RHUBARB CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS
WANTED: Essays on contemporary Canadian Mennonite poetry 10-20 manuscript pages long. Essays to be submitted in standard MS WORD format on or before June 6, 2016, c/o Ted Dyck, Editor, [email protected]. NON-Mennonite essayists are desired, ALL are welcome. Reward $200.
ESSAY
If you’re sure about it, you don’t have to essay it, because the essay is, radically, an exercise in undecidability. And so it happens the essay is precisely an antidote for our times. For these are the days when a new black is brown; when the gods lose their heads; a trough is served at every tablebigotry trumps agape; knowledge is an algorithm mining big data; non-meaning is the new meaning. When wisdom is a1 40-character fragment. To all of which the essay in its un-certainty takes radical exception. The essay’s style will approach zero-degree writing – fresh,jargon-free, decorous – as befits the Mennonite tradition.
MENNONITE POETRY
The subject goes by the name of Mennonite poetry, so some familiarity with that canon is required. The collection will focus on individual writers whose work; for whatever reasons, has not received the attention it arguably deserves: the work may be familiar but undervalued; or condemned without careful consideration; or so new it’s literally unreadable; or simply funny. Essays will be aware of their own fallibility and consequentiality, informed by the poetic tradition up to today, and enjoy the play of intelligence for its own pleasures.