Call for Work: Lineage & Influence

One of my greatest pleasures as a teacher and maker of poems is listening for echoes across poems and poetic traditions. To me, they are reminders that no matter how many poetic traditions have been born of human creativity, or how different the poetries are themselves, we are all, as human beings, navigating the same mysteries and, as poets, engaged in the same act of making. I find great comfort, too, in knowing that those echoes are often deliberate, that poets across the globe have been in dialogue and in interdependent relationships, shaping their poems and poetics in response to those of others, for as long as there have been poets. 

The attending ideas of “lineage” and “influence” are complicated, interwoven. Many believe influence to be a mostly unconscious process, hard sometimes to prove or even identify, while lineage is often considered conscious, identifiable, chosen. It’s around these ideas that I will organize my third and final issue as guest editor. 

For our November issue, we are looking for original poems that engage directly with notions of lineage and influence. Your poems can be for or to or after a predecessor or contemporary; “about” lineage or influence thematically; intertextual; ekphrastic; an homage, critique, or anything between; anything that places your original work in conversation with a poetic or artistic antecedent or contemporary. Show us who moves and agitates you, who paved the way for you as a poet, who didn’t, who opened imaginative doors, who tried to close them, who teaches you, and with whom you choose to be in artistic conversation and collaboration. 

We imagine that your poetic ancestry and kin will be as varied and particular as you are. We are not concerned with “schools” as a lineage as much as we are with personal lineages: individual voices (or even single poems) that have changed you, with and after whom you feel you are now writing. The unifying ideas for the issue will be exchange, influence, conversation. 

We look forward to reading your poems! 

Deadline: For consideration for our November 2023 issue, please submit by June 15. Work will be read on a rolling basis so we encourage you to submit early! 

How to Submit: Please send your submissions via the Lineage & Influence call in Submittable.