Red Wolf Editions Fall 2021 Issue 19: My Dream of You

Red Wolf Editions Fall 2021
Theme: My Dream of You

I came upon her on a full moon, her breath coming and going as she laid in the sand. She had been playing her mandolin before falling asleep, a jug of water on hand. I tried to put a paw on her—she sleeps lightly as a feather does she—but she merely shifted her weight and slept more deeply.

Oh yes, Shakespeare did say, “Perchance to sleep, to dream.” In Henri Rosseau’s The Sleeping Gypsy, a lion comes into the woman’s dream. It does not attack her. I have myself dreamt of wild animals, like tigers and elephants and hippopotamuses. They come at me often in water, a figment of the imagination invoking fear, and then they do not attack. Often dreams are surreal and only make sense within the dream itself. While one dreams one believes. When one awakes, it’s utterly unreal. Often the dream mines the unconscious, of our fears and longings.

In the painting Rosseau depicts the woman’s dream. But is he in fact the dreamer, creating the art we see? It’s all in his mind’s eye isn’t it? So it is for those who write. Haruki Murakami said “writing itself is like dreaming. When I write, I can dream intentionally”. But unlike a dream which poofs into nothing on awakening, the writer can continue the dream by continuing to write the story, or making up a new story. A dream is exactly like a story.

Dreams are like portals to another world. That’s how the surrealism presents in Murakami’s stories but not as a literal dreaming but what’s happening feels all real. His characters enters a portal, in the form of a well (The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle) or an underground subway route (IQ84) and so on. “So, in my stories, if you go down to the bottom of the well, there’s another world. And you can’t necessarily tell the difference between this side and the other side.” His characters typically learn some difficult truths after coming back to this side.

The plot device of other parallel universes is evident in stories like in the Harry Potter stories or The Chronicles of Narnia. So it is that poems, as stories, may also function as portals to other worlds, the point of which is an attempt to uncover the mysteries of humanity. It triggers an awakening. One transcends time and space when one steps into stories. And doesn’t one bring something back afterward? In writing and reading, as in dreaming, we ourselves are immersed in a different time and space, in a completely different narrative. We are imagining other worlds.

I want to ask you, what is this dream, this imagining, about which you as a poet writes? Is it a longing? Is it a dream of you? Who is this you? Answer me that. A loved one, a ghost? Even if the you is not named, is often amorphous, a relationship is being set up. Is it a loss of something, someone, and a desire, a dream to recover it, or the connection, in a poem? I think it is often about that too. Is it a dream of some better future, some better self? Like in this poem by Langston Hughes.

Hold fast to dreams
For if dreams die
Life is a broken-winged bird
That cannot fly.

Hold fast to dreams
For when dreams go
Life is a barren field
Frozen with snow.

But the meaning has shifted. Dreams shift our reality. This type of dreaming is not a literal one but more symbolic? A mindset? In which case, dreams are not to be dissed, well in this sense of the word. As you imagine, imagination opens the door to dreaming, and dreaming opens the door to the imagination. A door to riches, to happiness can happen in dreams, as we shift our mindset. I was mesmerised by the ending of JD Salinger’s The Catcher In The Rye, when Holden was just watching Phoebe going round and round on a carousel. I think on a deep dreaming level, happiness happens.

I was damn near bawling, I felt so damn happy, if you want to know the truth. I don’t know why. It was just that she looked so damn nice, the way she kept going around and around, in her blue coat and all. God, I wish you could’ve been there.

Then there’s a type of dream that interests me—the one of God. Our dream of God as it were. The God that lives within our imagination.

