Submission Guidelines: No Thanks

Mixer Publishing Submission Guidelines

mixer poetry mixes different forms or meters to great effect. Think: the offspring of a villanelle and sonnet. Free verse freed of sloppy rhymes and filled with iambs, trochees, or dactyls that create interesting effects. Poetry that is not just prose with line breaks! And yes, line breaks should be broken for a reason greater than poetical whimsy. Prose poetry that employs odd forms (a newspaper ad; an obituary) to great effect is also very welcome. Do I really need to mention no cliches or sentimentality? 

We like realist poems that break away from the cliches of insight and offer instead anti-epiphanies, anti-climaxes, puzzlement, or shifts in point-of-view. Endings that eschew understanding, that question epistemology, our ability to know the world. 

We like poems that mix in tropes, images, styles, or themes from some genres not typically used in traditional poetry--e.g., noir, horror, sci-fi (dystopia!), black comedy, farce, surrealism. The trick here is that the style or genre is used, obviously, in an interesting way--not gratuitous or goofy. More like a new context or occasion for a poem. 

Iconoclasm, parody, and satire. mixer loves poems that attack or play with the traditional tropes of "Poetry." Which means we want poems that make fun of convention--perhaps even while employing it--poems that interrogate the pastoral, the Platonic, the beauty of "Truth." Language experiments that call attention to the constructed nature of the world are also fine, but they must seek ambiguity, not opacity. mixer digs the necropastoral! 

Payment: $15-$75 for online (i.e., Website) publication, depending on length and quality; $15-$75 for print publication, based on the same standard--some stories will be online only while others will be chosen for online and print publication; and at the end of each year, an additional $500 will be paid to the story or poem that best represents Mixer's aesthetic of literary genre--i.e., The Focus Story. Yes, a Focus Story can be a poem! 

Electronic Publication (Kindle, iPad, and eBooks): 50/50 split of sales. 

Important! *Advice on the submission process* 

Please do not query us on the status of your submission. Response time on short stories and poems usually takes 1-2 months (sometimes earlier), but will fluctuate to 3-4 months if the submissions level is high. Novels and novellas are different: 3-4 month response time is normal and that can extend during busy periods to 5-6 months. 

Queries _are_ acceptable only if submissions pass the 4 month mark for short stories/poems and the 6 month mark for novels and novellas. 

It’s not that we don’t like chatting with our submitters, but if we answered you all individually we’d never have time to put the magazine out! :) 

SEE: http://mixerpublishing.submishmash.com/submit