SUBMISSIONS ARE OPEN FOR Australian Poetry Journal Vol. 14.1 ‘walking’ – GUEST EDITED BY JAKE GOETZ
APJ 14.1 takes inspiration around ‘walking’, and the 50 poems published to this theme are intended to be a reframing of what poetry about ‘walking’ might be. Australian Poetry acknowledges and thanks our First Nations AP Board Director and poet, Yvette Holt, for conceiving the theming and naming of this volume.
Jake Goetz, Guest Editor, writes:
Walking is a long-standing tradition and pivotal theme in poetry, across millennia, languages, lineages and poetics. Despite this, in western cultures, the relationship between poetry and walking is still often dominated by images of white men on Romantic sojourns through rural and urban spaces. But walking in poetry – whether as a theme, a methodology, or concept – has always been a subversive act, a way for people from diverse genders and backgrounds to speak back to cultures and histories of exclusion. For this issue, we are interested in poems that not only reframe and challenge the relationship between poetry and walking, but which also seek new ways of writing about walking that might not be about walking at all. Who gets to ‘walk’, for instance? Who is forced to walk? Who is prevented from walking? We walk at rallies, feet in sync, in solidarity; refugees and those suffering in warzones are forced to walk, then often forced to stop if not by national borders then military bombardment; for some groups, simply walking home at night can pose a significant danger, highlighting how certain socio-cultural contexts dictate who can walk when and where; while in ‘Australia’, each and every day settlers walk freely upon the unceded lands of First Nations Peoples, often unaware of the link between their steps and the ongoing effects of the colonial project. We invite poems across the many facets of this thematic.
Award-winning poet Andy Jackson will also curate three poets separately into the volume, for whom ‘walking’ involves wheelchairs or other technologies. There will also be the usual FROM RECENT COLLECTIONS section and other poems. Publication date is 31 March 2025.
Submissions Open: 27 November 2024–15 December 2024, 11:59PM (AEST).
Submission Form: >>Wufoo Form Link to Submit<<
or through the link here: https://apsubs.wufoo.com/forms/submit-to-apj-141-walking/
Information and enquiries
Submission / Wufoo Enquiries: Jennifer Nguyen, Editorial Associate at jen.nguyen@australianpoetry.org
Overall enquiries: Jacinta Le Plastrier, Publisher at ceo@australianpoetry.org
Formal Guidelines
- Submissions must be sent via an online Wufoo form found >>here<< (or via link: https://apsubs.wufoo.com/forms/s1axt0e0orrexz/)
- Poets, both Australian-born or international, are invited to submit up to three poems.
- All poems submitted must be previously unpublished and not currently submitted elsewhere.
- All poems should appear in a single document, which should be uploaded in both Word and PDF format. The word and PDF should be titled ‘first name_last nameAPJ14.1’
- Poets must also include a bio (third person, 50–100 words) and contact details (email, phone, mailing address) in their submission.
- Successful submissions will be notified in February 2025.
- Each poem selected for publication will be paid $80, in accordance with current ASA rates.
- APJ requires that the use of any other work by another author in a submitted poem is clearly acknowledged and cited. The responsibility for this remains with the poet.
- Guest editor/s of APJ may approach a number of poets directly for submission to each volume.
- Please specify for statistical purposes, if you are a subscriber to Australian Poetry. Poems are chosen by the editor/s based on merit and there is no advantage given to subscribers. Subscription however is strongly encouraged as it makes our publications viable and vital. If you are not yet a subscriber, please subscribe here (link: https://www.australianpoetry.org/subscribe/)
Jake Goetz is a poet and researcher who lives on the unceded lands of the Gadigal People (Sydney’s Inner West). He has published three collections of poetry: meditations with passing water (Rabbit, 2018); Unplanned Encounters: Poems 2015-2020 (Apothecary Archive, 2023); and most recently, Holocene Pointbreaks (Puncher & Wattmann, 2024). He holds a PhD in Writing and Literature from the Writing & Society Research Centre (Western Sydney University) and is currently a Research Fellow at the Rachel Carson Center for Environment & Society in Munich.
