“essay” (n.), 1590s, meaning “trial, attempt, endeavour,” also “short, discursive literary composition”, from French essai, meaning “trial, attempt, essay”, derived from Latin exagium, meaning “a weighing, a weight,” from Latin exigere, meaning “drive out; require, exact; examine, try, test.”
And Other Poems is now accepting submissions for a new prose feature. We hope to publish individual essays on a regular monthly or bi-monthly basis.
We are looking for essays about or in some way connected to poetry. This can mean a whole range of things: an essay about a particular poet, or a particular poem, or a particular style or school of poetics; an essay about writing poetry, or teaching poetry, or being a poet in the twenty-first century economy; an essay about poetry and housing, or poetry and affordability, or poetry and waste; an essay about essays written by poets, or diaries written by poets, or novels written by poets; an essay about your mother’s favourite poem, or a trip you went on to a poet’s grave, or that one dream you had about a poet who doesn’t exist.
You get the picture: craft essays and personal essays and everything in between. They can be funny, serious, surreal, autobiographical, experimental, fragmentary and so on. No topic or style is off limits, so long as it has something to do with poems, poets, or poetry. We are looking for well-crafted and original essays with a strong sense of voice.
We are interested in anything from flash non-fiction (circa 500 words) to full-length essays (up to 5000 words). We are happy to consider extracts from longer works, so long as they also work as self-contained essays. All work should be previously unpublished. Please note that we are not interested in publishing ‘reviews’ of individual books, though we are happy to consider essays about particular books or poets from a unique angle.
We are also interested in publishing interviews with or conversations between poets, so if there is a particular poet you are keen to chat to, let us know.
If you are interested in writing something for us, or if you have written an essay you think we might be interested in, please send an abstract of 50-100 words to Tom Bailey at editor.andotherpoems@gmail.com.
Please also send a short extract, of no more than 250 words, from something you’ve written. This extract need not have been published: it is simply an opportunity for you to give us a taste of your style as a prose-writer.
At the moment we are unable to pay writers for their work, but we do hope to be able to do so very soon.
We look forward to hearing from you.
andotherpoems.com 