Thursday, April 15, 2010

Free of Pomegranates

Prick of the Spindle's poetry submission guidelines make me laugh.

"Submit up to five poems in a single document.
General guidelines to keep in mind before submitting your work:

* Make it fresh.
* If it sounds like someone else's work, it probably isn't fresh.
* Speaking of fresh, please no cicadas, pomegranates, or babushkas.
* Have a point.
* We're not ordinarily interested in pop culture.
* Generally, if your work contains words such as "alas" and other archaicisms, we are not the publication for you.
* You're not Ginsberg.
* Five means five. Six is not the new five.
* If you're going to use rhyme, do it right.
* Ways to get your work rejected without being read:
a. Use a lot of unnecessary formatting, like bolding and italics, for no real reason.
b. Use yellow font.
c. Use script font.
d. Make your work otherwise aesthetically obnoxious.
e. Overalliterate."

They neglected to mention you are not Charles Bukowski, James Wright, Sylvia Plath, Seamus Heaney, Aase Berg, ee cummings, or anybody else. But that's okay. I'm looking forward to some pomegranate-free poetry.

By the way, if you're interested in reviewing my chapbook for Prick of the Spindle, they have a copy to send. See the right-hand side of this page.

5 comments:

Kass said...

Oh, no. Guilty, guilty and more guilty. Good thing I don't plan to submit any poems.

Kathleen said...

Also laughing! Alas, I am not James Wright. And, yes, we have no pomegranates.

Anonymous said...

I like pomegranates. And cicadas. A lot. Alas, however, they haven't shown up in my poems. Now I feel like they need to.

SarahJane said...

I assume the pomegranate warning has to do with the ten million poems alluding to the Peresphone myth, which is tired and wants to go to bed. You got me on the babushka poems.

Valerie Loveland said...

Ha, they had to mention Aase Berg! I can only imagine the terrible poems that happen when people imitate her.

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