Incendiary Lit

This is an interesting list of submission turn offs from the editor of The North American Review Vince Gotera. Those who are thinking about starting to submit their work for publication should check over this list, maybe even print it out. Those who already are submitting, look it over to make sure you’re not accidentally breaking submission etiquette. Everyone that has a Facebook profile should go here and friend “Friends of the North American Review”

Okay … for me, the “turn-off” is different for each poem I ultimately reject. Here are a few immediate turn-offs, in no particular order:

• Botched ending … forced, too explanatory, too “universalized”
• Clumsy use of form … for example, if sonnet or sestina, etc.
• Slow getting going … should rock from first line down
• Too much full rhyme … I prefer slant rhyme
• Uninformed line breaks … be aware of lineation effects
• Abstract or image-less … unless experimental
• Superficial topic or handling
• Obviously unaware of poetic tradition(s)
• Cover letter explains poem … inexperienced submitter
• Poem sent with vita or résumé … very inexperienced submitter
• Says “copyright …” … does writer think I’ll steal the poem?
• Centered lines … unless important for theme
• Badly edited … errors, typos, grammar, etc.
• Font too small … many editors are older and have old eyes
• Monotype font or font too fancy … hard to read quickly
• Pseudonyms … let’s back up our writing with our names, ppl
• Handwritten … usually from prisoners, though I’ve accepted
poems by prisoners.

There are other turn-offs but that’s all I can think of at the moment.

I do want to say that I don’t just drop the poem. My eyes touch every word. I read very quickly and wait for the poem to say, “whoa, you’re reading too fast.”

I love Duotrope. Don’t get me twisted, but sometimes I get a hankering for something to hold in my hands and look at while I’m watching Top Chef or The Office or MST3K or whatever. That’s when I bust out the good old Poet’s Market (used 2007’s at amazon for under $3!) and start flipping through it. I have the last 5. It’s definitely a nice tool to have, Writer’s Digest does a good job on them. I’ve read almost all of the articles in each one, and it’s definitely helped me find journals that seem likely to be more sympathetic to my type of poetry. Of course, there are other all prose journals, and probably at least another dozen or two magazines that accept submissions over the summer, but many don’t. So here’s a bunch of good ones (and some links to help you along), (e)= accepts email submissions and NoSS= doesn’t accept simultaneous submissions.

A-C

ACM (Another Chicago Magazine), Apalachee Review, Arable (e), Artful Dodge, Asheville Poetry Review, Backwards City Review (e), Baltimore Review, Barrow Street, Beloit Poetry Journal NoSS, Bitter Oleander NoSS(not in July), Black Warrior Review, Burnside Review (e), California Quarterly (CA residents only), Carolina Quarterly NoSS, Chaffin Journal (Only accepts during summer), Chattahoochee Review NoSS, Chautauqua Literary Review, Christian Science Monitor (keep in mind their positive sensibilities), Cimarron Review, Coal City Review NoSS, Common Ground Review NoSS, Connecticut Review, Cottonwood Review NoSS, Crab Creek Review, Cranky (e), Crazyhorse

D-L

Diner, Edgz, Epicenter, 5AM NoSS, Gargoyle Magazine (e), Good Foot, Hanging Loose NoSS, Harpur Palate, Hazmat Review NoSS, Hiram Poetry Review, Hudson Review NoSS, Indiana Review, The Journal, Lake Effect, The Ledge, Louisville Review, Lungfull! Magazine

M-P

Main St. Rag, Manoa, Margie, Massachusetts Review NoSS, Michigan Quarterly Review NoSS, Midwest Quarterly, Miller’s Pond, Mudfish, Nerve Cowboy, The New Criterion, New Letters NoSS, New Zoo Poetry Review, Nexus, Nimrod, North American Review NoSS, North Dakota Quarterly NoSS, Northwest Review NoSS, One Trick Pony NoSS, Pacific Coast Journal, Pebble Lake Review, Pennsylvania English, Pikeville Review NoSS, Pleiades, Poet Lore, Poetry NoSS, Portland Review

