LR News: Submissions Form Fixed!

Just a quick update to let you know that our amazing Tech Consultant, Brandon, has fixed the issue with our submission form.  You should now be able to submit visual art as usual.  (We’d appreciate it if you could please use the form to submit rather than emailing us, as it allows us to keep better track of your submission and to respond to you sooner).

Submissions will continue to be open until April 15th (Visit our submissions guidelines here).

Thank you so much to those of you who helped by pointing out the problem!  Please do let us know immediately should you ever run into further technical issues with our site or form in the future.

LR-News: Image Submission Errors

It’s recently come to our attention that our online form has been giving people errors when they’ve tried to submit visual art.  Please accept our apologies for the inconvenience as we continue to investigate the issue.

If you’ve also received an error that has prevented you from submitting work to us, please do drop us a line in the comments to let us know!

In the meantime, if you would like to submit visual art (and only if you are submitting visual art – poets and writers of essays & reviews must still go through the online form; we will not be able to read your submission otherwise), you may bypass the form by emailing your images to editors [at] gmail (dot) com. Please include the following information in the body of your email:

Prefix (Ms/Mr/Mrs/Dr):

First Name:

Last Name:

Contact telephone:

Mailing Address:

Artist Name(s) [if different from the contact name; translators should include the name of the original poet here; this is where authors of collaborative works should indicate co-authors]:

2-3 Sentence Artist Bio(s):

Titles of pieces included:

Is this a simultaneous submission? (Yes/No):

Submission Categories [Poetry(Individual Artist) / Poetry (Collaborative) / Translation / Essay / Book Review / Visual Art / Community Voices]:

Additional Info:

Statement of Originality (type your full name beneath the statement to indicate your agreement):

“I certify that the work being submitted has not been previously published in any format (neither print nor electronic), and that it is either:

  1. My own original creation (defined as a poem, prose piece, visual artwork, or new translation created solely by the artist or artists indicated above), OR
  2. (If submitting to the community profiles category) An original creation of the group that I represent.”

Thank you so much for your patience.  Our apologies once again for your trouble.

Best,

The LR Editorial Board

Contact Information

Prefix*
First Name*
Last Name*
Contact Email*
Phone (###-###-####)
Address 1*
Address 2
City*
State or Province (if US or Canada)*
Postal Code*
Country*

Manuscript Information

Artist Name(s)*
Artist Bio(s)*
Title #1*
Title #2
Title #3
Title #4
Title #5
Is this a simultaneous submission?*
Yes No
Submission Categories (Select all that apply. See Category Descriptions):*
Poetry (Individual Artist)
Poetry (Collaborative)
Translation
Essay
Book Review
Visual Art
Community Voices

Additional Information

File Upload (Click for file size/type requirements)*

Statement of Originality*

I certify that the work being submitted has not been previously published in any format (neither print nor electronic), and that it is either:

  1. My own original creation (defined as a poem, prose piece, visual artwork, or new translation created solely by the artist or artists indicated above), OR
  2. (If submitting to the community profiles category) An original creation of the group that I represent.
Agree Disagree

Announcing Our 2010 National Poetry Month Prompt Contest

Special Prize: A Signed Copy of Monica Youn's IGNATZ.

National Poetry Month is coming up in April, and in order to mark it, the LR blog is going to be hosting our first ever Prompt Contest, made possible by the generous sponsorship of Four Way Books.  Do you think our Weekly Prompts could use some spicing up?  Do you have a favorite writing exercise that you’d like to share?  Here’s your chance to have your ideas featured in our weekly content, or even — if you turn out to be the one lucky person whose prompt we like best — to win a signed copy of Monica Youn’s new collection Ignatz!

Here’s how it will work:

1) Leave a comment on this post that includes the text of your prompt.  Entries must be posted by 11:59PM EST on Thursday, April 1st April 8th. Comments on this post will close after that time. Please leave some form of basic contact information in your comment (even if it’s just a link to the contact page on your web site), so that we can get in touch with you if you win.

2) During the first full week of April, we’ll be choosing the four prompts that we like best.  The winner and all three runners up will have their entries featured as Weekly Prompts on the LR Blog during the four Fridays from April 9th – 30th.  In addition, the winner will also receive a special prize that has been graciously offered  by Four Way Books: a signed copy of Monica Youn’s Ignatz. We will announce the runners up and winner week by week starting with the third runner-up and culminating with the winner, so keep on checking back in April to see if your entry has been featured.

3) A few ground rules: You may only enter once. Please submit only poetry prompts.  Keep all prompts appropriate: anything of a bigoted, demeaning, or nasty nature will not be considered; we’d also appreciate it if you could please try to keep your prompts somewhat PG in nature, as when choosing prompts we always try to look for flexible exercises which can be adapted for classroom use with either adults or kids.

That’s it!  Go forth and prompt-ify; we look forward to reading your entries!  And while you’re at it, please do check out Ignatz on Four Way’s site.  Many thanks to Editor Martha Rhodes, to Monica Youn, and to Four Way for their generosity.  Be on the lookout for our review of the collection next month.

