[Sarah-Jane Crowson]

Bit of an aside but it might be worth thinking that:

The site is ad-supported so every bit of traffic you drive there will add to their page-view stats and potentially bring them sponsors (although I’m not expert on how this works). So be careful, or you're unwittingly supporting them.

It reads like a grooming site for right-wing extremism in places. But ultimately, for me, it looks like a peculiarly poor poetry journal, some okay work, some terrible work, placed at the very low end of the online market, out to make money partly through preying on vanity/the vulnerable. Suspect the anthologies are print-to-order, profit-making, and include lots and lots of authors who are keen to see their work in print. It also looks to have its own thriving community and all the hierarches/customs that occur naturally in any kind of space.

Their Duotrope stats (although these can be very volatile and not reliable) show they reject about half of the submissions offered to them. So they have some kind of selection process. It might be an ideological selection process rather than a poetic technique-based process, though. Accepting half of submissions is a HUGE amount of acceptances in context, anyway, for something that's relatively established. Usually that kind of stat is for start-ups, as fewer people know about them and so they're solicited subs from friends.


Putting it within the wider narratives of open submissions/metrical poetry journals is tricky for me to do accurately - you will all have better knowledge of this space - but it seems to me that Able Muse is the highest, most critically selective side of a continuum (D/T stats reflect this, too) and this journal at the lowest. There’s a gap in the market for something in the middle. A good online journal specialising in metrical poetry that is more selective, with robust editorial process (and is less politicised!) They exist for wider poetry-markets, that kind of higher-level print/online hybrid.

I am enjoying the particular bitterness - not quite vitriol - but stronger than citric acid - in Whitworth’s poetry very much. I hadn’t read him before.