Special Call:
Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness
We thank all those who submitted to our special call for Volume 14, Issue 1. We have selected the work of nine poets to appear alongside Tracy K. Smith’s “Declaration” in this special issue that will appear as an exhibit and online.
The Submittable portal will remain closed until we are ready to read for future issues.
Here’s What the Special Call Asked Poets to Send
The 14th volume of Tab Journal coincides with the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence and the founding of the United States based on equal and universal inalienable rights that include life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Through this special call, Tab Journal encourages poets to reconsider Thomas Jefferson’s Declaration and Thomas Paine’s preceding Common Sense that had popularized these concepts. Tab Journal is interested in work that recasts these documents’ words and principles in light of our mutual pledge to each other, past and current threats to our inalienable rights, and the anniversary of this nation’s founding.
Tab Journal invited submission of text selected directly from these two founding source documents that can be rendered as a poem. This special call builds on Tracy K. Smith’s poem “Declaration.” As such, the composition process should not reduce the document to merely an abstract of itself. Rather, as Smith said of her own process, the new poem should use “fragments of this founding document to say this other thing that [the words] seem very intent upon saying to me now.” We wanted to be surprised–and we were!
Poems were not be selected based on their visual representation, as Tab Journal is designing how the words are ultimately rendered with a distinct design determined by the Creative Director.
