Submissions for oxygen7

Submissions open for oxygen7. 

February, up until 12 March.

Send poems in hard copy to postal address.

Nonfiction articles can be emailed.

Art and photographs must be emailed.

 

 

ERRATA

' “Summer sang in me a little while, it sings in me no more,” Cooper as Bernstein paraphrases from an Edna St. Vincent Millay poem, in a quiet moment on the Bernstein family porch.

“If summer doesn’t sing in you, then nothing sings in you, and if nothing sings in you, then you can’t make music,” Mulligan as Montealegre responds.'

By John Di Lillo writing on the film Maestro, taken from Tudum by Netflix.

24 December 2023

But summer did sing in Leonard Bernstein, right up until the end.

As I am writing this in February 2024, summer is singing in the garden outside, and summer is singing in me.

Late last year I received a note regarding errors I had made in oxygen6. Well, I have at last found some time to go back over oxygen6. I really did think that I had done a final thorough proofread before uploading it. I was working through the night, so maybe I fell asleep and just imagined I had been proofreading.

Besides correcting the errors that had been pointed out to me in one poem, I went back over the whole magazine and much to my dismay I found a lot more errors. I missed including a whole stanza from someone else's poem. I mispelt another's name. Displaced two words, changing the meaning of the lines. And other various minor misdemeanours.

I am chastened. I have a perfectionist self — though not a pedantic one — and I also have a chaotic self who finds it, to date, impossible to keep things in order. I apologise to all whose work was affected by my sloppiness and I promise to try much harder with the next issue to get things right.

Making myself sit quietly alone reading through the magazine on a radiant summer's day I found something else besides careless errors. I experienced the beauty of all these voices coming together and speaking one after another. I saw more deeply into my reasons for choosing those particular poems. I appreciated the value of the time and effort that goes into it from all concerned.

I ask that work is sent to me in hard copy. One reason for that is that it takes more effort to do that than it does to send off an attachment with an email. I want people to send me work that they are willing to make that effort for. Also, I need to sift through and rearrange all the poems that are sent many times over as I read them and try to come to decisions and that is best done with paper.

I type the poems into the program that I use. That is how the errors occur — my errant eyes and fingers! I find typing the poems a lot less tedious than the alternative. Typing is meditative and it helps me to consider further the merits of a poem and whether it does indeed sing.

These are some things that I ask of contributors to make my job less tiresome.

• Make sure that your name and address is on each page submitted and that your name is as you want it to appear in print.

• Check for spelling errors. Hyphenated words are something I need to correct often. I use the Macquarie Dictionary as reference; please do the same.

• If you do need to digress from standard spelling etc, attach a note to let me know that is the case.

• Make sure that everything — puctuation, capitalisation, line breaks etc — is exactly as you want it to appear.

• Don't use quotes (unless you are certain they are no longer copyrighted). I do not have the time or resources to seek permissions.

• Please include a stamped self-addressed envelope. That small courtesy makes it a whole lot easier.

For visual items, please, they have to be high resolution, so that I can print them the size I need them to be.

Submissions are now open for oxygen7 up until 29 February (I will continue to accept work during first week of March).