Q-Z

Quercus Review NoSS, Rainbow Curve, Raintown Review, Redgreene Review, Redivider, River Styx, Roanoke Review, Sewanee Review NoSS, Slipstream, Smartish Pace, Southeast Review, Southern Humanities Review NoSS, Southern Poetry Review, Southwest Review NoSS, Sow’s Ear Poetry Review, Spillway, Spinning Jenny (e) NoSS, The Sun NoSS, Texas Poetry Journal (e), Third Coast, Threepenny Review NoSS, Timber Creek Review (short poems only), Verse, Virginia Quarterly Review NoSS, Westview, Whiskey Island.

In the great tome that is the new Gulf Coast, which I sadly haven’t been able to delve terribly deep into yet, I did, however, find a classic Lawrence Raab poem playing out scenarios stemming from movies, literature and nuclear fission. I love that guy. So here’s the poem.

Mad Doctors
by Lawrence Raab

Even as children they always went too far.
What will happen, they keep thinking,
if I pull that switch, strike this match?
Maybe no one told them not to,
or explained, logically, what could go wrong.
Then they were playing with lightning,

wondering what they would do if they didn’t
have to die. Consider Doctor Cyclops,
stuck in the middle of the jungle
with his radium, making things small.

It’s 1940, five years before Hiroshima.
Even then science wasn’t on our side.
In the movies, Albert Decker’s
shaved head makes him monstrous
and impressive, and a little like a child.
Yet he seems to have no past–

no wife to bring back from the dead,
no motive for evil, nothing but research.
His eyes are bad and he hardly sleeps.
We should remember Doctor Cyclops

from time to time, and Doctor Frankenstein,
Doctor Jekyll, and Doctor X.
They were all deceived by ambition,
although they behaved themselves
betrayed by the world.

Maybe no one ever told them
we don’t need to live forever.
Maybe no one explained, exactly,
the logic of it.

After reading a great deal of literary magazines I’ve come to hope that if I enter enough of the Indiana Review contests that I’ll eventually accrue a lifetime subscription. Every issue there are amazing poems, fiction, and even art. Also, ever since Sydney Brown’s creative nonfiction workshop I’ve had a soft-spot for the flash-fiction. The short short. Not sure who to blame for my prose poem affinity. Maybe Campbell McGrath. Yeah, I could probably safely blame my love for prose poems on his first book Capitalism.
The bastard.
Anyway, the Indiana Review 1/2K Prize is another one of those self-explanatory contest title names like “First Book of Poetry” or “Who can fart the bonfire started with a lighter?” though I’ve been told first prize for that last one isn’t quite as much as the hospital bills the second place winner receives, so it’s a gamble. The prize is for prose poems or short-shorts that are 500 words or less. 1/2 of 1K, 1,000. Yeah. 1000×0.5, even.
Entry Fee: $15 ($27 overseas)- which includes a year’s subscription to IR. Definitely well worth it. Consider it a bonus gift for subscribing, you’re entered into a sweepstakes where you could win $1000 and critical acclaim! HOORRAYYYY! But really, you never know who’s going to like your style, your flair for story structure, your unique image sets, so why not spend the $15 and ensure yourself two 200 page collections of poetry, fiction, nonfiction and reviews that I personally guarantee you’ll enjoy at least 1/3 of. If you don’t I’ll personally apologize in a form-email that I’ve already composed.
Deadline: June 9th! That’s right, very soon. That’s the postmark deadline. You can also submit online for the Indiana Review 1/2k Prize here.
Final Judge: You know the deal, the regular readers for the Indiana Review sort through the hundreds or thousands of pieces submitted, and narrow them down substantially. Then they move onto the senior editors who narrow it down to a reasonable number for the guest judge. Or it goes from readers to judge, depends on the contest, but if you make it past the early screening your prose poem/short short will be judged by none other than Russell Edson. I think Webdelsol summed up his biography best so I’ll shamelessly copy-paste that here for convenience: Russell Edson was born in Connecticut in 1935 and currently resides there with his wife Frances. Edson, who jokingly has called himself “Little Mr. Prose Poem,” is inarguably the foremost writer of prose poetry in America, having written exclusively in that form before it became fashionable. In a forthcoming study of the American prose poem, Michel Delville suggests that one of Edson’s typical “recipes” for his prose poems involves a modern everyman who suddenly tumbles into an alternative reality in which he loses control over himself, sometimes to the point of being irremediably absorbed–both figuratively and literally–by his immediate and, most often, domestic everyday environment. . . . Constantly fusing and confusing the banal and the bizarre, Edson delights in having a seemingly innocuous situation undergo the most unlikely and uncanny metamorphoses. . . .
I mean, it’s not a biography, but the pertinent information for someone who’s judging a writing contest. I first read Edson in Stand Up Poetry, Charles Harper Webb’s kick ass anthology. So send in to the 1/2k prize. What were you going to do with that $15 anyway? Buy two drinks at dinner? A frappuccino for yourself and two friends? 1/2 of a shirt? Get some good literature and an extra reason to be excited to see the mailman.