If God exists he isn’t just
butter and good luck.
He’s also the tick that
killed my wonderful dog
Luke.
Said the river: imagine
everything you can
imagine, then keep on
going.
—Mary Oliver, “At the River Clarion”

Importantly the linchpin of our belief system gives us the meaning of our existence. I want to believe God’s dream of us, God dreaming us into being. What do you make of your own life? Do you believe the path you have been put on is not an accident but a destiny? Who put you there? Chance? God? I was watching The Last Kingdom on Netflix and was transfixed by the path of Uhtred of Bebbanburg. Born a Saxon but brought up by Danes, he was a warrior who had fought many battles in support of King Alfred of Wessex, whose dream was of England. He believes that “the truth of a man lies not in the land of his birth, but in his heart”. In his path of unpredictable twists and turns, where demands were constantly being made, he responded and acted according to his heart and a sense of calling, and concluded that “destiny is all”.

Even so we need to imagine for ourselves what we wish to do in this world, how we find ourselves to be, and change path as chance or God will have us. We do not see what is coming. We need to imagine, to keep on dreaming, to become who we are, to finally be at peace with who we are. We will dream till the cows come home. While I sleep, my dream of you has not ended.

Read our submission guidelines here. Please check back on our site to see if your poem has been selected. We will not be sending out any acceptance or rejection letters.

Submissions period: 1 March 2021 to 27 August 2021. Selected poems will be posted on this site and compiled into a PDF release in Fall 2021.

Good writing.

Irene Toh
Editor
Fall 2021 Issue

Red Wolf Editions Spring 2020: True Love

Red Wolf Editions Spring 2020
Theme: True Love

An honorable human relationship…that is, one in which two people have the right to use the word “love”—is a process, delicate, violent, often terrifying to both persons involved, a process of refining the truths they can tell each other.

It is important to do this because it breaks down human self-delusion and isolation. It is important to do this because in doing so we do justice to our own complexity. It is important to do this because we can count on so few people to go that hard way with us.

—Adrienne Rich

On the subject of true love what are your thoughts? I guess you do not doubt that there’s such a thing in the Platonic realm. But in the world of sinners the quest is truly tricky. Of that forbidden fruit in the garden of Eden, is there a sense of that present in true love, that true love is a test of character, involving a transgression of sorts? For without the breach there’s no struggle, no tried and tested. If true love is divinely ordained, there must be a struggle to find it. We’re searching for a divine union so as to enable a coming into knowledge (or rather knowing)? For in impediment do we grow. Not just love thoughtlessly, like mating rabbits. How else do we discover ourselves? How do we discover another except in how we love? Or how we are loved in return. Or not. Are we using the other person, wanting them for reasons other than love? Are we being loved or used? Love is blind they say, but that blindness does contain sight. True love is about seeing. We need to see and discern another person’s heart. Is it true? Or false? Only time will tell. So only time is a test of love.

Part of why true love is difficult is that we are so imperfect it is difficult to love truly. There seems no such thing as immaculate love—love is an expression in action, often involving sexual desire. In its passionate form it is a deep union. However it can and often is fraught with complications. Why? Because human nature is selfish. Inconstancy, fickleness, disagreement, illusion, self-sabotage, illness, third parties, all sorts of selfishness. Any of that can surface in your poems. All of which you are probably privy to being properly adult.

It is true isn’t it—we are not making this up. The institution of marriage enshrines the Platonic concept of true love. But being sanctified by church or temple does not mean that a marriage is sure to last. It is a union but is it lasting? The actual experience of a marriage is a test…of true love. It all goes back to a testing of this fundamental goal.
So what is true love? Is it something that has to be tried and tested? Does it need to have physical expression for it to have meaning? Sometimes it seems that the physicality of love dominates so its absence makes love intangible, unreal. On the other end of the spectrum, physical love is only one aspect of love and without all the other spiritual and practical aspects, true love fails. Love that is real providence—financially and everything–or captivated by mesmerising beauty, is that true love? Take away the providence, take away beauty, does love remain? As the fallen, we ask ourselves, is it real or is it fake? Is it an illusion of mirrors? Love is about seeing I said. Seeing the other person’s emotional core, all analysis and logic being pretty meaningless. What makes you fall in love with another person is beyond words. I guess poetry is as close to falling in love.

