Editor Interview: Ballast Journal

Resonances and Explosions

Lana Turner Journal, Annulet, Mercury Firs, DIAGRAM, Ghost Proposal, EcoTheo, Heavy Feather Review, Indianapolis Review, Word for/ Word, Graywolf Press, Noemi Press, Copper Canyon, Action Books, and many more.

As far as famed heavy hitters go, my co-editor, Sara Judy, is specially a fan of James Schuyler, Muriel Rukeyser, and Robinson Jeffers, and I'm a major fan of A.R. Ammons, David Antin, and Johanna Drucker. Contemporary writers who we admire--and this is by no means exhaustive--include Douglas Kearney, Danez Smith, Natalie Shapero, Monica Youn, Kim Hyesoon, Shane McCrae, Joyelle McSweeney, and Johannes Goransson.

We operate under an ethos of "more and more and more," and we solicit poets to read/record their work and pair them in a section of our issues we call "dialogues" to react and respond to one another.
Additionally, I'll share some features that co-editor Sara Judy has noted in an editorial to one of our issues! She writes,
At ballast we share an editorial affection for poems which feature: bugs, landscapes, unknowing, portmanteaus, musical scores, dead things, wounds, flowers, ornamental flourishes, ecstatic visions, language that moves between high and low registers, waterways, erasures, citations, well executed dark jokes.
While we love experimental, avant-garde, transgressive work, we’re not wholly committed to only publishing that which is transgressive; we also love a brief lyric, sometimes, and the wisdom of personal observation or experience.
We love formal play and formal commitment.
We want poems that demonstrate, in ways sometimes ineffable and sometimes concrete, that they are complete in themselves, that the poem understands itself to be finished and ready to speak into the world.

Read our issues (and our editorials) to get a peek inside our heads. Read our "mission"/"About" page on the website www.ballastjournal.com. Read our submission guidelines. Follow us on the usual social media outlets.

We love submissions that surprise us, that don't take themselves too seriously in a "capital 'P' Poetry" sort of way, that don't assume that poetry has all the answers but, rather, gesture toward uncertainty and glitches and ugliness.

We're pretty omnivorous, so we may not have a "set style" that's immediately evident. We find the range of writers and writing that we publish to be among the most invigorating features of ballast; we find the diversity of content and style to be a feature, not a bug.

We welcome brief cover letters and bios, but biographical info and publication backgrounds don't feature into our editorial decisions. We want strong poems, that's all.

We read every piece from beginning to end, including for the submissions that include long, sprawling poems! We may have a hunch of whether we're likely to publish it as we read, but we do take care to read the full submission.

The works speak for themselves. If we respond, react, or find ourselves stirred by the words, we're down.

As submissions roll in day to day, we tend to send a quick confirmation email to notify our submitters that we've received their work. We enter the submission info into our bootstrapped submission system we share via Excel. The two of us read through the submissions on our own time (since one of us is based in Manhattan and the other in South Bend, Indiana). Once every few weeks, we'll have a Zoom meeting to make any deliberations and chat about each issue's progress as it comes together.

We tend to have a hands-off approach to editing: we want writing that is polished and stands on its own. If there's a glaring issue or question we have, we'll share it with the contributor if we're interested in the piece. As the issue comes together, we send out proofs for individual author approval about a week before we launch to go live.

We nominate for Best of the Net and look forward to nominating for the Pushcart Prize soon.