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River Styx
Mid-American Review
North American Review
Ploughshares
Rattle
Barn Owl
Indiana Review
Hayden’s Ferry
Los Angeles Review
Pleiades
Iodine Poetry Journal
Poetry
Bellevue Literary Review
Diode
Diagram

Cell Phone Text Messaging. Credit: kb35 on flickr

Our own 32 Poems editor, John Poch, published this poem via text message:

Love Poem

Sometimes my shirt makes sparks. Watch me take it off.

I’m always curious about new and creative ventures A poetry magazine delivered via text messaging has to be one of the more innovative and creative ideas I’ve heard lately, so I knew I had to interview the brain behind the magazine. He was kind enough to answer my questions.

Where did you learn to program to create this project?

I started undergrad as a computer science major, but I only lasted a semester. Debugging is rough when your heart isn’t in it. So I knew some of the principles, but I needed to learn some PHP and mysql to get it all working. I learn best when a lack of knowledge stands between me and a project I’m passionate about, but it still took a lot of trial and error and some help from Google.

It’s not that unlike writing and revising a poem, except you get error
messages instead of funny looks or polite smiles when something goes
wrong.

When did the idea strike you to launch this project?

I first got a cell phone in summer of 2006, and I was playing around
then with writing some short poems for my phone. I actually did the
original site design then, but at the time there wasn’t an easy way to
shoestring a text-message-based journal. You had to buy bulk text
message packs from online services and talk people into giving you their cell phone numbers. That was no good.

At the time, most of my poems were fairly middle of the road in length,
but in the three years since, I’ve developed a real fascination with
short poems, so my desire to make this project work was building.

I didn’t really start hearing about Twitter until the media blitz in
fall of last year, but for some reason I didn’t connect the dots right
away. This spring, the clouds opened up a week or two before spring
break and a little free time was all it took for the a-ha moment and
the initial work necessary to launch the journal.

What’s been the biggest challenge with launching this magazine?

Well, it’s Twitter, really. There’s a big stigma, and to some extent I
agree with the sentiment that Twitter is vapid and pointless. So I know people who are writing, and it’s still tough to get them to sign up and participate. But that’s also one of my goals for the project–to break down that perception. Twitter is a communication media, like the
telephone or broadcast TV, so it’s got the some potential to be used for interesting and uninteresting things.

How do poets react when you ask them to submit work?

There are two camps, which is an over-generalization, and this spans the fiction writers, too. There are people who aren’t inclined to hate Twitter and people who are. So there’s excitement about the project on one side, and a real hesitation to participate on the other.

I’m okay at convincing the latter group to try it out if I have personal access to them. If that fails, I nag a lot. However, I can’t be there to make a sales pitch to everyone. My sales pitch would be:

Exposure is ideologically important for writers. We’ve bemoaned decreasing readership for a long time now, and we’ve finally got a chance to use one of the next prolific communication technologies (the cell phone, I mean) to put literature in people’s pockets. The various poetry books and mags on my desk and in my backpack are great, but they don’t ring and vibrate. They don’t disrupt chemistry class or follow you to the grocery store.

Yes, it’s an abbreviated format, but that’s all it takes to keep literature on people’s minds.

And, you know, people will go to the trouble to sign up for multiple
submission systems, or mail in manuscripts. Signing up for Twitter and
submitting to escarp is easier than that.

Visit escarp via web or Twitter.

What do you think? Can a text message be a poem?

In Barn Owl: John Gallaher, Karen Weyant, Alison Pelegrin, Greg McBride, Erika Meitner and myself to name but a few.

Photo above borrowed from Mary Biddinger’s blog.

When I sent this poem to them, I felt like their magazine was the right place for the poem. Every time I feel that way, the poem in question gets taken by the magazine in question. I don’t feel that way often, but it’s a thrill when I do.

Yay to Jay Robinson and Mary Biddinger and the other folks I’ve not virtually met yet and who accepted my poem.

A few of my poems make a guest appearance in the latest issue.

Online poetry magazines can publish in nontraditional ways and in however-the-heck-they-want ways. NoTell Motel features a poet a week with one poem appearing each day. Verse Daily reprints a poem every day. Anti-, edited by Steven Schroeder, publishes poetry in downloadable PDF chapbooks. The publication also provides poems in easy-to-access HTML every two weeks. Authors must provide a 50-word statement on what they are against, which makes for an interesting read by itself:

Mary Biddinger recommends a temporary moratorium on poems about Persephone, and ekphrastic poems on The Persistence of Memory by Salvador Dalí. She has never met an adverb that she didn’t want to strangle. However, since she is somewhat anti-poetry-rules, someday she will write a poem incorporating all of the above.

From Karen Weyant:

“I am against poetry that doesn’t make you want to scrub your skin with a pumice stone, or at least look under your nails for dirt. “

Anti- has published one PDF chapbook and featured three poets so far. The archive already contains an impressive list (and number) of poets. I particularly enjoyed poems by Mary Biddinger (poems), Louise Mathias (poems - website) and Karen Weyant (poems – blog). I intend to return and read more.

In case you don’t know, Steven Schroeder used to edit The Eleventh Muse. Under his editorship, the magazine quickly became one of my favorites. It’s a pleasure when I find an editor whose taste in poetry is close to mine and who selects poems I would select. When I find an editor like that, I know I’m in for years of enjoyment. Schroeder left The Eleventh Muse, and I’m happy to follow him over to this new project to see what his roving editor eye turns up.

By the way, you can find a list of good poetry magazines right here at the 32 Poems blog.

However, some folks shake their head and incorrectly think that 32 Poem charges $2 per submission.

The correct statement is that Manuscript Hub charges $2.

If you don’t want to pay $2, then you can submit via mail and pay 65 cents in postage for your outgoing envelope and another 42-65 cents for your return envelope. Add to that the time to print, fold and mail the manuscripts. I dunno. The $2 seems worth it to me, and I gladly paid $2 to submit to Meridian. In fact, I was downright giddy. I’ve got better ways to spend my time than getting paper cuts. =-)

Whoever created Manuscript Hub knows how to program, came up with this idea, and deserves to get paid. If they ever make enough money to retire and move to Maui, then so much the better for them.