True love sounds testy, and it really is. What kind of a quest it is is a subject of interest in this issue. I believe that we’re all looking for a version of true love. In a way that it is the most important quest, it is the soul that is searching. Maybe we hope to find God (redemption) there, in so doing we become who we’re meant to become—our best selves. I want to hear your version of it. Does the quest interest you? We want poems about love in all its tender, or violent moments. Love poems in all its complexity. Real (even if imagined), touching poems.

Look at these lines from Li-Young Lee’s “Adore”:

This strewing and gathering
of Love’s face, of Love’s gaze, and only this,
begun in death’s audience, is the founding
action, call it the fundamental
paradise…did I say paradise?
I meant paradox…the fundamental paradox
of the breaths we breathe,
the thoughts we witness,
the kisses we exchange,
and every poem you write.

The idea of love beginning in “death’s audience”—how can love come through except through an awareness of the other’s mortality? I love you more because you and everything you represent will die and then the world will become a shadow of what we once had. Death is both literal and figurative. Lee once said, “My dream is love.” I suppose that will be our dream in this issue.

We don’t have to be limited to couple notions of love. The parental edition of true love seems the purest form of unconditional love. Brotherly or sisterly love, friendship based on love—are these acceptable notions of true love? The way a sister cares for an ill brother seems to me a remarkable statement of love. How does love, what love does to survive adversity or loneliness? How does love celebrate the beloved, what does it see? How love is a fixation, an anchor? How love exist even when the beloved is absent? And the fact of unrequited love. Can a lonely heart be in a good space? What about love even if your protagonist does not actually have a person to love or the person is gone? What is the calm after the storm? Love that is true and isn’t true.

Shall we just come right out and say it—true love is hard because it’s supposed to be unconditional. It’s agape. It is not eros is it? There’s such a gap there. Write about eros anyway. The world as a love poem—what does it mean? We want love stories. Remember John Lennon’s all you need is love. And Freddy Mercury’s I need somebody to love. How you choose to interpret love, to breathe love, that really matters. As Lady Gaga sings, we’re far from the shallow now…that resonates somehow. If you had not fallen in love, and loved deeply, and lost, would you call that as having lived? Love as abundance. Love as suffering. Love as discernment. True love is wisdom.

Above all to risk one’s heart–because it is a risky undertaking, your poems should try and reflect some of that complexity and not be a tad easy, too empty, too airy…if you know what I mean. You do want to leave the reader with something significant.

Here’s Mary Oliver’s “A Pretty Song” for inspiration.

From the complications of loving you
I think there is no end or return.
No answer, no coming out of it.
Which is the only way to love, isn’t it?

This isn’t a play ground, this is
earth, our heaven, for a while.
Therefore I have given precedence
to all my sudden, sullen, dark moods

that hold you in the center of my world.
And I say to my body: grow thinner still.
And I say to my fingers, type me a pretty song.
And I say to my heart: rave on.

—Mary Oliver, Thirst

Read our submission guidelines here. Please check back on our site to see if your poem has been selected. We will not be sending out any rejection letters.

Submissions period: August to February 2019. Selected poems will be posted on this site and compiled into a PDF release in Spring 2020.

Good writing.

Irene Toh
Editor
Spring 2020

PDF Release of Borrowed Poetry, Fall 2019 Issue 15

We are pleased to announce the release of the Fall 2019 Issue.

The poets with work in the Borrowed Poetry edition are:

Jonathan Beale
Gabriella Brand
Misky Braendeholm
Kersten Christianson
William Conelly
Tim Dunne
Lisa Fleck Dondiego
Jo Angela Edwins
Linda Goin
Sue Mayfield Geiger
Christopher Hileman
Diane Jackman
Ron. Lavalette
Barbara A Meier
Lisbeth L. McCarty
Annie Morris
Kevin Oberlin
Stephanie Pressman
Debi Swim
Alan Walowitz
Martin Willitts Jr,

You may download a copy of the PDF release here.

