There are so many. Many have come and gone.
Here are some more alive-and-well journals:
The Penn Review – Oldest literary mag at the University of Pennsylvania. Short response times, too.
Whale Road Review – The name reminds me of Robert Pinsky’s The Want Bone. I very much enjoyed hearing him read at The New School when I was a student there.
If you have the time, resources, energy (or general privilege) for self-improvement during the pandemic, you may be looking to get some writing done. You may be looking to get some writing submitted. You may be looking for some new journals to read and reach out to.
Creativity may be an essential way you interact with the world, and you may be frustrated because there’s not a lot of time or energy for that right now. You may be experiencing trauma. You may be exhausted, even though it feels like you’re not doing much.
But you’re probably doing a lot. This is what trauma feels like. It’s real, and it’s important to recognize.
I have a dozen tabs open, a dozen journals I’m going to submit to. At some point. At some point today. Maybe after I finish this post. Maybe after I take a walk. Maybe after I take a few minutes.
Here are some I have discovered recently:
Submit yourself to staying home. Submit your work if you can.
The Rilke post from earlier got me thinking about the first poem I ever memorized.
Obviously, nursery rhymes were first, and then songs like Jesus Loves Me. Then, when I started school, My Country Tis of Thee, America the Beautiful, The Star-Spangled Banner, Simple Gifts.
In fourth grade we had to memorize and recite poems, so of course we all asked if we could do Top 40. Someone beat me to We Didn’t Start the Fire (I memorized it anyway…we all did), so I did Another Day in Paradise by Phil Collins. The song really affected me. Years later, I’d find myself working street-level with the homeless populations of the Lehigh Valley. What had seemed like a very 80s problem has gotten so much worse.
The first sort of classic poem I ever memorized was To Althea From Prison by Lovelace, the cavalier. It’s very famous, especially for this line:
Stone Walls do not a Prison make,
Nor Iron bars a Cage;
but the ones that really got me were
When (like committed linnets) I
With shriller throat shall sing
The sweetness, Mercy, Majesty,
And glories of my King;
When I shall voice aloud how good
He is, how Great should be,
Enlargèd Winds, that curl the Flood,
Know no such Liberty.
and especially:
When I lie tangled in her hair,
And fettered to her eye,
The Gods that wanton in the Air,
Know no such Liberty.
I was 15, so yeah. Killed me. Still does.
It strikes me now that “Slide Away” by Oasis, which I also discovered around that time, is a cavalier poem from the Council Estates. I love it so much.
In honor of your birthday, you brilliant, beautiful man.
We must not portray you in kings’ robes, you drifting mist that brought for the morning,
or take again from old paintboxes the same gold for scepter and crown that have disguised you through the ages.
Piously, we produce our images of you, till they stand before you like a thousand walls.
When our hearts would simply open, our fervent hands hide you.
“God’s True Cloak” <as I remember it>, Book of Hours.
This piece was published maybe 10 years ago at a venue that no longer exists. When I first started publishing short fiction, there were many new, experimental web journals. Many of them were very good. Many good ones still exist, but many are, as David Thomas might say, now ghost-towns.
This piece also appeared in the first edition of my chapbook, What Other People Heard When I Taught Myself to Speak. That manuscript is going through some new revisions with a second edition coming sometime in the spring.
I Love You When You’re Pretty
When you said hi, I didn’t see you in her fitted polka dots and your hair like a USO girl and your legs in heels. Everyone is beautiful in your grandma’s pictures but we dress with conscience now, buffing out your curves or the square cut of my shoulders with fair-trade cotton. What right do you have, anyway, in eye shadow and stockings, wearing lipstick I can only see close? What right do I have, now, to closeness, to feel like cigarettes won’t kill me and sex is not transaction? What right to be pretty? And to love you when you are?
Dear Editors,
Please find attached a salty poem about being frustrated in bookstores (but never with lit mags).
Thank you for your consideration,
Chris Cocca
Special thanks to editor Stephen Tomic for publishing this piece today at The Junction. Please click through to read.
What I Recall from Patmos – The Junction – Medium
Chris Cocca 