To submit or not to submit? Take a good look at Mudlark. Spend some time here 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.

Submit to: William Slaughter, Editor
either by E-Mail: mudlark@unf.edu
or by USPS with SASE:

Mudlark
Department of English
University of North Florida
1 UNF Drive
Jacksonville, FL 32224-2645, U.S.A.

Turn-around time: No less than one day, no more than one month.

Simultaneous submissions? Because our turn-around time is short, because we do read and answer our mail, we prefer not to receive simultaneous submissions. But if you insist, we will consider them, asking only that you inform us of the fact, up front, and withdraw poems immediately that are accepted elsewhere.

Mudlark will not consider, for either its posters or its flashes, work that has already been published in either print or electronic form. For its issues, though, Mudlark will consider work that is being collected for the first time, including work that has already been published elsewhere. Acknowledgements, of course, are required.