32 Poems Magazine » Poetry Magazines

Give Lit for the Holidays!

Jessie — Sun, 21 Nov 2010 15:50:48 +0000

Yesterday, while in the mall, I overheard a sales clerk say, “See you back here next week on Black Friday!” And, I thought, it’s Thanksgiving next week!

That means the holiday shopping season is on us. I know, some of you have already bought all of your presents but not me. Why? Well, I don’t have that many to buy and I’ve become fascinated with watching people shop on days like Black Friday. I’m a regular mall walker, so the new influx of shoppers messes up my flow a bit but it is fun to pick out the: Husband who has no idea what to buy, the power Grandma shopper, the kid who got their gift cards early . . .

But, I digress. What I am hear to talk about is what a terrific gift literature can make for the holidays. I’m gearing up for a post on my own blog with specific suggestions, but here is the blog I made last year. The list goes through some poetry, fiction, non-fiction and even books on writing, but you know what is missing from that list? A separate section for literary magazines. I do mention a few magazines but I want to really promote the idea of purchasing magazine subscriptions for Christmas gifts.

When you purchase just a book or gift card, that is a one-time gift. When you purchase a subscription, you’re giving something that will come quarterly, twice a year etc. And, unlike the pie-of-the-month-club, a literary magazine won’t make you fat…well…maybe unless there is a particular sad poem that makes you really, really, really need a piece of chocolate.

The only issue with giving a subscription is that you need to know what the person might like. I say: ask them. As I noted in the blog post I mentioned above, readers love to talk about what they are reading. You could also check out their shelves or have one of their children or significant others do that for you. What do they already subscribe to? What is comparable? Could you extend a subscription? Is there something you have read that blew you away and you know you just had to gift that same magazine to your friend? (Like 32 poems!)

You may wonder if you’ll have your lit mag in time to wrap it for the holiday. When you order the subscription, send a message to the publisher and ask for a back issue (or current issue) to be sent to you so you can wrap that issue and note that the subscription is coming. You could also visit a copy shop and have an inexpensive color picture of the magazines website or cover printed so you can enclose that in an envelope with a card for your gift recipient or along with a nice piece of chocolate (again, I know, the chocolate). Other ideas fair readers?

I’ve been the recipient of two different literary magazine subscriptions and for a poet/adjunct English teacher, having someone else spend the money on a magazine really is a gift. Maybe even a nice enough surprise that you, the gift giver, will find yourself under the mistletoe . . .

(stop by Jessie’s blog on 11-22-10 for this year’s holiday shopping guide. We love people who leave other suggestions in comments)

32 Poems Spring 2010

32poems — Thu, 18 Mar 2010 02:56:04 +0000

32 Poems Magazine has existed since 2003. I am eating LOADS of chocolate to celebrate. I think editor John Poch — who is over in Spain — is eating a lot of lobster wrapped with bacon. He might hate lobster and bacon. Maybe he’s eating oranges instead — or olives.

When I started 32, there were doubters, my good friend.

You’re an indie magazine. How can you survive? Print is dead. You’re not The Kenyon Review!

I don’t listen to doubters. I do it anyway.

I’m actually allergic to negative people, so I carry an epipen at all times lest a negative person push me into anaphylaxis.

I digress.

The new magazine is out and about, and I’m feeling a bit nostalgic about the past seven years. In a recent interview, one of the questions asked was about how I started 32 Poems.

The idea grew from my head and percolated for 8-10 years. I had jobs in print production, direct mail fundraising, teaching, copywriting, and online marketing. Fancy that. Each set of skills was quite useful for running a magazine.

In 2003, I attended the AWP Conference in Baltimore, MD and brought bright red flyers to advertise our concept.

I had no exhibit table, no poems to publish, and no magazine. That is a lot of “no” for two people.

We got our first subscriber the next week.

I realized I had to make the magazine.

We’d love to have you subscribe?

Should Editors Have to Take a Poem from a Poet They Solicit?

32poems — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 12:30:09 +0000

If I accept a poem, all is well. People name their first-born children after 32 Poems. There were 64 babies named “32″ this year.

When I solicit people, I say upfront that I might not take their poems. My note says something about how I can promise a careful read even if I can’t promise publication. My goal with that line is to give the poet a chance to say “no thanks” if they fear rejection after a solicitation. I also aim to set their expectation. I’ve heard stories of poets getting angry and annoyed — certainly, no editor wants that — when getting their poems rejected after a solicitation. Trust me, it hurts an editor to say no. We are not rejecting poems and then performing happy dances to celebrate.

If I don’t take a poem, then I write a NICE note to explain why. I invite the poet to send more poems and to send more soon.

I try to show respect to the poet throughout the entire process. I can take a long time to respond. John Poch, our editor, does not take as long as I do. I let the poet know I am slow to read and invite them to submit elsewhere if they are in a hurry to publish. Sometimes they do and sometimes they don’t. On occasion, a poem is accepted elsewhere and that is sad for me. However, I feel it is only fair to let the poet send elsewhere if I am going to take a long time to get to it. For me, a long time is over two months.

