The slab opens to your work
The reading is no longer a verdict handed down — so it need not stay mine.
Photo by Jan Tinneberg on Unsplash
The turn this publication made — the shift from whether a poem succeeds to what it was reaching for — changed what the slab can hold. Once that is the question, the reading is no longer a verdict handed down. It is a reading done with the poet, over the draft, in the same key I use on my own.
Which means the slab need not stay mine.
So. The door is open. Send me a poem and I will read it the way I read my own — for the one thing it was reaching for, and the clearing that would let it arrive.
Here are the terms, plainly.
Only a fragment is published. I read the whole poem. On the slab goes only the fragment that carries the reach — the lines that show the one thing, and nothing past them. The rest stays in your drawer, still yours, still eligible for competitions and journals. This is the promise that makes submitting safe, and I mean it as written.
One reach per poem. Not a full teardown — the single most legible thing the poem is reaching for, named, and the one cut or clearing that serves it. The reading stays close, and it stays humane.
Anonymous by default. Your name goes nowhere near the post unless you ask it to. Credit and a backlink are a checkbox, not the price of entry.
Around forty lines or fewer. So the reading stays close and the fragment stays clean.
Open to subscribers. It is one of the things the subscription is for.
Round one has three slots. When they fill, the round closes, and the next opens once these are read.
I would rather read three poems closely than forty at arm’s length.
Send the poem you cannot tell whether to trust — the one you can’t decide is finished or fooling you. That uncertainty is the reading’s whole subject.
— Adam