Speaking of “ekprhasis,” as guest writer Deborah Batterman was on Thursday, here’s a call for submissions for a special issue devoted to ekphrasis (and formal verse):
SOU’WESTER, a literary journal founded in 1960 and housed at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville, is now accepting poetry and fiction submissions for a special issue, “Ekphrastic Fiction and Formal Verse.”
--Plenty of brainy folks from Plato to present have defined and redefined ekphrasis. What we want to investigate are its possibilities as a gesture/element/device in the work of contemporary fiction writers. Whether your piece contains an ekphrastic moment or entails an overall ekphrastic response – we want to read it.
--We define poetic form as an adherence to or interpretation of the kinds of patterns that shape poems. We love poems that follow the prescribed structure and we love poems that reinterpret, reinvent, or just make up a structure. In that spirit, send us your sonnets, pantoums, villanelles, kwansabas, bops, and sestinas. Send us your blues poems, your luc-bats, ghazals, and any of the other types of formal verse we don’t have space to list.
Writers whose work is accepted for the issue will be asked to write a brief (100-150 word) statement about their understanding of ekphrasis in contemporary fiction or form in contemporary verse. To submit, please use our online submission system. Info can be found at:http://www.siue.edu/ENGLISH/SW/submit.html
