Anti- from Steve Schroeder

Another magazine to add to your radar is Anti-.

Online poetry magazines can publish in nontraditional ways and in however-the-heck-they-want ways. NoTell Motel features a poet a week with one poem appearing each day. Verse Daily reprints a poem every day. Anti-, edited by Steven Schroeder, publishes poetry in downloadable PDF chapbooks. The publication also provides poems in easy-to-access HTML every two weeks. Authors must provide a 50-word statement on what they are against, which makes for an interesting read by itself:

Mary Biddinger recommends a temporary moratorium on poems about Persephone, and ekphrastic poems on The Persistence of Memory by Salvador Dalí. She has never met an adverb that she didn’t want to strangle. However, since she is somewhat anti-poetry-rules, someday she will write a poem incorporating all of the above.

From Karen Weyant:

“I am against poetry that doesn’t make you want to scrub your skin with a pumice stone, or at least look under your nails for dirt. “

Anti- has published one PDF chapbook and featured three poets so far. The archive already contains an impressive list (and number) of poets. I particularly enjoyed poems by Mary Biddinger (poems), Louise Mathias (poems website) and Karen Weyant (poemsblog). I intend to return and read more.

In case you don’t know, Steven Schroeder used to edit The Eleventh Muse. Under his editorship, the magazine quickly became one of my favorites. It’s a pleasure when I find an editor whose taste in poetry is close to mine and who selects poems I would select. When I find an editor like that, I know I’m in for years of enjoyment. Schroeder left The Eleventh Muse, and I’m happy to follow him over to this new project to see what his roving editor eye turns up.