Borrowed Poetry Fall 2019 Issue 15

You’re invited to submit to our new issue, titled True Love. Read submission guidelines here. You may also find us over at the other site at Red Wolf Editions. Happy writing!

Irene Toh
Editor
Fall 2019

Borrowed Poetry

Red Wolf Editions Fall 2019
Theme: Borrowed Poetry

Poems often are in dialogue with other artistic works. That makes us a collective. Things become interesting when there is a two-way street. As poets we read other poems, we consume movies, plays, music, various art forms. These things can be a springboard for our own thoughts and creativity. It’s something I do as well drawing inspiration from other experiential forms.

Just for instance riffing off lines from another poem.

We Are All Voyeurs

“The world is ugly/And the people are sad.”—Wallace Stevens

I read a couple of bleak poems that reeked of
cheap perfume. Mostly amorous crap.
Some guy who peeked through the wall saw
a woman take off her clothes, then kissed
her husband, then put her hand inside his
pants. They engaged in coitus, I think.

Me, I’m sitting by a bay window, looking at
the spreading branches–morning had broken
and the sunlight warmed my soles.
I’m slowly coming out of my shell
in the pine-scented air, portentous.
I combed out my voluminous hair.

The allure of woman, I think, lies in
some mystery–butt cheeks shifting under
maroon panties, for instance. She held up
a white blouse, like a veil. I thought about
God–where is he–nowhere here, not in
this seedy low-life, not this pageant.

Then I thought, tremulous, that search for
light must begin in darkness. Swirling
colors that begin to emerge into beauty.
Who held the brush but the artist
who is all body, and soul, when
in service of something so ineffable.

The lines in the first stanza references Mark Strand’s poem “The Way It Is.” The original Mark Strand poem reads:

My neighbor’s wife comes home.
She walks into the living room,
takes off her clothes, her hair falls down her back.
She seems to wade
through long flat rivers of shade.
The soles of her feet are black.
She kisses her husband’s neck
and puts her hands inside his pants.

In this issue we’re looking for these two-way streets. We borrow ideas and lines from another. No artistic work is a closed shell. You crack open the shell and the egg oozes out. What does your eggy consumption feel like? That’s what I’m interested in. Do you fry it sunny side up or poach it or turn it into a fancy omelette with mushrooms and so on? What is your experience of it?

In terms of borrowing ideas, you may also make your poem into some sort of response to another artistic source. This happens quite easily. For instance, after watching a movie, you may want to write about it. After listening to a piece of music, you may want to reference it. After viewing a piece of art or performance, you may want to tell the reader your perception of it in a poem. What are the things you’d highlight, that had struck you somehow?

In terms of referencing, you could do it in a deep essential way or you could do it quite casually–a quotation or whatever. We can be stretchy when it comes to definition. Make your poem an aesthetic response of sort. If life is about experience, your poem would be an aesthetic response to what happens in another aesthetic portrayal of it.

Anything can be borrowed. Borrowing isn’t copying. Please don’t be a skunk and plagiarize. You have to make the poem your own. Please clearly credit your source.

Read our submission guidelines here. Please check back on our site to see if your poem has been selected. We will not be sending out any rejection letters.

Submissions period: March to August 2019. Selected poems will be posted on this site and compiled into a PDF release in Fall 2019.

Irene Toh
Editor
Fall 2019

Ekphrastic Poetry

Special Thematic Edition 2018/2019: Ekphrastic Poetry

Marc Chagall, Time Is A River Without Banks

My grandfather had a clock.
It flew–the grandfather clock–through
the air, over the river, over the lovers,
over the blue. As it now bridges
time to memory, it’s as ersatz
as memory goes.

