What MUDLARK is and how to submit to it:
MUDLARK was founded in 1995 as an electronic journal of poetry & poetics. It has an ISSN from the Library of Congress; is refereed, copyrighted, and archived. MUDLARK is "never in and never out of print."
To query or not to query, to submit or not to submit: Take a good look at MUDLARK. Spend some time here on the MUDLARK website. Then make your decision.
As our full name, MUDLARK: AN ELECTRONIC JOURNAL OF POETRY & POETICS, suggests, we will consider accomplished work that locates itself anywhere on the spectrum of contemporary practice. We want poems, of course, but we want essays, too, that make us read poems (and write them?) differently somehow. Although we are not innocent, we do imagine ourselves capable of surprise.
MUDLARK publishes in three formats: "issues" of MUDLARK are the electronic equivalent of print chapbooks; "posters" are the electronic equivalent of print broadsides; and "flash" poems are poems that have news in them, poems that feel like current events. The acceptance rate at MUDLARK is low; the rejection rate high, very high. The work of hobbyists and lobbyists is not for us. The poem is the thing at MUDLARK... and the essay about it.
In MUDLARK poetry is free. Our authors give us their work and we, in turn, give it to our readers. What is the coin of poetry's realm? Poetry is a gift economy. One of the things we can do at MUDLARK to "pay" our authors for their work is point to it here and there, wherever else it is. We can tell our readers how to find it, how to subscribe to it, and how to buy it... if it is for sale. Toward that end, we maintain A-Notes (on the Authors) we publish. We call attention to their work.
Submit to: William Slaughter, Editor
E-mail (text files and/or attachments): mudlark@unf.edu
Air-mail (hard copies) with SASE:
MUDLARK
Department of English and Foreign Languages
University of North Florida
Jacksonville, FL 32224-2645, U.S.A.Turn-around time: No less than one day, no more than one month.
Multiple submissions? Because our turn-around time is short, because we do read and answer our mail, we prefer not to receive multiple submissions. But if you insist, we will consider them, asking only that you inform us of the fact.
MUDLARK will not consider, for either its poster or flash poem series, work that has already been published in either print or electronic form. In its issues, though, MUDLARK will consider work that is being collected for the first time, including pieces that have already been published elsewhere. Acknowledgements, of course, are required.
Mudlark