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Special Call for Poems

Tab Journal announces a Special Call for Poems for the print issue that will launch the 2024 volume. The Submissions page of the website has general guidelines, and the Submittable button there will take you to the submission form.

The first consideration deadline for this Special Call is July 18, 2023. The final deadline is September 10, 2023.

Each January, Tab Journal releases a uniquely designed print issue, which is mailed to all previous contributors, distributed at the Association of Writers & Writing Programs and other literary events, and sent to libraries and classes upon request. Past print issues have taken the form of a poster, a pouch, a set of postcards, and other innovative ways to consider the reading experience. 

We’re looking for somewhat short poems that will fit the design-in-progress. In addition, while Tab Journal applies the print issue concept loosely and it continues to evolve, we’re looking for poems that have to do with twos, pairs, doubles, halves, dialogues, translations, couplets, and the like.

Tab Journal does not charge a submission fee.

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Interview: Tab Contributing Editors Ruben Quesada & Lynne Thompson

As part of our celebration of National Poetry Month, Tab Journal Communications Coordinator Lydia Pejovic posed a few questions to our new Contributing Editors Ruben Quesada and Lynne Thompson both about their own interests in poetry and about the larger culture of poetry.

What about Tab Journal interested you enough to join the staff as a Contributing Editor?

Lynne Thompson: Tab Journal’s reputation as a literary journal that not only values text but exalts that text by pairing it with original and ever-changing graphic design has always made it a top-notch journal in my view. In addition, Tab’s commitment to a practice of equity and diversity in selecting its contributors, making it a policy that becomes integral and systemic in its editorial policy, made me excited to take on this role. 

Ruben Quesada: I’m impressed by Tab Journal’s visual elements. Fewer literary journals combine visual and literary aesthetics. I’m excited to introduce this journal to new readers and lovers of art and literature. 

What particular perspectives or skills do you bring to Tab Journal

Ruben Quesada: I’ve been editing literary journals for the past decade, and each journal I’ve worked with has taught me something new about editing. I believe that editing and composing an issue is similar to writing a poem. It is a practice of building an experience for the reader. With each iteration of an issue, I learn more about the importance of the editorial role. The experience reminds me of editing my work. As a jpurnal editor, I have the privilege of shaping readership and celebrating work that introduces me to new perspectives and reminds me about the beauty of life. 

Lynne Thompson: Fighting for equity for the underserved and marginalized has been a tenet of my work, first as an attorney, and now as a poet. In particular, in my role as L.A.’s Poet Laureate, I’ve worked to hone my skills to bring the broadest range of voices possible to public awareness on my podcast, Poems On Air.

When you review and select poems for publication, what are you looking to see? What about an ​individual poem make an impression on you? 

Lynne Thompson: I look, first and foremost, for the music in a poem’s lines. That music might be blues or Beethoven, might be Rhiannon Giddens or classical guitar, but whatever the genre, the music is always the most beguiling way in for me. 

Ruben Quesada: As a critic and editor, I try to find the question a poem or collection attempts to answer. An individual poem may clarify something, but there aren’t many poems that do this with insight and grace. Language should be composed thoughtfully. I’m excited about poems that draw my attention to music and storytelling. Form and content vary, but I believe all writing is a form of storytelling. 

What’s exciting about poetry right now?  

Ruben Quesada: I’ve always been excited about a poem’s imagination and language. I’m interested when a poem moves beyond the mundane in content and form. Poems are about the meaning of language and the beauty of imagination. Writing poetry is a practice made simply for its intellect and style. Poetry is an art that is practiced and not a profession. Yet, anti-capitalists will decry the need to be paid for labor. What excites me about poetry right now is its growing loss of value. Poetry is too focused on the poem’s maker as a token of the art and less on the art itself. 

Lynne Thompson: Despite the nightmare that has been the pandemic that is entering its third year, poets have been deeply ensconced in their craft as evidenced from the “gotta-buy-it” books from visionaries like Randall Horton‘s {289-128}and Mai Der Vang’s Yellow Rain, among too many other truly amazing books to name. I’m most excited that the creative impulse survives like a green shoot bisecting hard ground.

How can poetry connect us to our communities?  

Lynne Thompson: The poet Laure-Anne Bosselaar recently recommended that poets write about communities other than our own. Her advice strikes me as a brilliant approach for us all to begin to understand and honor our individual communities and to look for ways to connect with them, to empathize.

Ruben Quesada: Over the past decade, I’ve become more interested in poetry’s intersection at various forms of media to create an experience that can transcend language and culture. In the early 20th century, poets responded to their age of the image. Long before film and television became widely accessible to audiences, poets created worlds of their own for readers. As communication becomes more entangled in multimedia, poetry will serve as a tool for literacy worldwide. 