So we have another pastoral.
What heaven would have been if
it’s a place with houses and steeples,
and being vociferous with love,
we will look affably upon the
poetic idiocy of a winged fish

playing a fiddle–so music carries time
(ah, aphoristic wisdom), as do souls
like gypsies wandering into the other
before first memory turns opaque,
before the stealthy boatman comes
and takes you far away.

(by Irene Toh)

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You’re invited to submit ekphrastic poems for our special thematic edition.

“An ekphrastic poem is a vivid description of a scene or, more commonly, a work of art. Through the imaginative act of narrating and reflecting on the “action” of a painting or sculpture, the poet may amplify and expand its meaning.”

Read more here.

You are encouraged to write to a series of ekphrastic poetry prompts over at our sister site, Red Wolf Prompts.

Please do include in your submission the painting or photograph that inspired your poem. The photograph may be your own or belong to someone. If it belongs to someone, be sure to give credit. You may send in as many poems as you wish.

Read submissions guidelines here. Please note that the reading period will be in Jan-Feb 2019 so do be patient to wait to see if your poems are selected for the issue to be released in March 2019.

Submissions open from September 2018 to February 2019. The issue will be released in Spring 2019.

Winter 2015/2016 Issue 8: Seeing Beauty

Red Wolf Journal Issue 8 (Winter 2015/2016)
Our theme: “Seeing Beauty”

Suddenly, without expecting it, beauty is there. Yet ultimately beauty is a profound illumination of presence, a stirring of the invisible in visible form …”
― John O’Donohue

Beauty is a woman like Miss Universe. Ha! Or is Beauty the woman you love and behold? Beauty is, in fact, what you see. It is personal. Hence it lies in the eyes of the beholder. Where do you see beauty? That is the question for pondering.

True beauty has been transfigured by time. When you see a particular landscape that has been imbued by time, like the ancient rocks of Sedona, you perhaps experience a sense of stillness, solitude and silence. You are receiving time. Yet in receiving it you are steeped in its timelessness. Furthermore, nature seems to be a direct expression of divine beauty. You see beauty in the natural landscape―mountains, rivers, trees, whatever―and the creatures―hummingbird, snow leopard, salmon, whatever―that inhabit it. It is everywhere around.

That the beauty of these creatures, including human beings, shall eventually fade and finally die, whose frail presences shall fade into eternal absences, where does that leave us? Wreckage, loss and absence. These truths wrought within us a sense of their beauty rooted in time and yet somehow transcending it. Mortality enables us to see darkness in light, and light in darkness. We remember their colors. How we felt in their presences, enlivened as if a thread of infinity held us and it was through them that we have felt most alive. Then there is our ability to imagine them when they’ve become ghosts, an ability that makes us feel loss keenly and yet the act of summoning these ghosts fills us. Thus beauty is ether–sullied by ghosts, clothed in memory, revisited by imagination. What is beauty but to have known fullness?

Beauty achieves forms that are expressions of the human soul. So beauty is form, and form beauty—a variant of Keatsian truth. The quest for ultimate truth leads us to beauty. To quote O’Donohue, “We were sent into the world alive with beauty. As soon as we choose Beauty, unseen forces conspire to guide and encourage us towards unexpected forms of compassion, healing and creativity.” We heal from our woundedness, are transfigured through feeling, suffering. Then the beauty of our own human soul becomes luminous. Beauty is, says O’Donohue, “the illumination of your soul.”

How do we begin to see beauty? When our souls awaken and begin to recognize the concealed beauty of our mystical world, our stance changes to one filled with reverence and longing. We become attuned to nature’s rhythm–day and night; the change of seasons. Beauty makes us love. Love discloses another’s sacred and secret identity. It allows us to see one another in the soul’s individuality. I see you. An African greeting, “sawa bona”. The response is “Sikhona” (“I am here”). The exchange means, “until you see me, I do not exist and when you see me, you bring me into existence.” The beauty of the human soul seen by another.

