Poetry Snark Starts a New Journal

Announcing the formation of a new brand-spankin' new literary journal:

Crony: A Journal of Friends

Inspired by the recent "Legitimate Dangers" anthology, Poetry Snark has decided to follow suit with a similarly-organized literary journal -- Crony: A Journal of Friends. Crony will be instigating a new publishing schedule; we will be the world's first "quarterly quarterly." That is to say, we will be publishing a new issue one out of every four quarterly periods. To those who say, why not just call it an annual then, we say, poo! "Quarterly quarterly" sounds way cooler.

We will also be instigating an innovative new way of dealing with submissions. Everyone knows that wading through ever-renewed slush piles of hopelessly inept submissions sucks. Big time. That's why journals foist the job off on starry-eyed undergrads who think that if they read enough of that shit, someday the journal will reward them by publishing one of their own incompetent versifications. But we don't have any undegrads, and there's no way we'd publish their shit anyway, so we've devised a new method: we're going to charge you to submit!

That's right, just send Crony: A Journal of Friends your submission with a $25 check made out to "Poetry Snark," and I promise that one of our crack staff will at least skim the first line or two. This is a whole new deal, man, and we've found a way to beat the system! I mean, even photocopies get expensive, you know, and we've got like no money whatsoever! All of our contributors can be assured that any money in excess of publication costs will be spent on good causes: beer, pornography, and online gambling, mainly.

Also credit card debt. And unpaid parking tickets. And carmel-covered long johns. Also we'd really like to have enough money to buy a 21-inch flat screen monitor to play Civilization IV on. And if there's any left over, I'll use it for submissions checks to poetry contests for underprivileged writers (us). We're all just in it for the art.

You might think that this "pay to play" system itself stinks of corrupt poetry contests, but we've got a new twist: tiered submission fees. If you send the minimum $25, we'll read a line or two. If you send $50, we'll read an entire poem (40 lines or less). If you send a hundred, we'll read up to three pages of poetry. If you send $200, we will mail you a complementary back issue of Crony: A Journal Friends. $400 gets you a subscription and we'll add you to our masthead page, as one of the "Friends of Crony: A Journal of Friends." $600 gets you all this and an inflatable raft. And if you send us a thousand dollars, we'll actually be your friend and publish you in our journal. Can you beat that? With poetry contests, you can send them as much money as you want, and there's no guarantee you'll get published. Crony is changing all that. If you send enough money, you WILL get published, and we WILL be your "friend."

To keep costs down, we're going to be an e-journal. In fact, our journal is going to be the first e-mail journal. Basically, I'm going to cut and paste all the poems into an email and hit "send all" to our list of subscribers. A regular subscription, without us having to read your poems, costs $300. Just send me your email address and, like I said before, a check made out to "Poetry Snark." Our first issue is nearly finished. Contributors include Poetry Snark, his girlfriend, Ginger Pennebacker, his girlfriend, Agent Trochee, Bill Blood, my mom, my mom's friend Yolanda, and Bill Blood's little brother "Scratch."

So get ready poetry world, the winds of change are huff, puff, puffing, and we're going to bring this whole house of syncophancy and back-scratching down. Get ready for Crony: A Journal of Friends.