Issue 7.1 -- R O U G H M A T E R I A L
“A poem is never finished, only abandoned.” —Paul Valéry
For ISSUE 7.1, OF ZOOS would like to solicit your abandoned words—zombie phrases, loose and lonely lines, first drafts caught in limbo. The cast-off scribbles that never made it out of the notebook; the tedious rewrites you couldn’t crystallize—or so you thought(!). Your works in (perpetual) progress.
We want to explore the poetic potential of unfinished thoughts.
Here’s the plan. Send all correspondences to ofzooseditor@gmail.com.
1. By May 31
a) Send us your rough materials. They can be as short as a single marooned phrase or a sequence of multiple drafts that didn’t go anywhere.
b) Email and let us know if you’re interested in being assigned someone else’s rough material to work on.
c) You can do either option 1a) or b), or both.
2. June 1 – June 30
a) We will pair off rough materials with new artists or poets, with the prompt: “What would you do with someone else’s incompletions?”
3. By September 15
a) Final deadline to submit. Please include your biography as well as a short exegesis that relates your process to the theme. Did you “finish”?
We will consider all media forms—poetry, fiction, audiovisual material, etc.
***HAPPY FINISHING***
