Submission Guidelines

The general idea with Mediterranean Poetry is to publish poetry / prose inspired in some way or the other by the Mediterranean world. Not words depicting a tea salon in London, the mountains in northern Sweden, the Savannah in Africa, a jazz club in New York, a love affair in Tokyo, a hymn to this or that religion / political opinion or relations / situations / conversations that in no way tells us anything about the environment. The background has to be the Famous Blue and its surroundings!

This site is devoted to the Mediterranean world and impressions depicting not necessarily only the sometimes almost painfully beautiful side of this world. Still, your submission has to evoke some sense of citrus, cicadas, mountains, sea, kisses under an olive tree, conversations in a café, Apollo’s vaguely heard lyre, the smell of freshly brewed coffee … well, almost any colour that has been used on the canvas since Homer and his heirs!

So, if you would like to contribute (without any payment – we’re sorry to say – since this is a non-profit odyssey with a voluntary crew: poets & editor) with some poems or prose poetry (max 1 000 words) that you find – in some way or the other – illustrate your impression of the Mediterranean world, please send us your words in English, a shorter bio and a photo* of you and your submission will soon be considered!

From the first of January 2024 we will ask for a contribution of 5 – 10 euros for all new submissions IF AND WHEN we decide to publish the submission. PLEASE DO NOT DONATE ANYTHING BEFORE WE NOTIFY YOU THAT WE WILL PUBLISH YOUR POETRY! The donation is then paid via the donation link if you think a donation to keep this ship afloat is reasonable! The cost for running this enterprise with solely private (the editor’s) means has become a challenge. Web hosting, occasional web support, design issues that need consulting have become more expensive, which may eventually end this Odyssey somewhere between Scylla and Charybdis if no measure is taken …

*The photo will be cropped to a small, square size, 95×95 px – a “thumbnail” to illustrate the bio.

Submission address: submit@odyssey.pm

Previous publication is not an issue (problem for us), the only consideration is that any possible publisher, translator or photographer with copyrights won’t object to the “material” (your words, your photo) being highlighted at our site!

As for the format, which sometimes is asked for, our answer is: Send us your poem / prose directly in your mail or in a word-file, google docs, odt, plain text-file … Not keen on locked pdf-files, photos with text from printed books or handwritten manuscripts though – this will mean a lot of work for us if we choose to highlight such submissions. For those we choose to “bring onboard” they must be aware that we can not always reproduce the formatting since the words, line breaks are coded in html and the column reserved for the poetry is not very wide. So for poets who write rather long lines before pondering if it is the right moment for pressing “Enter” it may be a bit disappointing to see the outcome at Mediterranean Poetry!
 


 
If we choose to publish your words you always have the possibility to do some free advertising for one of your books – poetry, prose preferably with some connection to the Mediterranean world. We place a picture (300×450 px) of your book cover in the right column of Mediterranean Poetry (this website) and link that to the web address of your choice – a publisher who sells your book or maybe Amazon or your own website from where you distribute your book.