Submissions
 

Submission guidelines

Contributors may set longer poems or tanka in locales spread around Australia; perhaps offshore: always as seen through the eyes of a poet still resident in this country.           

Poets are welcome to celebrate some treasured sanctuary, yet a landscape need not be painted as picturesque, in order for work in either form of poetry to be published in Catchment.

Any focus on Indigenous culture will clearly need to show respect for Traditional Owners.
           

Size of submissions permitted:                                 

Longer poetry of place – most likely Western in style @ 30 lines or less x up to 3 poems 
Tanka of place – true to Japanese origins/ current approaches @ 5 lines x up to 5 poems

(In longer poems, blank spaces between title & text – or between stanzas/ sections – will not be considered as lines: titles themselves will not form part of the line-count either.)

Dates for first edition:

Submissions open – Monday, 21 August, 2023
Submissions close – Tuesday, 21 November, 2023 (11.59 pm, AEST)
Edition live online – Thursday, 21 December, 2023
                                                       

Contributions accepted from:        

Poets residing in Australia, aged 18 or over.           

Other requirements:    

Submissions are to be emailed to: editors.catchment@bawbawartsalliance.org.au

The title line must include: either catchment submission-longer poetry or catchment submission-tanka; followed by the writer’s name.

Covering emails need to give the writer’s name & email address, plus the name of the city/ town/ region of residence in Australia (along with a biographical statement – see below).

Writing submitted must be the contributor’s own work.          

With longer poetry, submissions have to be presented as a single attachment, as a .doc or .docx file (using Times New Roman/ 12 point/ 1.5 spacing).

Yet tanka must be offered within the body of the email itself.          

Any work submitted cannot have been published previously (including in blogs/ group chatrooms), nor should it be under consideration elsewhere; no dual/ simultaneous submissions permitted.

All writing offered needs to be presented in English, with no translations either.

Contributors should send only a single set of pieces from either poetic genre in one submission period.

But a writer could submit 3 longer poems & 5 tanka, in separate emails, in the same phase.

Tanka poets may include a sequence, as long as it does not stretch beyond a fifth poem.

Otherwise, contributors writing in Japanese-based forms should not present work here in associated genres: no haiku/ haiga/ haibun/ renga/ renku; nor equivalents such as tanka prose.

A locale can be named in a tanka or a longer poem, or within an epigraph or a post-script, without this being counted in the number of lines.

Yet poets should feel free to describe locations without having to identify them specifically.

No material considered as offensive will be published in Catchment.

Contributors will be advised, with editors’ decisions final, and no further correspondence entered into.

Writing offered outside a submission period will not be retained.

Submissions otherwise failing to comply with these guidelines will not be considered either.

No financial cost is attached to offering writing here: no payment can be made in return.

Copyright will remain with contributors, but Catchment will retain world-first-rights: work accepted should not be released via other outlets prior to our own posting of the relevant edition.

Acknowledgement of Catchment needs to be given with any subsequent re-publication.

                                                                      

Biographical statement:      

No longer than 50 words, this must be included in the covering email, written in the third person, starting with the poet’s name, summing up background/ publications/ successes.