Second Coming Wants YOU!
Submission guidelines for the Second Coming pro-democracy poetry series on Substack from Indolent Books and Michael Broder
Submitting to Second Coming
Second Coming is a pro-democracy poem-a-day series published by Indolent Books and edited by Michael Broder as a poetic response to the authoritarian regime that now calls itself the Executive Branch of the Federal Government of the United States.
The current plan is to continue for all 1461 days of the 47th US presidential administration.
I am not using Submittable. They are too expensive. Just attach up to three (3) poems in an email with a bio to michael [at] indolentbooks [dot] com with Second Coming submission in the subject line.
Donation in lieu of submission fee
In lieu of a submission fee, I ask you to support Indolent Books by making a tax-deductible donation of any amount starting at $1.00 using the button below BEFORE YOU SUBMIT. Donations go to Indolent Arts, the 501(c)(3) nonprofit fiscal sponsor of Indolent Books.
Based on prevailing norms on Submittable, the suggested donation is $3.00. You can contribute more if you want, but that is totally optional, and donation amount will never influence editorial decisions.
Remember, it can be as little as $1.00, suggested is $3.00, and more is welcome, but you must donate something or your submission will not be considered.
NOTE: If you liked the donation option where you could get thank-you gift books for donations starting at $25.00, you can access it via the button below.
EDITORIAL GUIDELINES
I previously said that the tone of Second Coming would be similar to that of Poems in the Aftermath and What Rough Beast. That being said, Trump 2.0 is not the same as Trump 1.0. This is no longer a matter of one man’s malignant narcissism run amok. This is an actual, real time, not-a-dress-rehearsal descent into outright authoritarianism, and the editorial guidelines for Second Coming must adjust accordingly.
I encourage poems that deal with life under a rapidly metastasizing authoritarian neofascism with wit, charm, and emotional depth. I continue not to be a big fan of political diatribe.
BUT I DO WANT POEMS THAT RESPOND TO WHAT IS ACTUALLY GOING ON IN THE UNITED STATES TODAY.
Iconic examples of the kind of work I am looking for
There’s a reason this series is called Second Coming. It is a successor to my Trump 1.0 series from 2016–2020 that was called What Rough Beast. These titles are both in homage to one of the icons of political poetry.
The Second Coming
By William Butler Yeats
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
This poem is in the public domain.
Source: The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats (1989) and The Poetry Foundation
Yeats’s “The Second Coming” is a good example of the kind of poetry I am looking for. So is the following poem:
The Colonel
By Carolyn Forché
WHAT YOU HAVE HEARD is true. I was in his house. His wife carried a tray of coffee and sugar. His daughter filed her nails, his son went out for the night. There were daily papers, pet dogs, a pistol on the cushion beside him. The moon swung bare on its black cord over the house. On the television was a cop show. It was in English.Broken bottles were embedded in the walls around the house to scoop the kneecaps from a man's legs or cut his hands to lace. On the windows there were gratings like those in liquor stores. We had dinner, rack of lamb, good wine, a gold bell was on the table for calling the maid. The maid brought green mangoes, salt, a type of bread. I was asked how I enjoyed the country. There was a brief commercial in Spanish. His wife took everything away. There was some talk then of how difficult it had become to govern. The parrot said hello on the terrace. The colonel told it to shut up, and pushed himself from the table. My friend said to me with his eyes: say nothing. The colonel returned with a sack used to bring groceries home. He spilled many human ears on the table. They were like dried peach halves. There is no other way to say this. He took one of them in his hands, shook it in our faces, dropped it into a water glass. It came alive there. I am tired of fooling around he said. As for the rights of anyone, tell your people they can go fuck them-selves. He swept the ears to the floor with his arm and held the last of his wine in the air. Something for your poetry, no? he said. Some of the ears on the floor caught this scrap of his voice. Some of theears on the floor were pressed to the ground.
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Copyright Credit: All lines from “The Colonel” from The Country Between Us by Carolyn Forché, Copyright (c) 1981 by Carolyn Forché. Originally appeared in Women’s International Resource Exchange. Used by Permission of HarperCollins Publishers. Additional territory: Virginia Barber, William Morris Agency, 1325 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10019
Source: The Country Between Us (HarperCollins Publishers Inc, 1981) and The Poetry Foundation
My last example is Section III of Audrey Lorde’s “Afterimages.”
Afterimages
By Audre Lorde
III
I inherited Jackson, Mississippi.
For my majority it gave me Emmett Till
his 15 years puffed out like bruises
on plump boy-cheeks
his only Mississippi summer
whistling a 21 gun salute to Dixie
as a white girl passed him in the street
and he was baptized my son forever
in the midnight waters of the Pearl.
His broken body is the afterimage of my 21st year
when I walked through a northern summer
my eyes averted
from each corner's photographies
newspapers protest posters magazines
Police Story, Confidential, True
the avid insistence of detail
pretending insight or information
the length of gash across the dead boy's loins
his grieving mother's lamentation
the severed lips, how many burns
his gouged out eyes
sewed shut upon the screaming covers
louder than life
all over
the veiled warning, the secret relish
of a black child's mutilated body
fingered by street-corner eyes
bruise upon livid bruise
and wherever I looked that summer
I learned to be at home with children's blood
with savored violence
with pictures of black broken flesh
used, crumpled, and discarded
lying amid the sidewalk refuse
like a raped woman's face.
A black boy from Chicago
whistled on the streets of Jackson, Mississippi
testing what he'd been taught was a manly thing to do
his teachers
ripped his eyes out his sex his tongue
and flung him to the Pearl weighted with stone
in the name of white womanhood
they took their aroused honor
back to Jackson
and celebrated in a whorehouse
the double ritual of white manhood
confirmed.
Copyright Credit: Audre Lorde, “Afterimages” from The Collected Poems of Audre Lorde. Copyright © 1997 by Audre Lorde. Reprinted with the permission of Charlotte Sheedy Literary Agency and W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., www.nortonpoets.com.
Source: The Collected Poems of Audre Lorde (W. W. Norton and Company Inc., 1997) and The Poetry Foundation
If you have any questions about editorial guidelines, shoot me an email.
💜🌈🦄
Michael
Michael Broder, Publisher
Indolent Books
Brooklyn, NY
michael [at] indolentbooks [dot] com