How do we begin to see beauty in suffering? When we experience unexpected grace, in whatever form. Our cover art, Sandro Botticelli’s The Annunciation, depicts the Virgin Mary being visited by the angel, Gabriel, receiving the message that she had been impregnated and would bear the son of God. That is a moment of grace and significance, made timeless through art. Isn’t life more meaningful if one is given a sense of some higher order? That kind of spirituality is surely how beauty resonates with soul. Is there beauty in mystery, you might ask.

Nature-inspired poems, creaturely poems, love poems, spiritual poems–would you have it within to find a note of sacred beauty somewhere? A reason to celebrate saying “I am here.” Above all, presence is beautiful, real or ghost.

… Have you noticed?
how the immense circles still,
stubbornly, after a hundred years,
mark the grass where the rich droppings
from the roaring bulls
fell to the earth as the herd stood
day after day, moon after moon
in their tribal circle, outwaiting
the packs of yellow-eyed wolves that are also
have you noticed? gone now.

Mary Oliver, “Ghosts”

We hope you collaborate in our poetic quest.

Dwell on the beauty of life. Watch the stars, and see yourself running with them.
― Marcus Aurelius, Meditations 

 

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Interpret the theme however you wish. Submit poems to us by email here.

SUBMISSION DEADLINE IS 28 FEBRUARY 2016. SUBMISSIONS CLOSED. PDF RELEASE FORTHCOMING.

Please review the submission guidelines and then send us your poems in the body of an email.

Poems will be published in ongoing posts on this site. Each posting will be announced on the Red Wolf Journal page on Facebook. Your poem may be published at any time from November 2015 to February 2016 so please check back here. If you do not see your poem(s) appear, you may deem it as not accepted for publication. We will not be sending out any acceptance or rejection letters.

The entire collection will be released in PDF format in due course. An announcement will be made at that point.

Regards,
Irene Toh and Tawnya Smith
Winter 2015/2016 Editors

Fall 2015 Issue 7: Making Art

Red Wolf Journal Issue 7 (Fall 2015)
Our theme: “Making Art”

Cover art: Jan Davidsz de Heem, Still Life with Oysters and Lemon

The poet, like the painter, needs to dwell in worldly things. As poets, you are engaged with language– words that often express relationships. As a person I am terribly interested in how we interact with objects. Their role is to anchor us in a personal and collective history. Art commemorates this such as through a still life painting. Our cover of Dutch painter Jan Davidsz de Heem’s painting, Still Life with Oysters and Lemon, was the subject of contemplation by American poet Mark Doty—how art stages a dialogue with reflexivity and represents pleasures of shapes, colors, textures and tastes, all held in “the generous light binding together the fragrant and flavorful productions of vineyard, marsh and orchard”. How does art move us? When we take in the lushness of the oysters, the transparency of the grapes, the tangy curls of lemon, Doty says we’re moved into “some realm where it isn’t a thing at all but something just on the edge of dissolving. Into what? Tears, gladness…Taken far inside.” Art holds us there, to be instructed, held in intimacy as it were, in an experience of tenderness, of warmth and presence.

Likewise good poems give us resonating images. The poet brings to his art a making of connections, yoking subjectivity to objects. In bringing memory and desire to the surfaces of things, language transforms objects into stories. A good poem dives into the interior. The past is often in the present. All is heightened awareness and ultimately the poem delves and then brings readers into something greater than their own consciousness. What making art does. It transcends the personal into a kind of impersonality which is Truth, which is God.

So in this issue, we invite poems that make art. You may interpret it however you wish—ekphrastic poems? Yes we love that. But not only that. Poems that have startling imagery. Poems that lay bare the process of making art. Poems that embody a certain aesthetic. Even haikus. (Coming from one who hardly writes haikus.) To me the best poems are the ones that reflect the aesthetic of your soul. To paraphrase Doty, “what stands before darkness stands close together” and is ultimately unparaphrasable.

