Forgotten Ground Regained

Call for Submissions

The Winter, 2025 issue of Forgotten Ground Regained is open for submissions. I am especially interested in poetry that fits the theme, “Images of the Natural World” or (for Spring, 2025) “Mythic Tales and Sacred Truths). Submissions should be sent to Paul D. Deane at the following email address: pdeane@alliteration.net.
Requirements
  • Submissions must be in modern English, but authors should feel free to submit poems that take advantage of the diction, rhythms, and syntax of particular language varieties and communities. I do not discriminate against Scots, Appalachian English, Black English Vernacular, Indian English, or any other language variety, though I do ask that authors be prepared to supply notes to explain any terms or expressions that outsiders to their communities may not readily understand.
  • Submissions should make skillful, systematic use of alliteration in ways that use alliteration to reinforce the rhythm and connect important ideas. Overall, I prefer poems that have a stronger impact on readers when they are read aloud. I therefore encourage authors to include links to audio or video versions of their poems in their submissions.
  • I would love to see people experimenting with modern English versions of Old and Middle English alliterative verse, with Old Norse forms like ljoòahattr and drottkvætt or modern Icelandic rimur, or with new alliterative forms designed to highlight modern English rhythms and speech patterns. While my first preference is what traditional scholarship calls alliterative-accentual verse, I am also open to alliterative free verse or to alliterative versions of traditional forms, such as the ballad, as long as the alliteration is clearly a structural rather than a decorative feature of the form.
  • I am open to work both by contemporary poets and to projects that would normally be considered to fall outside the literary mainstream, such as speculative poetry, SCA Bardic Arts projects, and fan fiction.
  • There is no hard upper length limit, though poems more than five to six pages in length are likely to be published separately on the website, with links provided from the Fall issue, rather than being included directly in the pdf magazine. Note that I love both both the lyrical and the narrative turns in poetry, so longer narratives will be given careful consideration.
  • I will consider reprints, but am far more likely to link to them (if published online) or to publish them directly on the site than I am to publish them in one of the quarterly issues.
Submissions for the Winter Issue must be received by January 1, 2025
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