The Un/finished Issue - an Unfinished List of Possibilities

August 15, 2025 Jonathan Catherall

In this issue, I want to explore the possibilities of the un/finished work, opening out to the theme in the most radical way. “Un/finished” will be an evolving issue which is in frequent change over the autumn - visible in part first on 1 September 2025 and 'running' to 30 November 2025 - at which point it will be considered ... 'Un/finished'!

My meta-thought-piece-thingummy to stimulate more ideas on the subject is here. But in practice this could be:

Work which involves nothing more to be done to it, eg

1. a submission of work which openly explores the very act of drafting, of unfinishedness, of multiplicity of finishes, of simultaneity of versions, or more ‘classically’ is about the theme, even if it doesn’t have an edgy format (!);

2. submitting a poem in multiple versions, where I publish all the versions, i.e. where you are not forced to decide/finalise;

3. submissions which claim to be terminally unfinished/-able, i.e. fragments or almost wholes where you think there's good stuff in it but can't (be arsed) or don't want to take to 'completion'

Work that implies several 'publications', eg

4. somebody submitting an unfinished poem which I publish ... with a commitment from them to provide another version or versions for me to publish by agreed dates

5. somebody submitting an unfinished poem which I publish, and then comment on (a. publicly, ie also publishing my comments, or b. in private). They then revise it (perhaps there are multiple back-and-forths) and I add subsequent versions as these emerge, so the reader can see the evolution

6. the above, but instead of me commenting, my matching someone else prepared to act as the commentator with the author (again, a choice whether to publish the 'correspondence' arising)

7. as at 4. above, but with two or more people approaching me with a pre-agreed collaboration. This could involve just one poet and other(s) as commentators, or two poets sharing each other's unfinished work back and forth, even in such a way as the poems act (however obliquely) as responses to the other's drafts

8. as at 4. above, only the unfinished work is also posted on social media with an encouragement to openly crowd-source responses and suggestions, which are also published/linked to (where constructive)

9. any individual or collaborative project you want to pitch me that engages with this theme;

10. visual work that engages with the 'un/finished' theme in any way. Or if it doesn’t engage with the theme, send it anyway. I tend to get fewer of these submissions in my audience of mostly poets, so you have a stronger chance - go for it!

+ any other related ideas that I enjoy enough to publish!

Be a different kind of participant!

11. As described at points 4-8 above, I am especially looking for people to engage and respond to work. I want to build community in the social act of ‘finishing’ or ‘progressing’. You could offer to do this alongside submitting your own work, or offer it without submitting anything. I will find various ways to credit you for this (always agreed with you)

A promise

Despite the end November 2025 date as the 'closure/launch of the final version' of the project, my commitment to you is that - for any of the above - if I accept your piece and you want to provide even later versions or edits at any time that Tentacular is still alive and under my stewardship, which I hope will be for years to come, I will do the changes!

Practicalities

Send any time from now. Look at the material on the Submit page for more details on how. I’ll look at your submission and come back to you quickly.

If I accept, the process of layout will depend on the nature of your work, my time and yours, but the aim is to have everything you want up there by 30 November. My promise above is real, but changes requested in December may have to wait some time.

Feel free to pitch ideas at any time or ask for more details.

Jonathan

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