One reason I may say no to the work of a poet I solicit is when the new work is nothing like what I’ve been reading and like what I had loved. This usually means that only between three and five poems did not speak to me. Often, a number of other poems the poet wrote DID speak to me and that is why I asked, yet sometimes people are insulted anyway.

Hopefully, I do not become the poet’s enemy for not taking a poem. After all, I am publishing this journal that supports and promotes poetry, and how many people are insane enough to do that? But that is another topic for another day.

Submission Guideline Changes

32poems — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 10:24:56 +0000

Since John Poch will be editing 32 Poems from afar next spring, we will not be reading manuscripts via regular mail after December 1. If you wish to submit poems between December 1, 2009 and May 1, 2010, please email your poems to us at 32poems at gmail dot com. As you know, we do not read from May 1 till August 31.

Email the poems (less than 5, please) in one MS Word doc or docx file. The cover letter should be sent as the body of the gmail.

As usual, we prefer shorter lyric poems that fit on a single page, but we sometimes bend the rules to fit other extraordinary work. Do NOT email other materials, promotional, correspondence, or otherwise, to this address. Please query us after 3 months if you still have not heard a reply concerning your poems. We aim to keep our response time at less than 2 months. We will go back to our ordinary postal submission process in September 2010.

And don’t forget to subscribe or give a gift subscription!

Escarp Poetry Magazine: Can a Text Message Be Poetry?

32poems — Tue, 16 Jun 2009 17:13:51 +0000

Cell Phone Text Messaging. Credit: kb35 on flickr

Travis Everett created a literary journal delivered via text-message and wrote the scripts behind the site himself — three cheers for coding poets! — and, after some debugging, the magazine has been running smoothly.
escarp distributes through Twitter, and faces length limitations beyond most people’s imaginations — 140 characters if placed onto Twitter — yet Everett finds himself passionate about the potential for social change that can take place when literature is in your pocket every day, and when it has the insistence of a text message. How much more will people who receive literature — even if it’s limited by the format — read and write when they’re forced to think about it frequently?

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?

Vital Stats of a Poet

32poems — Fri, 12 Dec 2008 12:09:55 +0000

Thanks to sci fi writer and former high school classmate, David Williams, for this meme on his author blog.

David (see above) wrote on his blog that the meme below was making the rounds in the San Francisco blogosphere. I decided to import (and revise, of course!) it over here in the poetry blogosphere. Come on bloggers. I invite Mary Biddinger, Charles Jensen, Kelli Agodon, and Eduardo Corral to play. I’d invite more, but I’m tired of pasting in all the links. =-)

If you decide to fill it out and post it on your blog, please post the link in the comments.

Age when I decided I wanted to be a writer: 8
Age when I wrote my first short story: 19
Age when I first got my hands on a good word processor: 22
Age when I first submitted a short story to a magazine: Never
Rejections prior to first short story sale: Never made a short story sale.
Age when I sold my first short story: See above.
Approximate number of short stories sold: Approximately zero.
Age when I first sold a poem: 23? 24?
Poems sold: I have no clue how many poems. (I think a novelist wrote this meme.)
Year I first published a book: 2009
Books published or delivered and in the pipeline: 2
Number of titles in print: 0. Soon to be one.
Age now: What poet wants to share their age?

Writing Prompts from One Word and Poetry Magazines

32poems — Sun, 24 Aug 2008 15:15:55 +0000

The Are You Outside the Lines blog visited the One Word website I recommended and wrote in response to a prompt. Yesterday, I visited One Word and wrote in response to the word “mantle.” I went back today to get another word, but the word is still “mantle.” Hmmm.

—–

What magazines do you receive?

I’m getting Cimarron Review, Bloomsbury Review, Ninth Letter, Virginia Quarterly Review, The New Yorker and some others. The New Yorker hardly needs my support, but there you go. I am morally opposed to The Atlantic, because they do not publish enough poetry. The amount of poetry they publish withered to nearly nothing the last time I checked. That’s about the time I decided to subscribe only to magazines that offered a large poetry presence. You could easily tell me how few poems The New Yorker publishes. Well, The New Yorker is The New Yorker. The prose is also good.

Some other magazines that invite my interest include Southwest Review, Barn Owl Review, and Pebble Lake Review to name a few. I’m only including magazines one can subscribe to, so that leaves out many excellent online magazines.

What magazines do you like? Please let us know in the comments.

Pebble Lake Review

32poems — Sat, 19 Apr 2008 21:54:06 +0000

Amanda Auchter’s Pebble Lake Review is accepting submissions again. I got the news via Facebook. =-)

I’m Very Dumb and Poets for Sale on Ebay

32poems — Fri, 11 Apr 2008 06:36:11 +0000

I don’t know quite how I did this. I sent poems to a magazine that is currently — according to my submission tracking sheet — already considering poems by me. Well, I guess I like that magazine a lot!

Ugh, I hope no one notices. But they probably will. And they will probably think I’m a nut.

—-

In other news, poets are for sale on ebay. When I last looked you could get D. Nurkse for 99 cents. Those are WalMart prices. Now, he’s up to $46. More like Target prices now.

You can get Natasha T’s Native Guard for $102.