The Page Transformed: Introduction & Part I – Ekphrasis

Breughel's "The Fall of Icarus"

During the month of March, we’ll be exploring the theme “The Page Transformed: Intersections of Poetry & The Visual Arts” in our posts.  We’re interested in ways in which poetry and the visual arts speak to one another, inform each other’s practices, and blend with one another on the page.  We’ll begin with an examination of ekphrastic poetry, and will eventually move on to explore other areas of intersection – the book as a physical object of beauty, for example, and broadsides and typography (poetry as visual art).  We also hope to feature conversations poets who engage in both the visual arts and poetry, as well as a couple of posts about visionary experimental figures like Theresa Hak-Kyung Cha, who pushed the boundaries of text as object.  Our prompts this month will also work in with our theme, and (we hope) will provide exercises that ask you to creatively engage with and perhaps try out some of the topics we’ll cover in our Editors’ Picks and Interview posts.

For this week and the beginning of next, we’ll be focusing on ekphrasis and ekphrastic poetry.  The Academy of American Poets’ website gives what I think is a helpful definition of ekphrasis: “poetry confronting art.” The  idea of the image which confronts and subsequently moves the poet to speak is clearly reflected in what is perhaps one of the best loved examples of American ekphrastic poetry: William Carlos William’s “Landscape with the Fall of Icarus,” based on Breughel’s painting “The Fall of Icarus.”  In his poem, Williams interprets the actions of the figures in the painting, highlighting the isolation of Icarus’s action in the larger context of the scene — while country people go about their daily lives, herding sheep and plowing fields, Icarus is visible only as a tiny pair of legs attached to an unseen body already engulfed in water.  Only one man looks up to the sky, but has already missed the action.  Williams plays powerfully on the desolate futility that he reads into Breughel’s interpretation of the myth:

unsignificantly
off the coast
there was

a splash quite unnoticed
this was
Icarus drowning

Williams’ poem is certainly a famous one.  But perhaps my favorite meditation on the commonalities between the work of the poet and painter in creating imagery that will resonate in the mind of the viewer or reader is Robert Lowell’s Vermeer-inspired poem “Epilogue,” which I will leave you with:

Epilogue
by Robert Lowell

Those blessèd structures, plot and rhyme—
why are they no help to me now
I want to make
something imagined, not recalled?
I hear the noise of my own voice:
The painter’s vision is not a lens,
it trembles to caress the light.
But sometimes everything I write
with the threadbare art of my eye
seems a snapshot,
lurid, rapid, garish, grouped,
heightened from life,
yet paralyzed by fact.
All’s misalliance.
Yet why not say what happened?
Pray for the grace of accuracy
Vermeer gave to the sun’s illumination
stealing like the tide across a map
to his girl solid with yearning.
We are poor passing facts,
warned by that to give
each figure in the photograph
his living name.

[Text of “Epilogue” courtesy of poetryoutloud.org.  To read more about ekphrasis, visit this article on the Academy of American Poets’ website.]

LR News: March Blog Changes

Dear Faithful Readers,

It’s been a wonderful four months since we first started blogging. We’ve featured interviews with poets and literary magazine editors, a guest post series on the small press and Asian American poetry, reviews of two recent collections, and countless Editors’ Picks, Weekly Prompts, and Events Roundups. The focus and scope of the LR blog (as well as our audience) have started to grow in really exciting ways, and in light of this, we’ve decided to announce a few changes, to be implemented beginning in the month of March.

Community Calendar

You might have noticed that there is a now new orange tab located in the top right hand corner of the blog’s layout.  This is our new Community Calendar, which will serve as the successor to the weekly events roundups we’ve posted in the past.  Instead of posting roundups once a week, we will now be making use of the new Community Calendar page as a space on which to post a consolidated list of events once a month. We’ll do mini-updates to each month’s calendar roughly every week and a half, adding new events that we learn about during the course of the month, and removing events that have already happened.  We decided to implement this change not only to streamline the culling process for us (on the editorial end), but also to centralize the information so that it’s easier for you to find.  This way, not only will we able to keep all information about events in one location, but you won’t have to scroll through reams of past posts in order to find the roundup for the week you’re looking for. If you have the chance, please do take the time to check it out!  You’ll notice that for most of the cities listed (except for NYC) we’re a little sparse on details at the moment.  If you know of interesting APA arts events going on in one of these cities (or one we haven’t listed), please do consider suggesting them in the comments.

Speaking of suggestions, we’re also adding a new Twitter events reporting method: to suggest a new event or a correction to an existing event’s information, you can now either leave a comment on the calendar page, or mention us in a Tweet (@LanternReview), using the hashtag #APAPoetryEvent.

March 2010 Theme: “The Page Transformed: Intersections of Poetry & the Visual Arts”

During the next few months, you’ll find that many our posts will be themed around a particular subject or issue.  For the month of March, we’ve chosen the theme: “The Page Transformed: Intersections of Poetry & Visual Art.”  Throughout the month, we’ll be posting Editors’ Picks, prompts, and hopefully a few interviews as well in which we’ll be looking at poets who engage the visual arts in their work, the visual aspects of poetry, and the poem (or book) as an object.  Look out for a fuller explanation of our March theme later this week.

