Tag: agenda magazine

Blog/

Some poetry magazine submissions windows now open

windows-scales-weights

For behold! Some windows are now opening, namely…

Agenda – opens today, June 1st – with the promise of a 12 week turnaround time. Submit by email only.

Bare Fiction – submit now for Issue 8, deadline 10th July.

Popshot – is announcing its theme for the next issue tomorrow (June 2nd)

Long Poem Magazine – opens today for the whole of June.

The Interpreter’s House – open for the month of June. Submit by email or post.

Good luck, and don’t forget to check the guidelines as they vary from magazine to magazine.

Most editors suggest you read the mags first before submitting (not unreasonably!) Although it can get expensive you could always take out subscriptions on a rota basis, which is what I do – subscribe to, say, 3 mags per year but change to 3 different ones when the subscription period is up. It seems a fair way of spreading around limited funds and also gives you a good overview of the different styles of magazine. It also exposes you to poets and (reviews of) collections you might not otherwise encounter.

Angst/

An acceptance, a talk and workshop news

Pleasant Stores

Pleasant Stores

I haven’t had a poem accepted for a while so it was very nice to hear from Jeremy Page at The Frogmore Papers to say he’d like to take one for issue 82 in the autumn. Hurrah!

(I also had some other good news last week but more about that shortly.)

And now I’d like your thoughts please on a slightly sticky situation. I’m still rather on tenterhooks with Agenda, after a four month wait I thought I would email again to ask very gently if my poems were still being considered (it does say on the website to expect a 12-week wait, and subscribers -of which I am one- are allegedly given some priority in being dealt with, so I didn’t think it unreasonable to ask.) But would you believe it, apparently my (email) submission was never received, but editor Patricia McCarthy was apologetic and invited me to resubmit, which I did, asking for acknowledgement that they had been received. But I’ve heard nothing.

So here’s the issue:  do I assume my emails aren’t getting through, and just submit the poems elsewhere? (Email is now the only way to submit to Agenda.) Or do I wait, and for how long? I don’t really want to put these poems away for another 4 months. But I don’t want to put myself in the editor’s bad books by having to tell her the poems have gone elsewhere, if she does want them. I also don’t want to pester her with emails saying ‘can you please tell me you’ve got them’ or whatever. It’s a good magazine and I’ve had work in there before, so I don’t want to give up lightly.

Lordy! The etiquette of submissions. And is it very common for poems to go astray? It seems to have happened to me an inordinate number of times.

Meanwhile on the workshop front I enjoyed hosting Colin Bell’s poetry evening in Pleasant Stores round the corner from me in Lewes, although only 2 people turned up. So with Sara the cafe owner that made four of us. It’s not a workshopping group, but people are invited to bring either their own poetry or someone else’s. I took along a selection of mags and books and read poems by Lewes poet Janet Sutherland which everyone liked, and a couple from Sam Rivere’s 81 Austeries, which I love but I think they were a bit too challenging for those present. (Read the review by Ruth Padel in the Guardian.)

Then yesterday I was at Brighton Library giving a short talk for writers about ‘Building your social web presence’. It was part of  New Writing South‘s Publishing Industry Day which was well attended and I sat in on a couple of the other sessions, including one on Arts Council funding which was very interesting. I think I managed to sell a few tickets for the workshops I’m doing there next month and into May, so that’s good.

Mags & Blogs/

When my sister is old

I will wait at the door with flowers
if she greets me at all it will be brief
and cold as the Guildford house
where the stairs stayed uncarpeted
and the kitchen unmodernised,
names and numbers taped on walls,
coats and boots crammed under stairs.

Her back will be bent like our mother’s,
she will start in the middle of a sentence
half scolding, half pleased, tired of TV
and itching to get out walking with sticks
she will bring up that time on the Isle of Wight
when my legs gave way and she carried on,
fitter than me and needing to travel.

We will have tea and talk about church
or someone’s baby, there will never be
enough hours for all she must do or has done.
I will tease out family secrets and remind her
of twenty years she thought she’d never have,
if she comments at all it will be brief,
like the moment before sleep.

 

(from Agenda – web supplement to ‘Retrospectives’ issue April 2012)

 

 

Mags & Blogs/

River Ouse, Rodmell, 1941

The first she prises out, clenched in bindweed:
reluctance adds to its appeal.

And there: not so large as to burst pockets,
several flints conspire

their surfaces glass-perfect, all the better
to slip in without fuss.

From mud, she frees a stump of the fat chalk Down
walked each day, as worn

as the worsted that parcels up her reedy body
ready for anchoring.

Pebbles lean into her, take us they say, take us,
the floods are coming

but like Noah she must leave some behind,
the unbelievers.

 

(first published in Agenda Vol 46 No. 2, Sept 2011)