Jessica and I are working on an independent study class right now that involves reading as many 2007 journals that we can find, and pick the ones we like the most. The project still has a ways, but I’ve really started noticing some of the same names, especially in the smaller journals like Cairn and the Pacific Review the Willow Review and the like. Patrick Carrington, Sean Kilpatrick, Jonathon Wells, Emma Bolden, Geof Hewitt, Gary Nowacki, and Marilyn Ringer. This, of course, is merely coming from some guy who thinks he’s learning to become a poet, so take it with a grain of salt. The names may be terribly familiar, or new, but check out their poems when you come across them, at very worst they’ll be decent poems. I guarantee it.

Though more journals end their submission periods after next month, this month has quite a few, including:

Buffalo Carp, Crab Orchard Review, Cream City Review, Crucible (4/15), Epoch (4/15), Grasslands Review, Lips, Notre Dame Review, Paterson Literary Review, Saranac Review

They’re just awesome, and I heart them. Just wanted to say that. They keep in touch with you throughout the whole process of publishing your work, they offer helpful editorial suggestions, but work with you on them. They understand when you can’t get back to them right away, and they just have a great eye for writing. Well, I exclude my own writing from that, of course, because I don’t want to sound cocky, I mean all the poetry they choose is excellent, and all of the poems give you more than one rewarding reading.

Bret Lott has sadly left TSR to return to teaching, but that should be nice for him. Also, he has a son named Zeb, so he’s automatically cool. But the whole TSR staff are wonderful, and I would highly recommend sending them your very best work. But the new editor is also a very capable writer: Jeanne Leiby (you may have read her award winning collection Downriver, released just last November).

OK, I’ll stop gushing now. But, be sure to check out the Spring 2008 issue which will include my poem “When someone suggested mushrooms on the pizza” and tell me how cool I am, or how much I suck. I’m open to varying opinions.

CSU- Fullerton’s finally got a literary magazine! Dash Literary Journal is seeking submissions of short works for their magazine which is keying in on brevity. Prose pieces (fiction or micro literary criticism) are limited to 1500 words, and poems to just 16 lines (Yeah, just 4 quatrains!) But, you know, brevity’s fun sometimes. The deadline for submissions is March 31st, and you can submit via email. Here’s a link to their submission guidelines, and I hope a bunch of you help them produce their first issue with some awesome work.

CSU Long Beach’s journal RipRap surprised me. The whole program has. Their poetry department has some of the finest poet-teachers in California. But I digress. RipRap 29 is the most recent edition, with a cool selective focus, hand toned cover, the content was definitely a pleasant surprise. Jessica and I had helped out in the selection process for the poetry side, so we’d read almost all of that, and knew what to expect, but the prose kept up the same standard. “At the Panaderia” by Raul Martinez and “A Hard Way Upwards” by Matthew Nakamura were some of my favorites, but I took a wandering approach to it, so there are probably some hidden gems in there still waiting for me, as I’ve liked most of what I’ve read, which is kind of hard to find in most student run journals these days. They are also accepting submissions,  between October and December, here’s a link to their submission guideline page, check it out. It’s worth it.

