Themed Issues

When I see themed issues of journals or calls for submission to anthologies, I look through my work to see if I have something that fits, but I have never written for a specific market. However, this week I've seen three calls for submissions that have me considering doing just that. Here they are:

1) The Chattahoochee Review has a migration theme, which I think I mentioned earlier on this blog. If so, skip ahead to the next one.

"The Chattahoochee Review seeks submissions for its Fall/Winter 2015 double issue with a special focus on Migration. Literal and figurative translations of the theme welcome. Not only flight, but also movement; not only movement, but also kinetics; not only kinetics, but also conflict; not only conflict, but also arrival; not only arrival, but also immersion. Dare to be […]"

Deadline September 15 of next year. Lots of time to work on this one.

2) The National Museum of Animals & Society is looking for "poetry and visual art for poet-artist collaborations to appear in an upcoming exhibition on animals in poetry, entitled “The Poetic Animal,” opening in fall 2015. This first of a kind exhibit will focus on poems, and the visual presentation of poems, that represent animal subjects and animals’ subjectivities, and that explore human-animal relations and the human-animal bond."

Deadline January 10, 2015.

3) Body in D[ist]ress Anthology is project from Negative Capability Press "seeking work (Poetry, fiction, non-fiction, drama, hybrid work) for an issue on Health-Healing: Body in D[ist]ress. Think of the body in disarray, the body in costume, the body as text. We are also seeking artwork that would be related to this theme."

Deadline April 6, 2015.

Calling All Bards of the Binary Code

Are you equally comfortable with Linux and linebreaks? If so, this post is for you.

Poetic use of mathematics and science as both topic and literary device has been around for quite some time. For a classic compendium, see Verse and Universe: Poems About Science and Mathematics, compiled by Kurt Brown (Milkweed Editions). In the past few years, Strange Attractors: Poems of Love and Mathematics, edited by Sarah Glaz and JoAnne Growney (AK Peters), has also come on the scene. The latter editor also has one of the better blogs on the subject, compiling poems and briefly introducing the thinking or history behind them, at Intersections--Poetry With Mathematics.

I have to admit, however, that I am not as familiar with the blending of computers/computer science and poetry. Recently I was directed to the following site, Thinking Machines, run by Neil Aitken, editor of Boxcar Poetry Review. Here Aitken is soliciting poems for an anthology about computers, programming, and poetry. Neil Aitken is presently working on his PhD in Literature and Creative Writing at USC, but in a previous incantation he was a programmer, so he's the go-to guy for all things on this subject. He even has suggestions to stimulate your thinking about this mix of topics on the website cited above.

If you have a poem relating to programming and poetry, OR if you are a programmer and a poet who's written poems on any subject, you are invited to submit. So check it out.

And if you have a favorite book of/about poetry and math/science/computing, let me know! I'd love to hear about it.