scooters, vacation, fall

The two literary journals I decided to look at are the American Poetry Review and the Antioch Review.

The American Poetry Review is a bimonthly journal, that is published by World Poetry, Inc., which is a non-profit corporation. It is based out of Philadelphia and its website is www.aprweb.org, which is actually a great website to navigate around, you have the option of seeing a lot of poetry in there you should check it out. Anyway, the journal is printed to look more like a poetry periodical on newspaper quality paper, and not at all bound in book form, which is almost a deterrent at first because I doubted how credible this journal would be. But it doesn't seem like there's an overwhelmingly large amount of journals out there with just poetry, so I figured I'd have to give it a look. Many of the authors to this journal submit multiple poems. Only a few (one maybe two) of the poems are really experimental with the format and shape of the poems, giving it an almost conventional look to the journal as you leaf through it before you actually read any of the poems, but in reading some of the poetry you can definitely see that this is new contemporary poetry. There are a lot of insets and blurbs from the authors on the practice of writing itself, which makes reading this journal seem a lot more personal and makes the reader want to go experiment themselves rather than solely appreciating the writing. Because there were so many poems it was hard for me to pick out a favorite, it was also hard for me to focus on just one poem because I knew there were so many more and my mind kept flitting back and forth between pages and poems. Just like a newspaper, there are adds scattered all over the place in this journal advertising different MFA programs, spreading the word about poetry contests, and displaying books that the reader should explore.

The Antioch Review, unlike the American Poetry Review is a literary journal that is not solely about poetry. It is one of the oldest and most well established journals for writing, and features both contemporary and older writers within its pages. It is published quarterly by Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio, and its website is antiochreview.org (no www. part in the beginning, that threw me for a little spin there). The book itself is very cleanly printed and the material inside is separated into six categories: Essays, Poetry, Fiction, France, From Our Archives, and Et Cetera. I didn't really know what to think about the section "France"... but basically it's a whole section in the journal dedicated to literature about France or the French culture. Go figure... I'm not sure if that section is present in every issue or what, but it was funny to me that the "France" section has more pages filled than the Poetry section. However, I really enjoyed all of the poetry in this journal, more so than some of the poetry I read in the American Poetry Review. Maybe it's because they had to be more selective of the poetry they published. I especially liked one poem entitled "Bunny Hole", with text that was separated in a way to form the image of a bunny hole itself with the words. The types of poetry in this short section seemed to hit all the bases. I feel like as a starting out poet you'd have more luck submitting to the American Poetry Review. I would definitely pick up another copy of both issues!