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SPAM Magazine
Submissions for the Magazine are currently closed. Sign up to our mailing list or follow us @spamzine on socials to find out when our next open reading period is.
With our online magazine, SPAM aims to publish exciting poetry that speaks to the post-internet generation. Our tastes are varied, but for an idea of what we publish you can peruse our back catalogue of zines, anthologies and pamphlets, or check out our post-internet scrapbook here. We welcome any type of content that may be deemed 'poetic' in the 21st century. Simultaneous submissions are perfectly fine, as long as you inform us if your work has been accepted elsewhere. We don't do bios, but feel free to tell us a bit about yourself in a cover letter.
→ Please submit up to three A4 pages of poems as a .doc and PDF document (or any suitable format for video/audio/cross-media submissions).
→ We now accept submissions within limited reading periods throughout the year. If we have not responded to your submission within two months, you can assume the work was not right for us at this time and are free to submit elsewhere. You are also free to submit (new) work when submissions reopen for future issues.
→ Please do not submit work outside of the reading period.
→ If we publish you, please wait at least 2 more issues before sending us work again; this is to ensure a diversity of authors.
→ Send your work to spamzine.editors [at] gmail.com, with 'Online Magazine Submission' within the subject.
N.B. We are especially interested in submissions from writers of colour, disabled writers, queer & neurodivergent voices.
To be notified as to when Magazine submissions will be next open, follow us on social media or subscribe to our mailing list.
Reviews and essay submissions are currently CLOSED.
Before sending us your work, please consider the guidelines below.
What's Hot:
Reviews and essays on contemporary and/or recent poetry publications, poet’s novels and books of theory or nonfiction whose themes resonate with us and the ethos of our readership and publications; 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…
What we’re not really looking for:
Previously published work; 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).
→ Please get in touch with Kirsty (kirsty.spamzine@gmail.com) if you'd like to submit or pitch a review and/or interview. If you'd like to become a regular contributor, please send a sample of previous critical work and we can add you to our contributors list, if we find your writing suitable.
SPAM Cuts submissions are currently CLOSED.
Submissions for our SPAM Cuts (single-poem reviews between 350-1200 words) are very welcome, as long as the poem (interpret 'poem' as you like) reviewed is freely available to read online and published, ideally, in the last six months.
To submit a review or for any information, email editors.spamzine [at] gmail.com
→ To submit a SPAM Cut, email alice.spamzine [at] gmail.com
Archive Fever submissions are currently CLOSED.
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. 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...
→ 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.
Some SPAM-endorsed free-to-access archives:
-
anthology.rhizome.org
→ 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. Please also get in touch if you think your poetry archive should be on this list!
Please note: All SPAM editors work voluntarily and part-time. The expected response window for all Plaza submissions is 2-3 weeks. If you have not heard back about your pitch after that time, please feel free to send us a friendly follow-up email to check the status of your submission.
Season 5 Pamphlet Series
Submissions for pamphlets are currently CLOSED
We are pleased to announce that between 1st and 30th April 2021, SPAM are open to submissions of poetry manuscripts of up to 36 A5 pp. Please check out our magazine or buy some of our previous publications to get a sense of what we like.
→ Please submit pamphlets in BOTH .doc and .pdf form to
spamzine.editors [at] gmail.com under the heading ‘Pamphlet Submission: “TITLE”’.
→ Ensure your submission is typeset to A5 page size in no smaller than size 11 font, and no more than 36 pp in length.
→ When submitting, introduce yourself with a brief bio, indication of publication history and cover letter about the work and why you want to publish with SPAM.
→ Note that we can only accommodate publishing in black and white (although cover will be in colour).
→ This series will have a standardised cover aesthetic.
→ Submissions are open between 1st April to 30th April 2021. Manuscripts sent out-with these dates, and manuscripts which do not follow the above formatting guidelines, will not be considered.
→ Your manuscript will be read in May; expect to hear back from us in June — if you do not hear from us by mid July do drop us an enquiry email.
Working with SPAM & Internships
SPAM is not currently looking for new team members.
It's great that you want to be involved though! Currently we do not have capacity to bring new members aboard SPAM HQ, however this might change in the future. If you have skills in (or enthusiasm for!) sound production, typesetting and design, organising events, archival research, outreach and marketing, then watch this space! Please note all roles at SPAM are currently unpaid (voluntary).
Statement on Fees
SPAM is a non-profit, community interest company / DIY operation.
Please note, at present we are unable to pay for website contributions.