Floating Wolf

Recently I learned about Floating Wolf Quarterly, an online journal that publishes two chapbooks each quarter. This quarter's chapbooks are Matthew Zapruder's The Odyssey and Nick Vagnoni's Victual.

Each quarter one chapbook is by an already established poet and one is by an up-and-comer. Past chapbook contributors include some of my favorites, such as Campbell McGrath, Denise Duhamel, Catherine Bowman, and Gabrielle Calvocoressi.

This is a great way to get to know a poet's work in more depth than the one to three poems usually showcased in journals. And it comes with cover artwork, like a real book. Fun artwork too, like pomegranates on a television screen, or beds, all kinds of beds. You can even download these chapbooks to your Kindle.

Especially for people living abroad who have a really difficult time getting access to current poetry without breaking the bank, this is a terrific way to become familiar with poets in order to decide which books to spend our meager poetry budgets on importing.

And what's with poets and wolves anyway? There's Graywolf, Concrete Wolf, Floating Wolf.......

Summertime, and Submitting is Easy

Well, submitting is easy if you know where to submit, since during the summer many journals are closed to submissions. Thankfully, Diane Lockward at her blog Blogalicious has put together a list of journals open to submissions during summer months.

The link above lists journals whose titles begin with letters A - F.

For G - P, click on this link.

And for Q - Z, this is the link you want.

Thanks to Diane for putting this list together and making it available to everyone. It's a big timesaver. Now there are no excuses: you can submit and still have time for fun in the sun.

Jewish Poetry Anthology: Call for Submissions

The New Promised Land: 120 Contemporary Jewish American Poets is accepting submissions from Jewish poets born in the US in or after 1945. Previously published work okay. Click on the link for more details.

Not Capital, My Good Man

Today a prominent poet asked the following question on Facebook: How do you turn off the automatic capitalization of first words on new lines when writing poems in MS Word? This is something that has been driving me crazy too, but when I'm in the middle of writing a poem, I don't want to spend the time to figure it out, and when I'm not writing a poem, I forget about it. So I was glad that many people responded with the solution.

Most of you probably already know how to do this, but just in case you are like me and never got around to fixing the problem, here are the steps.

1) Open MS Word.
2) Click on the tab File at the top, and in the drop-down menu, go to Options, near the bottom, and click on it.
3) In the new menu that appears, click on Proofing.
4) On the right, click on the AutoCorrect Options button (it is blue).
5) Uncheck the box that says Capitalize first letter of sentences.
6) Click the OK button at the bottom of the page, and you are done!

And that's the end of that annoying little problem. Yay!

Arch

I have a poem in the newest issue of the online literary journal, Arch Literary Journal, out of Washington University in St. Louis. It's called "How to Find a Missing Father in a Town that Isn't There," and believe it or not, it doesn't have the longest poem title in the issue! I'm upstaged by both Karen Rigby's "Love Notes from the Firefly Spanish/English Visual Dictionary" and Tom Daley's "After a Stroke, My Mother Denounces a Nurse in the Rehab Clinic."

I discovered Arch Literary Journal because I ran across some poems by the poet Willie Lin, and was so impressed that I decided to learn more about the poet and her work. That search brought up the fact that Willie Lin is a poetry editor at Arch, and so with the hopes that she would recognize our sensibilities as somewhat kindred, I submitted some poems there, and voila.

Here are a few on Lin's poems online at the Boxcar Poetry Review, another in a later edition of Boxcar, and some in Linebreak, Anti-, and Diagram. Enjoy!