We are looking for poetry that seeks an answer to the question: Why are we in Iraq? You do not have to answer the question (if indeed such a thing is possible), but you need to address it.
Obviously, there are a lot of different ways to look at this question. It could be a political question, a social question, a religious question, a generational issue, a racial issue, or something deeply personal. Your poem can be about the causes of the conflict, the lives and feelings of the soldiers, Iraqi citizens or the soldiers' families back home, patriotism, peace, war, terror, pride, honor, or something else.
How you address the question is up to you. We will be taking a very broad view of what is acceptable.
All poems will be considered for publication, regardless of political point of view. The purpose of this site is to propagate discussion and expose readers to differing points of view. Poems will be judged on their artistic merit, and how well they deal with the subject, not on political correctness.
We are looking for poetry. We don't want stories, memoirs, essays, letters, learned dissertations, reasoned arguments, sermons, rants or anything but poetry. We don't want to know what you think; we want to know how you feel.
Rights and Copyrights
All poetry submitted must be original and submitted by the author or the owner (if not the author.) You may submit previously published work, but please make sure you have the right to do so. (Make sure you tell us if we need to acknowledge the original publisher.)
By submitting a poem to this site, you are offering us one time rights to publish your poem. If we accept your poem, it will be published on the site for a minimum of ninety days. After ninety days, it will remain on the site indefinitely unless you ask that the poem be removed. We acquire no other rights.
Unfortunately, we are not able to pay for poems.
Note, if your poem has not been previously published, then publication on this site constitutes first rights publication. You will not be able to sell first rights to any other publication. Just because we are an internet web site, and are not paying for publication, does not mean this doesn't count! Submit that masterpiece to The Atlantic Monthly before submitting it here, okay?
The entire site is copyrighted to protect your and our rights. Ownership and copyright for each poem, however, belongs to the author.
Formatting Your Submission
By default, all poems will be printed in an proportionally spaced font and left justified. Tabs will be replaced with five non-breaking spaces. If you wish your poem to be published in a monospaced font, please specify this in your comments with the submission.
If you want any other type of formatting for your poem (bold, italic, color, right justification, etc.), please include the html code with your poem. The easiest way to do this is to format your poem using an html editor and copy the html code into your submission. Please note: no outside calls to images or attachments will be accepted. Only submit text or formatted text.
How to Submit
Click on the link to the submission page in the left sidebar and fill out the form. The Name, and Email fields must be filled in. Copy your poem into the Poem field. There is a limit of approximately 32,000 characters in the Poem field. (This would include any html code included with your text.)
Only submit one poem per form. If you wish to submit more than one poem, please fill out a new form for each one. Yeah, it's tedious, but you are dealing with volunteer help here on creating the code for this site.
All other fields are optional, but please fill in as many as you can. Most of this information will be used for the author pages, but some will be included on the poem pages.