We’re delighted to announce that after a brief hiatus, SPAM Plaza are reopening for submissions. Before sending us your work, please consider the guidelines below. You can also find this info on our Submissions page.
WHAT’S HOT
SPAM HQ are currently looking for:
Reviews and essays on contemporary and/or recent poetry publications, poet’s novels and books of theory or nonfiction whose themes resonate with us; reviews and essays on movements, craft or formal tendencies in poetry that resonate with the post-internet (these might include flarf, metamodernism, concrete poetry); reviews and essays on recent releases or phenomena in the world of art and music (sometimes also film and tv); short reviews on recently published poems; work on hybrid forms; work that challenges our sense of what a poem is; writing that might be considered within the realm of electronic literature; writing of or against the digital humanities; writing on queer temporality; essays or reviews which attend to underrepresented or marginalised writers, publishers and literary scenes; reflections on poetry and value; criticism on poetry and ekphrasis; work that takes an innovative and interdisciplinary approach to ecopoetics and matters of the anthropocene; writings on the intersection of poetry, technology and everyday life; hot takes on pop cultural phenomena with a political or polemic edge; experimental music criticism; interviews with artists, musicians or poets whose work resonates with us; performative writing; writing for the love of trash; art writing with a post-internet slant; essays on the cultural phenomena of the nineties and (especially) noughties; “practice as research” expositions on writing poetry ~In the Digital Age~; criticism that explores post-internet tendencies in work in translation, or beyond the Anglo-American context; comparative and critical ventures in the affective tendencies of contemporary poetics, situated in political contexts; writing which acknowledges its medial conditions; writing that takes a post-internet slant on topics such as: neurodivergence; medicine, illness and the body; the everyday; the utopian; parataxis; cultural nostalgia; acid communism; the blockchain; feminist epic; queer ecologies; micro-forms; poetry publishing; psychoanalysis and schizoanalysis; pedagogy; love and desire; dreams…
Archive Fever:
Let's rewind! We are now accepting reviews/encounters (up to 2000 words) with poetic works from online archives, blogs and websites of yore.
We are looking for criticism and retrospective essays on poetry drawn from the archive of small press publishing and zines, in particular revisiting work from underrepresented and marginalised writers in these publications. SPAM Cuts: Archive Fever also looks for critical work on media that tracks the changes from earlier forms of the internet to present modes of being online; the transition from web 1.0 to 2.0; broken links; hauntology; fax and Xerox machine aesthetics; modernists who somehow predicted the internet; Blogspot musings; stylised gossip and in-jokes; the noughties; dial-up ekphrasis; MSN epistolaries; spells against nostalgia; Alice Notley; poetics of cyber-optimism; online eros and sex before streaming; socialist cybernetics; the movie Hackers (1995); emergent affects; Y2K; LiveJournal poems; flarf; gendernauts; scene kid poetics; pre-2010 JRPGs; Limewire phenomenologies; utopias as imagined ten, twenty, thirty years ago...
Some SPAM-endorsed free-to-access archives:
What we’re not really looking for:
Criticism on fiction, unless the fiction has some significant poetic element or is hybrid, creative-critical and experimental in nature (see recent Prototype fictional output as an example), or is a novel written by a poet, or pertains thematically to poetry; personal essays (unless they are deeply woven in relation to a literary or art work of interest to us).
A brief guide to submitting:
New pitches for essays, long-form pieces and experimental works (including audiovisual pieces): please email Kirsty Dunlop (kirsty.spamzine@gmail.com) with your name, proposed title, approximate word count and a proposal of no more than 350 words. Please note, we are particularly on the lookout for essays that challenge our sense of what is and where is the site of poetry, and blur critical and creative boundaries, in the context of the post-internet. We are also interested in multimedia works at the moment: for example, video essays, sound essays, hypertext essays, game essays; critical-creative writing that opens up new possibilities in content, form and media. If you have not written for us before, please also include a sample of your work or links to existing publications, and a brief note on why SPAM might be interested in your pitch.
New pitches for reviews and matters of Archive Fever: please email Mau Baiocco (mau.spamzine@gmail.com) with your name and what you would like to review or write about. Please note we are mostly interested in reviews of poetry, but see our ‘What’s Hot’ list for a broader sense of what might work for us. If you have not written for us before, please also include a sample of your work or links to existing publications. If you would like to join our list of regular contributors, please indicate this and we can add you to our contacts, if we find your writing suitable.
New pitches for SPAM Cuts: please email Alice Hill-Woods at (alice.spamzine@gmail.com) with your name and a link to the poem you would like to review. Remember it must be available for free online and published within the last six months to be eligible.
If your work doesn’t seem to fit into these categories, or you’re not sure, please email spamzine.editors@gmail.com with a general pitch or enquiry.
~
Published: 16/8/21
Image by Maria Sledmere