Upcoming this spring: Prompt Contest, AWP Coverage, Submissions

The AWP’s annual conference and National Poetry Month are both scheduled for April (next month), so be on the lookout for posts later in March relating to our plans to cover these events on the blog.  We’ll be hosting a prompt contest towards the middle of March (with the winner and three runners up to have their prompts featured during National Poetry Month), so keep your eyes peeled for an announcement to that effect.

Secondly, the Lantern Review editorial staff plan to be at AWP, and it’s possible that we might be able to organize a meetup of some sort.  If you’re planning to be at AWP, know something about venues in Denver, and would be interested in helping to coordinate an informal LR meetup, please do shoot us a quick email at editors [at] lanternreview (dot)com.

Finally, we’re still accepting submissions!  (Don’t forget that we are also looking for visual art, in addition to poetry).  Please do consider sending us your work; we would love to see it!

Thanks, and best,

Iris & Mia
Lantern Review Editorial Staff

LR News: Submissions Period for Issue 1 Now Open

Dear LR Fans,

We know you’ve been anticipating this for a long, long time, and have endured many push-backs of the date, but we’re happy to announce that our very first reading period is finally, and officially, open!  You can link over to our submissions guidelines here, or by clicking on the image at the beginning of this post.

A gigantic thank you to our brilliant Technology Consultant, Brandon, for the many hours he spent programming, creating the nuts-and-bolts behind the whole operation.  The database that he’s built for us will allow us to gather, filter, and screen your submissions entirely online without the need for cumbersome reams of email attachments.

Here’s how our system will work:

  1. Carefully read the submissions guidelines that you’ll now find on the “Submissions” page of our main web site.
  2. Format your work as specified and prepare it for uploading (poetry & critical prose should be in a single MS word or .PDF document with a cover letter as the first page; images should be in .JPEG format and multiple images should be compressed into a .ZIP file prior to upload).
  3. Follow the link at the bottom of the guidelines page to access the submission form.
  4. Input required information (quick tip: you may find it helpful to have the submissions guidelines open in another window or tab while you do this), upload manuscript, confirm that your work is original and that if it’s a simultaneous submission, you’ll inform us immediately if it’s accepted elsewhere.
  5. Click “Submit”!

That’s it!  You’ll receive a confirmation email to let you know that your submission has been logged into our database.  In up to 4-6 weeks, we will reply with a decision (please don’t query about your submission’s status before then; but if we take too long, feel free to send us a gentle reminder).  In the meantime, feel free to email us at editors [at] gmail(dot) com with any questions or updates you may have. Our reading period will close on April 15th.

Please do consider sending some of your work our way.  We’d also appreciate it if you could help us spread the word  (the banner at the top of this post is free for “grabs” if you’d like to use it to link to us on your own blog or web site; we also have a smaller, button version, available here).  Finally, as we are still figuring things out for the first time, any feedback you might have about how to make this process more user-friendly in future reading periods would be much appreciated, so please feel free to drop us a line to that effect. Thank you for all of your patience with us while waiting for this long-overdue phase of our magazine’s development to come to fruition.  We look forward to reading your submissions!

Best,

Iris & Mia
LR Editorial Staff

LR News: Suggestions and Upcoming Reading Period

Happy New Year, and welcome back to the Lantern Review blog!  We’d like to kick off the year 2010 with a request for suggestions re: topics/questions/books you’d like us to blog about in the New Year.  As always, we love to hear from you, and want very much to be responsive to our readers and wider community of poets/writers.

Also, our reading period is opening soon, which means that we will (if all goes according to plan!) begin accepting submissions for the first issue of Lantern Review sometime toward the end of the month.   If you haven’t already, check out our journal’s main page and preview issue, which offer a glimpse of our mission statement, aesthetic, and layout.

We wish you a Happy New Year, and look forward to reading your submissions!

Best,

The Editors

Happy Holidays!

As of December 23, 2009, the Lantern Review staff are taking a short break from the blog for the holidays.  We will return on January 8, 2010.  In the meantime, have a safe and joyous holiday season, and a very happy New Year.

2009 HolidayCard

Thank you so much for a fantastic first few months; it’s been an experience more wonderful than anything we could ever have imagined when we first planted the seeds of this project.  We are incredibly grateful to you for your continued support and enthusiasm, and look forward to 2010 with great excitement. Happy Holidays!

Best Always,

Iris & Mia
LR Editorial Staff

LR News: Introducing . . . The LR Blog!

Dear Friends,

Welcome to the LR Blog!  The weeks of anticipation are finally over. We’re pleased to announce today’s launch, which coincides with the launch of our full web site and preview of our magazine’s layout.  Please add us to your RSS feeds and spread the word wherever you can!  We have a lot of exciting new content lined up for our first month, including a review of Ching-In Chen’s debut book The Heart’s Traffic and interviews with poet Luisa Igloria and Kundiman founder Joseph Legaspi, but before we begin to post new content, we thought we would take the opportunity to introduce the regular columns that we’ll be running: Continue reading “LR News: Introducing . . . The LR Blog!” →