Art and shiny things…
Really excited to say that my poem has been published as the poem of the week at Cellpoems! Cellpoems is one of my three favorite online publications, along with Rattle and Linebreak, so it’s a real pleasure to be included. If you haven’t yet, check them out, and consider subscribing -as well as publishing online, they deliver a short, exquisite poem once a week via text to subscribers.
Orange
I thought you would make things certain
Like a window nailed shut to the sill.
You were born with a paper lantern for a
heart,
the skin lit from within, the light in
danger
of going out.
-Sandy Longhorn, Cellpoems
To celebrate his just-announced Pulitzer win, a poem from Vijay Seshadri!
We hold it against you that you survived.
People better than you are dead,
but you still punch the clock.
Your body has wizened but has not bled
its substance out on the killing floor
or flatlined in intensive care
or vanished after school
or stepped off the ledge in despair.
Of all those you started with,
only you are still around;
only you have not been listed with
the defeated and the drowned.
So how could you ever win our respect?–
you, who had the sense to duck,
you, with your strength almost intact
and all your good luck.
You are the start of the week
or the end of it, and according
to The Beatles you creep in
like a nun. You’re the second
full day the kids have been
away with their father, the second
full day of an empty house.
Sunday, I’ve missed you. I’ve been
sitting in the backyard with a glass
of Pinot waiting for your arrival.
Did you know the first Sweet 100s
are turning red in the garden,
but the lettuce has grown
too bitter to eat. I am looking
up at the bluest sky I have ever seen,
cerulean blue, a heaven sky
no one would believe I was under.
You are my witness. No day
is promised. You are absolution.
You are my unwritten to-do list,
my dishes in the sink, my brownie
breakfast, my braless day.
-January O’Neil, Rattle
It’s a hard cold world as a poet out there. Just kidding. Kind of.
In all seriousness however, it’s easy to feel lost in the world of literary journals, there seem to be simultaneously too many and too few. Here is a quick tip I recommend from the last year or so of actively hunting down and submitting work to literary journals: the first and most important thing about any journal is whether or not they publish work similar to yours. I used to naively assume that as long as you wrote good stuff you could get published: this is not the case.
Journals publish according to their tastes and generally have a particular aesthetic, and whether or not your work matches with that aesthetic is the most important factor to getting published. (Though you do, of course, need to write decent stuff). I’ve spent a lot of time sorting through lists of literary journals and filtering out dozens of good, active ones simply because my work didn’t fit their style. Honing in on the journals that take poetry like mine has really assisted me in getting published.
Having said, here are six lists to help you get up and running. I recommend slowly going through these and pulling out a list of targeted ones that match your work in some way, then applying to those. Filter out the rest as noise.
1. The CLMP (Council of Literary Magazines and Presses) has the second-largest and most reputable database online and allows you to filter for your genre. Fantastic.
2. Litline, a website for the independent literary community, has a list of 240 literary journals
3. Redactions has a list of 344 literary journals, choosing only literary journals with “Review” in their title. Fair warning; a percentage of these links are no longer active. However, I’ve found it a good resource, particularly because the journals that style themselves as “reviews” often take their work and their contributors’ work more seriously. I recommend parsing through it alphabetically.
4. Duotrope’s Digest lists 5000 literary publications. Two downsides: access costs $5/month (they used to be free but recently switched), and I have found the selection to be a huge mishmash with more misses than hits. Still, definitely a good option if you run out of resources from the previous lists.
5. Newpages offers a PDF guide to literary magazines (updated yearly) and a list of reviews of literary journals
6. John Selby has a large list of experimental poetry/art magazines all over the world
It takes work to get published. It can and should take you a lot of time to look through some of these lists and find journals that you love to read and which might like your work. But the payoff? Priceless 🙂 Go forth and conquer.
Little just-begun, dough rising,
sparrow northward, kicker south.
Lentil to grapefruit, you sleep-step sidewise,
turnover, pop-up, tongue in the mouth.
-Rachel Richardson, Cellpoems
Gulls sensing the fisherman
pulling the
fish from the nets.
This is how I mourned you.
Swimming to the cave, letting the birds
near me.
-Lisa Hiton, Cellpoems
Have you followed me on Soundcloud? I’ve begun a process of reading favorite poems (mostly from contemporary poets) there. Recently I did a reading of Ilya Kaminsky, whom I had the great honor of seeing in person at a reading in LA. Kaminsky is a Russian immigrant whose poems deal often with the traumas of his native land, and he’s attained success incredibly early in life because his work absolutely bleeds power and music. I read “Maestro”, the third poem in his Dancing in Odessa collection, which he signed for me.
Coffee and Irony 