The Mid-American Review’s annual Sherwood Anderson (fiction), James Wright (poetry) and Creative Non Fiction contests are all nearing their postmark deadline of October 20th (Saturday). MAR’s a really cool journal with accessible, well crafted work. The contest judges are David Kirby(poetry), Anthony Doerr(fiction), W Scott Olsen(cnf). I’m really excited about the James Wright prize because I love David Kirby’s work. I know this has no effect on luck I’ll have, but still, the possibility of David Kirby reading my poems is pretty awesome. The entry fee for each contest is $10 (which includes a copy of the winning issue) and the prize is $1000 in each division. Send up to 3 poems, or 6,000 words for prose. Also, if you enter more than one contest, you can also move your second free copy to the next issue (ostensibly)  so it’s like you get a year’s subscription… Here’s the rest of the information about it. It’s a good opportunity to justify buying a sample issue of a journal you’ve never seen at Barnes and Noble at the very least. You get the satisfaction that you made strides to get your work the acclaim it rightly deserves (right?) and you get to read wonderful work, as well as see what a potential market publishes. Win win win.

The Briar Cliff Review from Briar Cliff University in Sioux City, Iowa is always a surprising treat to get in the mail. The most artistic and high quality 8×10 format journal I’ve come across.Very top notch artwork (BCU has a quality art department) along with accessible, but not light poems and stories. In the 2007 issue there were an especially large amount of general reading goodness. Some particularly inspired moments came in Joshua Robbins’ wonderful poem “Dawn Above Spokane, Sacred Heart Hospital, 2001″ for instance, early on “precise sutures of crows across the wire” was really cool, as was “false dawn of hospital gowned light / thinning over commuters’ stop-and-go and the river’s / broken prosody.” Other lovely moments were in James Doyle’s “Necking in the Ford”- “It takes real romantics // to cauterize the ordinary.” Or in Emma Bolden’s “Assurance”- “I love your body the way I love the slur of grass against my feet.” Isn’t that nice? The slur of grass against my feet. Very cool phrasing. The art is varied quite widely from some beautiful river shots from Randall D Williams (though he’s only credited for one) to amazing macro plant photography to some beautifully simplistic, Rothkoesque paintings from Jacqueline Kluver and Bill Welu. Pretty solid content all the way through too. Some journals have a couple wonderful pieces, a lot of mediocre pieces, and some dreadful ones. BCR keeps the bar high, and while it may be shorter than other journals, it makes up for it in substance. Definitely a journal to check out, here, at the Briar Cliff Review homepage. They have a contest running, fiction, poetry and creative non fiction with $1000 prize in each category, $15 entry fee (which includes a copy of the spring 2008 journal the winner appears in.) More info on their page.

Thank you to the wonderful people at www.newpages.com who offer writers one of the most valuable websites online, behind, of course, icanhascheeseburger.com for their lolcats. Everyone should bookmark New Pages, and move that bookmark to the top of their bookmark list. No scrolling through old links to get to that one. Same with Duotrope.com. Anyway, the point of this is to link to New Pages’ recent literary magazine reviews, which include 6×6, Brilliant Corners (jazz literature), Cave Wall, Columbia, Diner, “Forklift, Ohio” High Desert Journal, Insolent Rudder, Iowa Review, The MacGuffin, Missouri Review, Polyphony HS, Quarterly West, Quay, Smartish Pace, and Versal. That’s a mouthful. Then there’s links to a whole bunch of other reviews. It’s always a good thing to get an outsider’s perspective of a magazine you’re thinking about submitting to. Usually journals don’t like to say what they tend to publish, claiming eclecticism, and though that’s usually the case to an extent, everyone has their own personal lean.