Poems that treat objects as subjects. But are they really? Isn’t the perceiver the real subject? When you describe, what you describe then is “consciousness, the mind playing over the world of matter, finding there a glass various and lustrous enough to reflect back the complexities of the self that’s doing the looking” (Mark Doty, The Art of Description: World Into Word, 2010). How wondrous art is, and how one may find true solace in art.

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Interpret the theme however you wish. Submit poems to us by email here.

SUBMISSION DEADLINE IS 25 OCTOBER 2015. SUBMISSIONS CLOSED.

Please review the submission guidelines and then send us your poems in the body of an email.

Poems will be published in ongoing posts on this site. Each posting will be announced on the Red Wolf Journal page on Facebook. Your poem may be published at any time from August to October 2015 so please check back here. If you do not see your poem(s) appear, you may deem it as not accepted for publication. We will not be sending out any acceptance or rejection letters.

The entire collection will be released in PDF format in due course. An announcement will be made at that point.

Regards,
Irene Toh and Tawnya Smith
Fall 2015 Editors

Summer 2015 Issue 6: Once Upon A Time

Red Wolf Journal Issue 6 (Summer 2015)
Our theme: “Once Upon A Time”

Cover art: Marc Chagall, The Promenade

Poems are stories. As if you didn’t already know. But the stories are eclipsed in shadow so you only get half or a quarter of it. The half or quarter carries the weight of the whole. The best poems inscribe a mood through observed, almost incidental, details. The surface details and action delineate feelings. Feelings are the real deal. Stories are steeped in mystery and enchantment as the title of this volume suggests. They prescribe a path, a journey, a quest because stuff happens. Bad stuff. The reader is hooked. Does the story hold out a promise of the happy ending? The human story is ultimately, to me, a quest for identity (Who am I? What is my place in the universe? What is the meaning of this universe?), which is why the reader is vested in the experience of its telling. It seems a grandiose thing to ponder. It, in fact, is an everyday thing. An experiential thing. In a good poem there is transformation by the time you get to the end of it. The mundane can be pretty epic. Anything can be a story. Whether or not life is a fairy tale, I just like to believe that the best poems tell a love story. It’s as if we depend on stories to save us. It is love that saves us. It is we who save each other.

So you tell us a story in a poem. Rather than tell the whole story, your poem pivots on a lyrical moment– let the delicate rendering of a moment tell a story. “Once upon a time” might as well mean “once upon a moment”. Sometimes the poem is the story. What does the act of fictionalizing do? It either transcribes a reality that’s out there, or it creates a reality that doesn’t exist out there. That only you and your reader knows. Now isn’t that just fabulous? Now it doesn’t have to be clear-cut at all. Fantasy does, in truth, intrude into reality (we all daydream don’t we?) and the best poems also play on the idea of rupturing ordinary reality. Story, it turns out, is the reality we create.

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Interpret the theme however you wish. Submit poems to us by email here.

SUBMISSION DEADLINE IS 19 JULY 2015. SUBMISSIONS CLOSED.

Please review the submission guidelines and then send us your poems in the body of an email.

Poems will be published in ongoing posts on this site. Each posting will be announced on the Red Wolf Journal page on Facebook. Your poem may be published at any time from May to July 2015 so please check back here. If you do not see your poem(s) appear, you may deem it as not accepted for publication. We will not be sending out any acceptance or rejection letters.

The entire collection will be released in PDF format in due course. An announcement will be made at that point.

