Illuminations: An International Magazine of Contemporary Writing

16/08/2025

If you've received a copy of _Illuminations_ 40, please pick your favorite three poems and list them in the comments below. I'm crowd-sourcing nominations for this year's Pushcart Prize.

09/08/2025

Here's a survey question from a poetry-editor friend, Stan Jacoby, interested in demonstrating, essentially, the value of poetry. Please read and respond either in the comments or by email to me.
***
“If I read a book and it makes my whole body so cold no fire can warm me, I know that is poetry. If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry. These are the only ways I know it. Is there any other way?“
-- Emily Dickinson
I edit Porlock, an online poetry journal. Would you consider indicating if the anonymous poem below meets Dickinson's requirements? Perhaps not taking Dickinson literally but keeping in mind her standards, is "Set in France" (below) poetry?
Stan Jacoby ([email protected]; porlockpoetry.com)

Set in France

We don't know whether to get religion
or storm the Edgewood Club. Inhuman patience
seems required of us, or some insight.

Think back to Max Ophuls' Le Plaisir
attending a first communion service
in a country church crowded with all sorts,

God's stock in a barn of faith. Some weep
and an actor loses half his mustache
as the camera flows past celebrants,

among them a hardly seen extra child
who turned her head toward us.
She can't exist on twelve frames.

In a galaxy of incident,
the film's her story, we can say,
all things clearly being equal.

And if by now she's dead or embittered,
grieve for her, who seemed alive
as God allows on Sunday morning.

24/07/2025

Ekphrastic poems are always cool. I love it when they introduce me to pictures I'm unfamiliar with. Karl Plank's "What It Was" in the latest issue of Illuminations is inspired by Georgia O'Keeffe's "It Was Blue and Green" (https://whitney.org/collection/works/415). Plank writes about "veins that thin toward turquoise/ and disappear . . ."
Check out the painting in the link, and read the full poem by ordering a copy of Illuminations for $10 from Simon Lewis, Department of English, College of Charleston, 66 George Street, Charleston, SC 29424-0001.

23/07/2025

Very pleased to have #40 in hand. Poets from the US, UK, Canada, Chile, China, Ireland, the Netherlands, Nigeria, St. Lucia, South Africa and Zimbabwe musing on everything from Gaza, Ukraine and the improbability of human life to lining up for portapotties in Dublin, the democratic nature of Chinese take-aways in New York, and the secret life of squirrels.
Copies $10 from S. Lewis, Dept of English, College of Charleston, 66 George Street, Charleston, SC 29424-0001.

03/07/2025

03/07/2025

After way too long a wait, I'm happy to say that I've picked up copies of the latest issue of Illuminations. It's a goodie -- but may, alas, be the last.
Cover design by Jason Hardesty, featuring a detail from one of Demond Melancon's amazing beadwork creations.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j1jGF-6bFpI

20/06/2025

Further delay on #40. Hoping now to start getting it into circulation first week of July. Sorry to keep everyone waiting.

10/06/2025

Inching closer to seeing _Illuminations_ 40 in print.
(Cover design courtesy of Jason Hardesty; image from beadwork by Demond Melancon [https://www.demondmelancon.com/])

30/09/2024

https://www.thirteenbridgesreview.com/
Thirteen Bridges Review, the literary magazine out of Auburn University in Alabama, is open for submissions.
(As is Illuminations, of course! https://illuminations.submittable.com/submit)

Check out AUM's online Literary Review. Look for Thirteen Bridges Review's upcoming print journal, coming soon!

25/06/2024

Here's my Editor's Note introducing the new issue of Illuminations:

Illuminations was first published in 1982 in Columbia, SC,
which means it’s been in existence for more than 40 years (even
though this issue is only #39). Much has changed over these last
four decades: the global political landscape has changed and
changed again, while our concept of writing has been revolutionized by technology more significantly than since Gutenberg.
With the potential for instant global transmission of any words
we care to tap out, little poetry magazines look less like dinosaurs than one of the myriad apparently insignificant species
that daily become extinct virtually without notice. Illuminations
is more like the Cheongpung Blind-Beetle (officially extinct in
the wild in 2023) than the pterodactyl.
Except that, like the poet in Holly Day’s opening poem of this
issue who hasn’t figured things out and given up, we’re still
here. And we’re still implicitly beating the same drum that
poets and poetry have been beating for millennia, leaving verbal
traces attesting to the preciousness of words in time. As W.H.
Auden famously wrote (and then attempted to cancel) in his
elegy to W.B. Yeats,
Time that is intolerant
Of the brave and innocent,
And indifferent in a week
To a beautiful physique,
Worships language and forgives
Everyone by whom it lives;
Pardons cowardice, conceit,
Lays its honors at their feet.
Thus, while so many of the poems in this issue address the
inevitable passage of time, in their craft, their beauty and their
brokenness, they also illustrate what Joseph Brodsky took from
Auden: that “if time . . . worships language, . . . then isn’t language a repository of time? And isn’t this why time worships it? And isn’t a song, or a poem, or indeed a speech itself, with
its caesuras, pauses, spondees, and so forth, a game language
plays to restructure time? And aren’t those by whom language
‘lives’ those by whom time does too?” In reading Auden’s lines,
Brodsky recognized “a poet who spoke the truth—or through
whom the truth made itself audible.” May the poems in this issue bring you similar moments of recognition, similar illuminations.

22/06/2024

Issue 39 of Illuminations is dedicated to translator-extraordinaire Louis Bourne (1942-2023).
Louis was a prolific translator of Spanish–language poetry into English. Among his many publications over a long and distinguished career, The Crackling Sun, translations of Nobel Prize–winner Vicente Aleixandre, appeared in 1977. For more than 30 years, Illuminations benefited enormously from Bourne’s expertise and his extensive connections with poets across the Spanish-speaking world—Spain, the Canary Islands, Latin America, and the Caribbean. The magazine first carried his work in the 1989 issue (a translation of Humberto Diaz Casanueva’s “The Child of Robben Island” as well as an original poem of his own) and very few issues subsequently did not carry at least one Spanish poet introduced to English-speaking readers by Louis Bourne.