About Detroit Lit Mag
Often, in the course of history, there comes a time when you must simply do it yourself. For literature, this is that time. The agents and the publishing houses need profit, the general public lacks taste, and the highbrows have such excessively good taste that they merely wallow in the “melancholic-unintelligible.” This is no insult; it has about as much to do with ourselves as a drowsing man has to do with the fly he waves unconsciously away. The simple fact is that our present culture is deeply ugly, alienating, and even hostile to the individual—and it must be remade. We can no longer trust the literary establishment to bring us anything human or refining.
We have therefore founded this literary magazine. It is to be a new publication, for a new city, a new country, and a new time—albeit its tastes are remarkably classical. We are brazenly anti-innovative; we are exhausted of your alienating and indecipherable poetries. We like the naïve, that which is “on fire” for Life itself; we like the old forms, rhymed sonnets, exquisite ideas, Beauty, Nobility, etc. The aim of this publication is to print genuinely compelling, beautiful, human, refining, and otherwise intellectually pleasurable work. We reject most vehemently as well this Poetry of Infinite Selves that is going around, our pitiful 21st century; we have tasted enough of selfhood for many lifetimes. We do not wish, reading a poem aloud, to taste the very tongue of the poet who penned it. Let us read with our own tongues, and we will be grateful.
If you write in the established forms, thank God for you. If you write in blank verse, Thank God, and Please Send Us Your Poems. If your poetry rhymes, and does not cloy—if you rework old themes—if you make use of religion, or are religious—if you are interested in what is Beautiful and True, as the old masters were—please send us your work.
We ask no reading fees, for in our eyes such a thing is repulsive and even predatory—and the compiling, printing, publishing and distributing are all done for the pure joy of it, on our own time. In addition, for the present, we pay contributors 20 dollars per accepted work, almost for the mere symbol and gesture, as 20 dollars is admittedly a pittance. Someday we will surely increase this number. However—as for now, 20 dollars just exceeds my hourly wage, and therefore this is as much as I can do, for now. If you care to help, you can buy a copy of the lit mag.
We read and respond to submissions quickly; typically within a week. We’ll publish the next volume come winter. Submit short work of any kind to detroitlitmag@gmail.com.
With my whole heart,
Robert Hunter
Detroit Lit Mag 