Submission Guidelines

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• To submit to En•Trance, please send three previously-unpublished poems in a Word doc, the entire submission being no more than six pages

• Send to journalentrance@gmail.com with the words Submission Issue 3 Your name in the subject line. Example: Submission Issue 3 Juana Wright

• The  submissions should be single-spaced, in a readable serif font like Times New Roman, with one-inch margins, and page breaks between poems.

• ​Please include a short bio in your Word doc, no more than 100 words, at the end of your submission after the poems.

• Other than in your bio, your name should not appear in the document or in the title of your document. 

• Simultaneous submissions are accepted, but please notify us immediately if your work is accepted elsewhere.

• We prefer shorter poems—no more than 40 lines—but are open to seeing longer ones. We are looking for diverse voices and styles but prioritize poems with strong imagery, technical skill, insight, and a touch of the unearthly. We are not afraid of difficult content. ​

• Please note, experimental formats are difficult to publish online. We will consider them, but they present technical difficulties with web software that may not be easily resolved.

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​Examples of what we mean by altered states:

We are not necessarily interested in poems about the psychedelic experience itself though a poem about, say, going on an MDMA journey or getting Reiki, if done well, will be happily considered. All the usual poetic tools apply: music, diction, syntax, insight, risk, creativity, but the main decider is this: can we feel the light touch of another world? Can we feel the lyric moment?

Here are some excerpts from other writers who embody our vision:

There is another world, and it’s this one.

- Paul Éluard 

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Underneath everything, 

the skin of the world breathes.

- Bro. Yao (Hoke S. Glover)

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I think I’m smelling the rain

we can smell before it rains.

it's the odor of another world, I'm convinced, 

and means nothing, yet here it is, and here

sweetly it comes

from the gray sky into the small openings.

- Stephen Dunn

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Oh tall tree in the ear!

-Rilke
 

….and everything

you dread, all you can’t bear, dissolves

and, like a needle slipped into your vein—

that sudden rush of the world.

- Ellen Bass 

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A world of dew,

And within every dewdrop

A world of struggle.

- Kobayashi Issa

…The universe is one rhymed thing, but I keep

wanting to rhyme with I, I—to capitalize myself, stand apart from the whole

I know I am a cloth and someday you will pull my thread,

unravel me…

- Danusha Laméris 

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How does one go about such a poetry? I think it’s like this: first there must be an experience, a sequence or constellation of perceptions of sufficient interest, felt by the poet intensely enough to demand of him their equivalence in words: he is brought to speech.
- Denise Levertov

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But I do feel strange-almost unearthly. I'll never get used to being alive. It's a mystery. Always startled to find I've survived

- John Steinbeck 

Possible Topics: 

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• The many theories of consciousness 

• Psychedelics in the sense of the word’s etymology: manifesting soul 

• Defining the undefinable (as Louise Glück does in the poem “Mock Orange” or Ellen Bass in “A Small Country”)

• Mythology

• A world beyond words

• Radiance of child mind

• Being

• Hallucination

• Dreams

• Daydreams

• Kundalini

• Breathwork

• Hypnosis

• Falling in love

• Falling out of love

• The sacred in the everyday

• 12-step programs

• The primary imagination

• Buddha nature

• The horizon where meaning and language meet

• The power of symbols

• Therapy

• Friendship

• Mystery

• Frank O’Hara walks into a room

• Whatever’s beyond the conscious mind

• Spirit

• Soul

• Falling apart

• Coming together

• Paying attention