Submissions are open now but will likely close by the end of May as the Editor, Contributing Editors, and Creative Director make content decisions for the July, September, and November issues.

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Tab Contributing Editors: Ruben Quesada & Lynne Thompson

Tab Journal welcomes Contributing Editors Ruben Quesada and Lynne Thompson as part of the editorial team for the July, September, and November 2022 issues. We’re grateful for the Poetry Foundation grant funding that supports these positions.

Ruben Quesada is the editor of Latinx Poetics: Essays on the Art of Poetry, out this year from University of Nebraska Press, and hosts the Mercy Street Readings. He visited Chapman University via Zoom last fall to speak with MFA students in the required Aspects of a Writer course. His energy and breadth of knowledge and experience made him a top choice for our new position. His latest poetry book is Revelations from Sibling Rivalry Press.

Lynne Thompson is the Poet Laureate of Los Angeles and has visited Chapman University several times, so she has a good sense of what we’re trying to accomplish with Tab Journal and how she can make a difference. A lawyer by training, Thompson sits on the boards of the Los Angeles Review of Books and Cave Canem and is the Chair of the Board of Trustees at Scripps College. Her latest book is Fretwork (2019), winner of the Marsh Hawk Press Poetry Prize.

In our grant proposal, we wrote:

Tab Journal requests a grant from the Poetry Foundation specifically to continue our diversity and inclusion initiatives. A diverse pool of submissions flourishes based upon several factors: the journal’s self-representation, credibility of staff, integrity of equitable policies and practices, analysis of and response to demographic information, broadly written calls, expansive networks (visibility in BIPOC spaces), and incentives. 

We consciously chose not to use the guest editor model, which too easily shifts responsibility for inclusion away from the organization’s underlying structures, policies, and practices. Instead, our contributing editors are part of the conversation about how Tab Journal reaches potential readers and contributors, how staff read and respond to submissions, and which poems end up in the published issues. We’ve defined the contributing editors as collaborators rather than advisors, and we’ve had some frank conversations about the challenges we face and the possibilities we envision.

One of the first changes we made was to add optional demographic questions to the submission form.

Submissions opened in February, with our greatest one-month influx of submissions. At least two staff read each submission anonymously, and those submissions that make it to the next round are read by the Contributing Editors, Editor, and Creative Director, who will collaboratively make decisions about what goes in which issue. The decisions we make together will be evident in the published issues later this year, but we’re also excited about how the conversations are shaping the way we do things and suggesting future goals.

In the last couple of weeks, submissions have slowed down a bit, so now is a great time to send something our way! Keep in mind that, because we give a lot of attention to design and production, we work several months ahead of each issue’s publication date. Once we fill the November issue, we’ll close submissions–and that could happen in May. So, get yourself over to Submittable this month.

Image of black and white collage with reflective silver textures with writing "space before text"
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Tab Submissions Open

Tab Journal submissions are now open!

Image of black and white collage with reflective silver textures with writing "space before text"

Read the Submission Guidelines before submitting your work to Tab Journal. We consider all things poetry, including poems, scholarly and creative essays about poetry, poetry pedagogy pieces, and interviews with poets. Because Tab Journal is continually evolving through design thinking, we’re doing a few things differently this year, not only on the surface but in our policies and practices.

We welcome submissions from writers with a variety of backgrounds, experiences, voices, and aesthetics and encourage BIPOC, LGBTQ, and Disabled poets to send us work. As part of that, we’ve updated our submission form to include optional self-identifying to help us work toward an increasingly inclusive submissions pool. Of course, our staff readers don’t see identifying information when they evaluate submissions.

This year, we are especially encouraging of submissions of visual poetry. You can see examples we’ve published by Keith S. Wilson and Monica Ong in Volume 9 (2021). Plus, there are more in the January 2022 print issue and also a conversation with several visual poets coming in the March online issue.

Tab Journal uses Submittable. We do not charge a submission fee. If you’re unable to use Submittable, please use the Contact form to ask for the best way to submit your work. If you can’t use Submittable or receive email, you can write to us using the postal address in the footer of most of our webpages; if you do that, make sure you that don’t put your name on the poems themselves and that you include a return envelope.

We are now reading for the July, September, and November issues. As part of our ongoing efforts in diversity and inclusion and with the help of a grant from the Poetry Foundation, new Contributing Editors Ruben Quesada and Lynne Thompson will help Editor Anna Leahy make final decisions on the content of these three issues.

For as long as we can afford it, every contributor to Tab Journal receives at no cost a copy of all future print issues, which are published each January. We are also working toward offering small honoraria to contributors.

We remain grateful that so many wonderful poets have trusted Tab Journal with their work these past nine years. We’re excited to see the work that poets send our way this year!