Regards,
Irene Toh and Tawnya Smith
Summer 2015 Editors

Spring 2015 Issue 5: Here Comes The Sun

Red Wolf Journal Issue 5 (Spring 2015)
Our theme: “Here Comes The Sun”

Cover art: Vincent Van Gogh, Three Sunflowers in a Vase

Amour, le jour se leve

SUBMISSIONS CLOSED

Life is full of strife. Not a bowl of roses. Yet it’s really about how you see, isn’t it? Notes of green, yellow, orange. These balance out, dominate, crowd out the shadows. The brown and the gray. Their presence fills the heart with song, yelling: here comes the sun (yea, The Beatles). We’re sun-worshippers. The sun is the center of your universe, as a lover is. Each day, when the sun goes up, is a moment of rebirth. We’re born again. Art, in tandem, is about making it new. As a trope in poetry, the sun is really about transcendence. Finding the sublime in the mundane. Experiencing joie de vivre. As practicing poets, we like to think art helps shine a light on the path.

One might also reframe this thing into an optimist/pessimist frame. Like Don Quixote believes in windmills and Hamlet believes in the nunnery. Both minds being tarred by the brush in which they paint. So maybe at the end of it all, you can balance out the entire composition. You, the poet. But just as we could do with a little sunshine, too much of it causes imbalance. Can we be blinded by the sun? Icarus flew too near the fireball and got burned. Hubris–overstretching, or too much belief in infallibility–seems to be a tragic flaw. We want to cling to the belief that we’re somehow divine, special, unique. Will we be undone? Are we saved? It all boils down to the consciousness that we each possess. We’re just beings who desperately need to see the light.

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Interpret the theme however you wish. Submit poems to us by email here.

SUBMISSION DEADLINE IS 12 APRIL 2015. SUBMISSIONS CLOSED.

Please review the submission guidelines and then send us your poems in the body of an email.

Poems will be published in ongoing posts on this site. Each posting will be announced on the Red Wolf Journal page on Facebook. Your poem may be published at any time from February to April 2015 so please check back here. If you do not see your poem(s) appear, you may deem it as not accepted for publication. We will not be sending out any acceptance or rejection letters.

The entire collection will be released in PDF format in due course. An announcement will be made at that point.

Regards,
Irene Toh and Tawnya Smith
Spring 2015 Editors

Winter 2014-15 Issue 4

Submissions Now Open for Winter Issue 4. Theme: Play

Red Wolf Journal requests your submissions for its Winter 2014/2015 Issue #4, and invites your poems to “Play”.

Play sparks the imagination. It’s an actor’s word, maybe Gielgud playing Hamlet, or a child’s imaginative play as Freud described. Or perhaps playful pursuits of the heart, play the field, play around. We play a song, and fall under music’s spell. We play for time, for attention, play into someone’s hands. We play waiting games, we play chicken, play fast and loose, play hooky, play possum, and who amongst us hasn’t played the fool or played to the gallery.

Play stirs memories. As Thackeray said, “I’ve played a second fiddle all through life.” Play leads to regrets and bitterness. Play is deeply human. We play rough. Careless. Without thought. We play endlessly at being human.

Life and play are symbiotic, and not restricted to humans. Animals play. Kittens, puppies tussle and tug and learn as they play. We even suggest that nature plays – the wind playing with leaves, wind playing in the clouds …

Play includes risk. We play with fire, run with the hare and hunt with the hound. One child, on the swing, wants to go higher and higher “push me, push me!” she calls, while another sees monsters in shadows, and giggles away fright. Flirting, teasing, crawling into dark places–just to see what’s there–are all play. Play involves risk because life involves risk. Play is discovering our personal limits. Play is practise for… not-play.

So come and Play with us. Send us your poems that Play.

SUBMISSION DEADLINE IS 21 December 2014

Please review the submission guidelines and send your poems in the body of an email to: redwolfjournal AT gmail DOT com. Please do not send attachments.

Poems are published on an on-going and random basis on this site. Each posting is announced on the Red Wolf Journal page on Facebook. Your poem may be published at any time from October 2014 to January 2015. The entire collection will be released in PDF format in January 2015.

Regards
The Editors of the Winter 2014 Issue

Red Wolf Journal is a periodic publication of Red Wolf Poems (formerly known as We Write Poems).