Quantitative Poetry Journal Rankings

This is the listing of all small press magazines that publish poetry and print over 1,000 copies of each issue that I can find numbers for. With a few exceptions, all of the circulation numbers come from the CLMP Directory, which is publicly available online. Note that the CLMP data is self-reported by each magazine and may not be up to date, even at the time of this posting. A few magazines, like POETRY, APR, and Paris Review don’t have circulations listed on the directory, so I’ve used other reported sources that I could find on the internet (ad sheets, news articles, etc.)  I can’t guarantee that any of this information is accurate, other than what’s listed for Rattle.

If you think I’ve omitted any magazines that should be listed, check the CLMP.org Directory (or some other source) and let me know.

Possibly missing (but can’t find data for):

Hudson Review
IMAGE

For an estimate of submission volume, I used Rattle’s known quantity to extrapolate from the number of submissions reported to Duotrope for each magazine. It was six months ago that I did this, but I think it was about 7x the number of submissions reported there (Rattle had over 2,000 responses reported, and at the time only Poetry and Hayden’s Ferry had over 1,000).  I believe that this methodology is under-reporting for the most established magazines, because the demographic that uses Duotrope is younger and more internet savvy, and so postal submissions are underrepresented there.  Because Duotrope is now subscription based, I probably won’t be able to update that list.  The numbers provided are an estimate of submission packets, not individual poems.  In most cases the number of poems would be four or five times the number of packets received.  Rattle receives about 70,000 poems per year.

Print Run
Subscribers
Subm/yr*
1 Poetry 30,000 15,000 11,000
2 Paris Review 16,000 10,000 3,600
3 American Poetry Review 14,000 9,000 3,100
4 Tin House 10,500 3,800 7,000
5 Ploughshares 6,500 5,000 4,700
6 VQR 6,500 4,000 3,700
7 Missouri Review 5,500 4,000 3,500
8 RATTLE 5,000 3,100 15,000
9 Kenyon Review 5,000 3,000 4,000
10 Bellevue Review 5,000 2,000 1,000
11 Indiana Review 5,000 2,000 5,000
12 Conjunctions 5,000 1,000 2,900
13 New Letters 3,500 2,300 4,500
14 Crab Orchard Review 3,300 2,300 1,300
15 AGNI 3,200 1,300 7,600
16 Crazyhorse 3,000 2,500 7,500
17 Georgia Review 3,000 2,000 5,100
18 Prairie Schooner 3,000 1,000 2,600
19 Southern Review 3,000 2,000 2,100
20 Iowa Review 2,500 1,600 2,000
21 The Gettysburg Review 2,500 2,000 n/a
22 Mid-American Review 2,500 1,200 4,700
23 Zyzzyva 2,500 1,200 800
24 Alaska Quarterly 2,300 1,600 3,200
25 Five Points 2,000 800 1,900
26 Florida Review 1,750 1,100 800
27 New England Review 1,600 1,000 2,100
28 New York Quarterly 1,500 800 1,900
29 Willow Springs 1,400 250 2,200
30 Colorado Review 1,300 850 4,000
31 Beloit Poetry Journal 1,300 670 2,000
32 Hayden’s Ferry Review 1,300 400 10,800
33 Chattahoochee Review 1,250 800 800
34 Southern Poetry Review 1,200 1,000 2,100
35 Southwest Review 1,000 600 1,800
36 Cincinnati Review 1,000 500 4,200
37 Greensboro Review 1,000 500 1,900
Statistics compiled from the CLMP online directory as of March 18, 2013, and other sources.
*Poetry Submission Packets/Year estimated from Duotrope listings as of 9/19/12 (back when it was free and publicly available).

9 Comments

  1. Note that the CLMP data is self-reported by each magazine and may not be up to date, even at the time of

    Made this comment an introduction to the chart.

  2. In the introduction to the Poetry 100 anthology, Christian Wiman mentions that Poetry magazine receives over 100,000 poems per year. Assuming he’s only referring to submissions to the magazine (and not Ruth Lilly Fellowship poems, etc.), then that should put their submission volume closer to 25,000 packets. But I’m leaving the Duotrope number for consistency.

  3. I think Image journal prints more than 1,000 copies? I could be wrong. http://imagejournal.org.

  4. Gettysburg Review?

    • Good catch! I haven’t updated this in almost three years, but I should. Rattle is up to a print run of 8,000 and 6,000 subscribers. And 32,000 submissions per year. Would be good to update the rest.

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