Black and white image with the Tab Journal Logo and collage of reflective minerals and textures
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Submissions Open!

Subscribe to Tab Musings for the latest goings-on!

Tab Journal is now open for submissions!

Tab Journal is now seeking poems for our March and July issues. In addition, we consider critical and creative essays and art–poetry pieces. If your work has something to do with poetry, send it our way.

To get a better idea of the range of what Tab Journal publishes, browse through the Archives. In a recent Tab Musings post, we also recently discussed “How We Read Poems.” You may also want to take a look at the increasingly diverse Tab Staff. We welcome submissions from writers with a variety of backgrounds, experiences, voices, and aesthetics.

The Tab Staff also write book reviews and interviews. If you are an author or a publisher with a book forthcoming in 2021, use the Contact form to query. While we prefer hard copies for review, we are currently restricted on office use because of the pandemic.

To submit to Tab Journal, use our Submittable portal.

open notebook with binder clip and pen
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How We Read Poems

Earlier this summer, Editor Anna Leahy’s craft essay about punctuation in poetry appeared at Waxwing. This essay was originally developed as a presentation for the Association of Writers and Writing Programs Conference (but was not presented because of the pandemic). Leahy opens:

As a poet, I’m intrigued by the tension between the clarity of standard grammar and the innovation that can emerge when grammatical conventions are elided or subverted. I spend an inordinate amount of time on social media defending the Oxford comma, yet when I put my own pen to poem, I treat each comma as a choice. When I read poems, grammatical mistakes irritate me, unless they don’t. Poetry’s punctuation follows what I’d like to call the principle of full expression.

At Tab Journal, we read for full expression, not applying one simple or objective standard or another but, instead, looking at each poem according to the terms it sets for itself on the page or screen and aloud. Later in that essay, Leahy refers also to “the full expression of lived experience” that a poem represents. The range of lived experience in this world is why Tab Journal seeks poems that, together in each issue and over a given year’s volume, demonstrate aesthetic, topical, and experiential variety.

The poem submissions are first read by staff, all of whom are alums of or current students in the MFA in Creative Writing program at Chapman University. This year, that’s been Liz Harmer, Daniel Miess, Laila Shikaki, Jason Thornberry, and Tryphena Yeboah. Each submission is read by at least two staff, often three, after which the editor makes final decisions. Any one staffer’s enthusiastic yes is taken seriously so that a yes is never merely canceled out by another staffer’s no. The process also allows for the maybe—an interest, a questioning. Because the staff represents diverse perspectives and aesthetics, Tab Journal uses this approach to the individual yes or maybe to challenge the status quo and to avoid drowning out an underrepresented point of view.

Of course, we end up with more good poems than we publish, so final decisions involve additional considerations. How will the contents of an issue play off each other—complement, contradict, challenge, talk with, and build upon each other? What does a curated group of poems make together? The 2020 print issue, in fact, can be literally built out of the poems that are its contents.

We also consider how each poem will appear visually in the format Tab Journal has chosen as part of its design constraints. Because we use pdf files instead of blog formatting, the online issues allow for a great deal of agility within the constraint of the screen’s page size and orientation. They’re also downloadable. While we value consistency, we are not tied, for instance, to a set margin for the sake of having a set margin, when a particular poem challenges that aspect of our style guide. Formatting decisions are guided first by accessibility and then by balancing the poem’s aesthetics with the journal’s format.

Stacked tower from printed panels in the Vol. 8, 2020 print issue

Finally, each year, the Editor and the Creative Director look back at the design and the contents to understand the journal’s trajectory and make changes. We’ve selected the content for this year’s remaining issues, and we’ve now begun that process of looking back over the year. Creating a completely new design for each January print issue forces us to reconsider our assumptions, recognize our strengths and weaknesses, and take new risks.

Tab Journal strives to be a project where poetry meets design in inclusive reading experiences. We read poems with that vision in mind. And we ask you to join us in this reading experience!

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(Pandemic) Update

Tab Journal staffers continue to work remotely this summer. While the pandemic slowed us down at first, we’re up to speed now, and the July issue is in production. We’re busy reviewing the submissions of Book-Spine Poems for Pandemic Times to be featured in the September issue. And we’re already filling the November issue and discussing design possibilities for next year’s print issue scheduled for January.

Because of all this, poem submissions are on hold for the time being, and we’ll put a hold on all other submissions soon. If you plan to submit to Tab Journal, you’ll have to wait a bit. Check back in August, when submissions will likely reopen.

Also in August, the dates for the Tabula Poetica series will be announced. Each visiting poet gives both a Talk and a Reading, which are open to the public and connected to both creative writing and literature classes at Chapman University. The events this year will be hosted virtually, so we’re working this summer on the format and platform to ensure an engaging and accessible literary experience for everyone who wants to participate.

