Forgotten Ground Regained

Call for Submissions, Issue 8, Fall 2025

The Winter, 2025 issue of Forgotten Ground Regained is open for submissions. I am especially interested in alliterative poetry on the theme, “Psalms and Meditations”. Submissions should be sent to Paul D. Deane at the following email address: pdeane@alliteration.net by January 1, 2026.
Note that topics have been set for the next four issues, though submissions are currently only open for the Winter issue:
• Winter, 2026: Psalms and Meditations• Spring, 2026: Moments Sensed and Seen• Summer, 2026: Alliterative Verse in Arda [Middle Earth] • Fall, 2026: Speculative Visions
Form and Content
  • Submissions must 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.
  • 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 variety of English, 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.
  • I will not publish metrical poetry or free verse that does not make systematic, structural use of alliteration. 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. Note that I love both the lyrical and the narrative turns in poetry, so longer narratives will be given careful consideration.
  • 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.
Editorial Policies
  • I accept simultaneous submissions but require authors to notify me in a timely fashion if a work is accepted elsewhere. I reserve the right to withdraw acceptance if a work has been accepted or published elsewhere without my knowledge.
  • I am not able to offer payment for publication. However, authors retain all rights.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • As editor, I have final say on any and all issues of copyediting, formatting, punctuation, layout, illustration, and the like. I will endeavor to take an author’s wishes into account, but in any cases where the author and I cannot reach agreement, they have the choice either to accept my decisions or to withdraw their work from publication in this journal.
  • It should not be necessary to state this, but in the age of generative AI, it is best to be explicit. I expect submissions to be entirely the author’s work. If a work has benefited in any way from reference to generative AI, I expect the author to provide logs of all interactions, both prompts and AI responses, so that I can judge whether a poem is the author’s authentic creation.
Copyright © Paul Deane, 2024.No part of this site may be used or reproduced in any manner for the purpose of training artificial intelligence technologies or systems