Mudlark was founded in 1995 as an electronic journal of poetry & poetics. It has an ISSN (International Standard Serial Number) from the Library of Congress; is refereed, copyrighted, and archived. Mudlark is “never in and never out of print.”
To submit or not to submit? Take a good look at Mudlark. Spend some time on the Mudlark website. Find out what issues, posters, and flashes are. Then make your decision.
As our full name, Mudlark: An Electronic Journal of Poetry & Poetics, suggests, we will consider accomplished work that locates itself anywhere on the spectrum of contemporary practice. We want poems, of course, but we want essays, too, that make us read poems (and write them?) differently somehow. Although we are not innocent, we do imagine ourselves capable of surprise.
Mudlark publishes in three formats: “issues” are the electronic equivalent of print chapbooks; “posters” are the electronic equivalent of print broadsides; and “flashes” are poems that have news in them, poems that feel like current events. The acceptance rate at Mudlark is low, very low; the rejection rate is comparably high. The work of hobbyists and lobbyists is not for us. The poem is the thing at Mudlark… and the essay about it.
In Mudlark poetry is free. Our authors give us their work and we, in turn, give it to our readers. What is the coin of poetry’s realm? Poetry is a gift economy. One of the things we can do at Mudlark to “pay” our authors for their work is point to it here and there, wherever else it is. We can tell our readers how to find it, how to subscribe to it, and how to buy it… if it is for sale. Toward that end, we maintain A-Notes (on the Authors) we publish. We call attention to their work.