If you haven’t yet read the Current Issue of Tab Journal, please take the time soon. The May issue features poems about the California coast by K-12 students that will make you smile.

Also, please follow Tab Journal on Twitter and Facebook. You can sign up for our occasional newsletter at the bottom of any page of the website.

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Call: Book-Spine Poems

Tab Journal Special Feature:
Book-Spine Poems for Pandemic Times
Submission Deadline: June 15, 2020
See guidelines on our Submittable page.

For this special project on book-spine pandemic poems, Tab Journal seeks work that is composed and formed by stacking books so that each title serves as a line in the poem. The subject or theme of the poem should be related to the global pandemic and the ways it affects our lives. As such, these poems will become a curated archive of our bookshelves during this historical moment as well as found-and-constructed literary and visual art using specific constraints across the many possible iterations.

In recent weeks, you may have seen some book-spine poems for pandemic times on social media, but this sort of project isn’t new. In 2013, New York-based artist Nina Kathchadourian published a collection of photographs book spines called Sorted Books. In the book’s introduction, Brian Dillon writes, “it is as though the books have convened of their own accord like plants or insects—following secret or, in the case of more explicitly comic or narrative groupings, not-so-secret attractions.” We at Tab Journal have long been interested in this sort project that explores the relationship between text and image, various constraints that writers and artists choose or face, and ways “that books are objects designed to be handled.” 

To submit a book-spine poem, please include:

  1. a photograph of the book stack
  2. the typed text of the poem
submit

What to keep in mind as you prepare your book-spine poem for submission:

  • Avoid clutter in the background of the photograph.
  • The photograph should be high enough resolution (at least 300dpi at 100% scale) that it doesn’t get blurry when viewed at 4” x 6” size.
  • While the book titles are key, you might consider the typeface and spine color as well, or you may want to experiment with options if you have hardbacks with paper covers. Remember, for this project, image is text, and text is image.
  • The typed poem should maintain the line breaks established by the stack of books. However, feel free to consider punctuation, stanza breaks, and indents.
  • The text of poems published in Tab Journal will use our usual typeface family, Verdana, which includes italics and bold.
  • For this project only, it’s okay if the photograph (with or without typed text) has appeared on social media. However, the work you submit here must not have been published or distributed beyond your personal social media.

Chapman University (the institutional home of Tab Journal) shall have rights to publish electronically work accepted for this special feature. Publication rights revert to the author upon publication in Tab Journal, but we do retain permission to republish and to submit to other outlets such as the Pushcart Prizes. In addition, we require poets whose work is accepted to provide an audio file or give Tab Journal permission to make a recording.

Stack of Books so that titles make a poem
Being Mortal

The first cell,
an elegant defense—
I am, I am, I am
all the wild hungers,
an arrangement of skin.
Be with me always
in accelerated silence.
The body keeps the score.
In the lateness of the world,
minor feelings
meander, spiral, explode.
When death takes something from you,
give it back.

from the bookshelf of Editor Anna Leahy
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Submission Info

Reminder: Submissions Open Now

TAB staff are immersed in reading submissions now, and we’d like to see more this month. We have spots left in the very next issue, and your work might be just what we’re looking for. In fact, we’re especially interested in seeing more work from writers of color, work from writers of all genders, and work from writers with disabilities. Please share our this call for submissions with writers you know.

We’re looking for poems, of course, and you can read around in the TAB Archives to see what a wide aesthetic range we publish. Our Criticism Editor is looking for work that ranges from scholarly essay with a works cited to personal essay, as long as it has something to do with poetry. And if you have an interview with a poet or a poetry collaboration with a visual artist, we’d like to consider it.

Please read our submission guidelines before submitting. We’d like to be faced with so much good work in the next few weeks that our final decisions about the next couple of issues are really difficult.

If you’ll be at the AWP Conference in San Antonio, we’d be happy to talk with you in person. Stop by Bookfair Booth #1543 to pick up a free copy of our print issue.

TAB Submittable page listing three categories for submissions
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TAB Submissions Open

TAB: The Journal of Poetry & Poetics is now open for submissions, and we’re now using Submittable. We consider poetry, scholarly and creative essays that address poetry, interviews with poets, poetry-artwork hybrids, and other cool stuff. We don’t charge a fee to submit, and we consider simultaneous submissions.

Before you submit, we recommend that you do two things.

First, read around in the Archives. We’ve spent the last year making the archives more accessible and moving them to this website platform. Sorting through all the wonderful work we’ve published since 2013 has reinvigorated us and deepened our gratitude for the writers who’ve shared their work as part of TAB.

Second, read the submission guidelines. And share them with other writers who might be interested in what we’re doing at TAB.

Our staff looks forward to a pool of submissions that will make for some tough decisions.

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