Submissions welcome for Catchment 4.
Thanks to all AHS members who have offered contributions to the first three issues of Catchment – Poetry of Place.
The next submission period will span between 21 st March and 21st May 2025, with the fourth edition due to go live online on 21st June, via the Baw Baw Arts Alliance website
Before then, we will also make postings in a new dimension – called Catchment Views – which will present essays on poetry of place, both in tanka and in Western verse forms.
Contributors for Edition 4 should offer strong, original poems through a digital portal accessible in the BBAA website, where submission guidelines can also be viewed from 21st March.
There, you will see that Australian tanka poets are welcome to submit up to five stand-alone pieces, showing a sense of location: a maximum of four will be chosen per poet.
You could contribute a tanka sequence instead, made up by no more than four pieces, likewise focussed on place, preceded by an overall title.
With tanka strings rarer these days in Australian poetry journals, Catchment is proud to offer this opportunity.
Our team is also delighted to provide contributors with yet another unusual chance, welcoming submissions in free-verse, so as to publish work in longer Western forms alongside tanka.
Unfortunately, we are not in a position to accept submissions of haiku or haibun, though.
Catchment may extend mentorship towards poets with less experience in the tanka form.
Because our team is still small, however, we cannot process submissions received from overseas. Nor do we have the human resources to work with poetry in languages other than English.
Across the next two months, we look forward to receiving high-quality poems of place, from throughout Australia, both in Japanese-derived tanka and in lengthier European styles of verse!
Rodney Williams
Editor
Catchment – Poetry of Place
Baw Baw Arts Alliance
Gunaikurnai Country
West Gippsland, Victoria
Australian Haiku Society 