When our editorial team was writing the call for work for our Moon Issue, we asked ourselves, what kinds of poems might fit well in Moon? Poetry editor Maggie Boyd Hare suggested that the French repeating forms can feel particularly moonly. Our editor, Anna Lena Phillips Bell, has long loved these forms, and nearly leaped up in agreement/excitement.
So we asked for them, and a few of y’all sent them. We received some stellar rondeaux and the like in response—but we always want to see more! We’re opening a special window for fee-free submissions of poems in the French repeating forms, from now through October 31. These will be considered for all our upcoming issues.
We’re interested in the ways work in these forms born out of song, with their repeating lines, repetends, intense rhyme schemes, and wild meters, can speak to place, environment, and the climate crisis. For this call, we’re especially interested in seeing rondeaux, rondels, rondelets, ballades, and similar. (We love villanelles and triolets too, but for this window we are most interested in the less frequently employed French forms.)
We are agnostic about which meter you use—truly! and we love noniambic meters—but would prefer to see work that employs some particular meter, whichever you choose.
Here’s a quick guide to some of these forms, from Bell’s A Pocket Book of Forms, a tiny guide to poetic forms (out of print, at least for now). Read/look on (the particulars of these forms are in the alt text for these images as well), and see below for details on how to submit your work to this call.
You can find more about some of these forms in John Drury’s A Poetry Dictionary, among other places. The Poetry Foundation’s Glossary of Poetic Terms has entries on the rondeau and ballade, as well as good examples of these, and Alberto Ríos has some good notes on the rondeau and kyrielle (on a truly vintage webpage, which we love).
We hope you’ll be inspired to try making a few, if you haven’t. Then send them to us! For more details on how to submit, review our guidelines here. You can send your poem(s) using this form in Submittable, before October 31. If you sent work in a prior reading period but would like to send in this one as well, you are welcome to. And if you’re looking to send work that is not in the FRFs, please wait for our next general or subscribers’ submission window.
We look forward to reading your work!