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Fall 2007 will be an all-poetry edition (no prose or Bumbershoot this time; the 'shoot is on summer break).
In addition to general poetry submissions, we are reading for a planned special section on the subject of working. These could be poems based on your experience in jobs, or persona poems from the POV of working people, or poems of a more philosophical nature. Work is broadly defined: office work, manual labor, arts, crafts, housework, hospitals, classrooms, kitchens, courts. Deadline: August 5.
I'm also hoping to get The Salon of the Refused off the ground. Some background: In 1863, the selection committee of the French Academy of Fine Arts would not allow certain paintings from an upstart group of artists calling themselves Impressionists to exhibit in that year's prestigious Salon de Paris. The artists protested and no less a figure than Napoleon III stepped in and decreed that the paintings must be seen; as a result, the Salon de Refusés (Salon of the Refused) was organized, and the public was given a chance to judge for itself works by Manet, Whistler, Fantin-Latour, Cezanne and Pisarro, among others.
Umbrella will present the contemporary poet's answer to the Salon of the Refused by featuring worthy poems wantonly rejected by well-known journals. Snarkiness is not the point of this feature. We simply wish to shed light on the fact that fine work is often overlooked. We're not even the first to work in this direction; quite by accident yesterday, I hazarded upon an online site calling itself Ugly Cousin, with the same idea, though perhaps not exhibiting the level of quality our Salon is looking for. It's tough. So far, with one exception, the submissions I've seen for the feature seemed rather rejection-worthy. They've got to be very good poems for the feature to work, and poems rejected by the better print journals. For the Salon, we consider (indeed we favor) poems that were eventually published in a journal or in a book.