Random Selection and Publication

August 18, 2022 Jonathan Catherall

All submissions will be numbered in order of submission.

On selection day, the editors will generate a series of numbers between 1 and the number of last submission using the Random Sequence Generator at Random.org. The editorial team will read the first twenty-four submissions resulting from this series of numbers. These will be the poems published unless, in the editors’ opinion, any poem is or could be reasonably construed to be racist, misogynistic, homophobic, transphobic or hate speech to any group or individual; or any kind of ‘punching down’. The editors’ decision about what is unacceptable is final and may include categories not previously anticipated. Anything unacceptable will be discarded and the poem with the twenty-fifth number in sequence will be read and added, and so on.

Contributors will then be contacted to ensure their poem is still available and to input on correct layout as usual. If a poem is unavailable, the next poem implied by the random sequence of numbers will be accepted.

The order of the poems as presented in the magazine will use the same randomised sequence, tweaked only for visual considerations.

Layout for submission

April 22, 2021 Jonathan Catherall

Poetry

If sending a Word document, please use spaces to get indents rather than tabs.

If your layout is not ‘traditional’ - i.e. a series of lines starting near or close to the right hand side of the page - but more ‘open-field’ or justified blocks etc etc, then send a PDF so we know how you want it to look.

Images

We’d really love it if you could send your images below 300KB. Smaller size images load faster.

For most images, you can reduce them without noticeable loss either with Photoshop or with a number of free tools:

(a) using your photo editing software (eg Preview/Tools/Adjust Size on a Mac), take the jpeg or png and reduce images ‘scaling proportionately’ to a maximum of 1200 pixels wide, or half that if the image only needs to stretch across half the page etc.

(b) while doing this, reduce resolution to 72 pixels/inch

if your images have detailed text on them, get a crisp effect using PNG format at 300 pixels/inch instead. This may make for a larger image but we can live with it.

If it’s a problem, don’t worry - just send us what you have. But saving us time is much appreciated.

Yasmine Seale & Robin Moger

October 9, 2018 Jonathan Catherall

Translators' Note to The Interpreter of Desires

Mohieddin Ibn Arabi (1165-1240) was a prolific Sufi philosopher, mystic and poet known as The Great Sheikh. He was born in Murcia in modern-day Spain, and died in Damascus. The Tarjuman Al Ashwaq, or The Interpreter of Desires, is a cycle of 61 poems.

The poems of Tarjuman Al Ashwaq are, as the title suggests, about desire and longing, the object of the poet’s love both sensual and divine. Criticised for writing mere love poetry, Ibn Arabi himself was obliged to issue a second edition with a commentary clarifying the relationship of the text's eroticism and sensuality to aspects of the divine and embodied mystical-philosophical concepts.

These are poems, then, of distance and approach, of communion and the impossibility of union, of completion and the impossibility of completion. Our response is a project of translation as long-distance correspondence: a project of dissatisfaction and endurance and failure and repetition, and the engine which drives these cycles and aims beyond them.

The process is as follows. We each separately begin a translation of the same ode and then send the translations to one another. The second iteration of the ode is written as a response to this translation and sent in turn, and so on, until we are exhausted. Some of the odes have a couple of iterations each, some three or four or more. Each iteration is marked with an initial and a number.

> Go (back) to the translation of Poem 28
> Go (back) to the translation of Poem 53