What Most Vividly is an online journal of sexy-smart, gorgeous new poetry of attention, ambition, and lyric intensities. We publish issues in the fall and spring—our first fab issue is coming soon! Keep reading for more on our aesthetic and guidelines. Subscribe to our Substack for announcements, infrequent missives, and reminders of submission windows and our Vividly Lit! reading series dates.

 

Submissions

We are not currently open for unsolicited submissions, but we will be soon! Subscribe to our newsletter for announcements.

 

We want

poems that embody and enact the thinking and perceiving, the feeling and desiring that the poet experiences and wants the reader to experience—the poem as the mode of that thinking-feeling itself, music-image-text that estranges and renews both word and world.

Form is an extension of content is an extension of form is…   

We aim to provide a space for embodied poetry from poets of diverse bodies, id-dented-entities, cultural hy/stories, and socio-psychic inheritances.

We want rich music and imagery—the lyrically ludic, vividly oneiric, and mindfully attended. We want you to (re)shape and/or explode the language to reveal y/our (or hint at some other possible) way of being. We want less meaning "aboutness" and more "be(com)ing-ness." 

We want to revel in the sensuous materiality of language—

Seduce us—stun us—leave us

lost in the poem’s world—we want viscera

skanking the line—the disordering unconscious bursting the word—

Don’t just talk at us; hum our nerve buzz us into song.

 

We want language that is searingly gorgeous-intelligent emotionally ugly-expansive—

go for Bacon for Braque, go Bach going for broke—

 

We want to wake in the poem to a way

                                                  to awake

in this world differently—

                                                                 We want too much

                                                                 We want you

to make us feel how much we want—

 

Guidelines

Submit one .docx Word file containing at least three and no more than ten poems, together totaling no more than 20 pages. We're far more interested in consonant constellations of poems, poem-sequences, and long poems, and will rarely, if ever, publish a single short poem by itself.

If your poems are field compositions or visual poems, submit a PDF or image against which I can check the formatting.

We're open to both single-author and collaborative work. We encourage explorations in the artform of poetry (refer back to What We Want above).  

Unsolicited submissions are only accepted through Submittable. 

While we are primarily interested only in previously unpublished poems (including via social media posts), we may consider poems once published in a journal or book that is out of print or nearly impossible to find. If you have amazing poems that have disappeared from the face of the Earth which you very much would like to make available to readers again, please submit 1 to 5 of them through the "Lost Ear Rings" category of Submittable with the poems' full publication history. 

We do not consider work that has used AI in any way or stage of the writing process.

We are not accepting unsolicited translations at this time.

Thank you for trusting us with your work! 

~ Tod Edgerton, Founding Editor

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Michael Tod Edgerton (he/they) is a Queer poet of lyrically fluid gender and genre alike. Author of the poetry collection Vitreous Hide (Lavender Ink), Tod’s poems have appeared in Boston Review, Denver Quarterly, Interim, New American Writing, Posit, and VOLT, among other journals. Tod holds an MFA from Brown, a PhD from UGA, and has received support from Bread Loaf and MacDowell. He also serves on the editing teams of Conjunctions and Seneca Review, where he is Book Reviews Editor. You’ll find him swishing along the streets of San Francisco and online at MTodEdge.com. He has finished a book of poems long in the making, “Yet Sensate Light” (you can read the whole story in Maw Shein Win’s “Process Notes” series); his most recent manuscript, “This Wilderness of Inhabitation,” is a book of poetry that mine's Tod's personal history as an adopted, “sissy” queer boy of working-class Kentucky house painters to stage investigations into psychic inheritance; issues of identity and belonging; and the constellation of language, the unconscious, and signifiers in/forming the body.