piece is reprinted; most simply want the credit, some want a specific wording. If a poem won or was placed in a competition, say so. If it appeared in a pamphlet, say that too, so a reader is not confused when they recognise it.
If you have quoted another writer at length, or used a translation, permissions may be needed. Do not guess about rights — ask the publisher how they would like it handled, and give yourself time to sort it out before the deadline rather than after.
Readers may not notice good typography, but they notice inconsistency, even when they cannot name what is bothering them. These are the details worth standardising.
A serif body text at 11 or 12 point, with generous margins and comfortable line spacing, is a sensible default. Poem titles can be bold, italic or small caps — pick one treatment and apply it throughout, including on the contents page and in any running heads.
Decide whether runover lines are indented or flush left, and never mix the two. Use tab stops or a paragraph indent setting rather than hitting the space bar; strings of spaces collapse the moment a file is converted. Keep one blank line between stanzas, and two (or a discreet symbol) for a section break within a poem.
Use spaced en dashes or spaced em dashes, but not both. Use curly quotation marks and apostrophes consistently, or straight ones consistently if the guidelines demand it. Ellipses should look the same in every poem. These choices are invisible when they are uniform and distracting when they are not.
A four-line poem stranded at the bottom of a page, with its title on the previous one, looks careless. Insert a page break so short poems begin on a fresh page. Check that no stanza is separated from the rest of its poem by a page turn.
Some publishers want a PDF, others an editable document. Read the guidelines and comply exactly. A beautifully typeset PDF is no help if the editor needed a Word file.
Titles change during revision. The contents page often does not. After you cut or rename a poem, run a final comparison, line by line, between the contents and the manuscript. Also check that capitalisation is consistent across titles, that subtitles and sequence numbers appear in both places, and that several poems called "Untitled" are numbered or otherwise distinguishable. Consistency in a contents page signals that the rest of the manuscript has been checked; a mismatch suggests it has not.
Print the manuscript. Read it aloud, in order, without stopping, and mark every place your voice stumbles. Those stumbles are almost always the poem's fault, not yours. Then read each poem from the last line to the first to catch typos that your eye has learned to skip.
Check names, dedication wording and the sources of any epigraphs. If you are submitting to a UK publisher, keep your spelling British throughout — unless you are quoting a text that uses another convention, in which case leave the quotation as it is.
Finally, give it to two readers: one who reads poetry, one who does not. Ask the second reader to mark anything they had to read twice. Do not explain the poems to them first. Their confusion is data.
Most of the mistakes in this piece come from working on a manuscript for months and then looking at it only in fragments. Do one final pass with fresh eyes and a checklist.
Keep two copies: a clean master and a working file you are willing to mark up. When the manuscript stops surprising you, it is ready. Send it, and start the next one.
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