Magazine

Time has almost elapsed for Poetry Magazine’s summer student submission spectacular. OK, not only students, but as I posted about here, in Yo Bum Rush the Poetry Show(with a wonderful graphic I might add. haha) Poetry Magazine is only accepting submissions from people who have not published their previously, which includes 99.95% of students, if not a bit more.

Willard and Maple is the product of Champlain College in Vermont. Literary and Fine Arts, Perfect Bound, This last issue weighed in at a hefty 230 pages. Some of my favorite pieces in there were “Testing” by Vermont SLAM champion (now, I know what you’re thinking when you see SLAM, but think more Billy Collins, writing that holds its own on a page) Geof Hewitt, “Late Summer Dew” by Justin Perreault and John Grey’s “To the Old Men in Harry’s Diner” with some also fine work by Gary Nowacki, Robert Cooperman, and, uh, Zebulon Huset. Their art section also stands out with some very fine photography. Overall it’s a good buy. There’s enough to keep you happily reading throughout many line waits, commercial breaks, bus rides, flights or lunch breaks that, though there are some definite space-fillers, you can flip past them to another enjoyable piece. However, they don’t even have a website yet, tsk tsk. Their submission info: (also see their listing in the ever-valuable Poet’s Market)

3-5 poems or one short story per submission, between 9/1 and 5/1, mail to the address:

Willard and Maple; 13 South Willard St.;Freeman 302, Box 34; Burlington, VT 05401

Here’s a little blog by Kenyon Review editor David Lynn posted about simultaneous submissions, and here’s a blog about the blog. So yes, this is in essence, a blog about a blog about a blog about a magazine. For those who don’t know, a simultaneous submission is when you send a story or poem or what-have-you to more than one journal at the same time. Some journals allow the process, on the understood basis that if the work is accepted at another journal, they will be immediately informed and they will stop considering the piece. Now, you can have a piece accepted on the first submission, but most writers know that’s a rarity, some poems/stories end up not being accepted until 10 submissions, or even 20, 30 before it is finally accepted. Even great pieces. David Kirby, said in Best American Poetry 2000, that the poem they’d chosen as one of the best of the year, had been rejected 17 times before it finally found its home at Parnassus. Seeing as most journals ask you to allow 3-4 months, sometimes as many as 9 months for them to consider your submission before even checking on its status, your entire wardrobe could be out of fashion by the time it’s accepted. You’d be wearing your Kris Kross overalls (backwards of course) writing a poem that may not be published until your mother sends you a pair of those ridiculous Croc shoes.

Anyway, there are two sides to the argument of Simultaneous Submissions, or, as I call them SS’s. It’s like pretending you’re Kaa from The Jungle Book… Trusssst in me. But yeah, most journals take SSs, but some don’t. Of those who don’t are the likes of The New Yorker, Poetry, The Kenyon Review, The Atlantic Monthly, The Sewanee Review, American Poetry Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, Playboy (for fiction, at least) and many more prestigious magazines. Some respond very quickly (Michigan Quarterly Review usually in under a month from personal experience, and Poetry right around a month) while others take many months. So basically, there’s a decision to be made. Your options?

1. Submit your work only to one journal at a time and hope that your work attracts someone’s attention while you’re still stylish enough for an author’s photo on your dust jacket.
2. Only submit your work to journals who accept simultaneous submissions, and cry bitterly that you’ll never be in The New Yorker unless they change their horrible ways.
3. Submit your poems simultaneously everywhere, even to magazines that don’t accept simultaneous submissions, and if a piece happens to get accepted, sit under your covers with a flashlight hoping the editors don’t find you in the night and ruin your literary career with a publication embargo.
4. Submit some poems simultaneously, and when poems happen to not have any overlap at other journals, venture a submission to a NoSS journal, and hope they send you a prompt rejection, or for that miraculous acceptance.

Poetry Magazine, for this summer only, is only accepting submission from poets who have never been published in their hallowed halls. So all you wordsmiths who have dreamt of getting a piece in the illustrious Poetry, here is your big chance!