Oppose, Withstand, Refuse

For the Fall 2026 issue of Arc Poetry Magazine, we're looking for poetic responses to resistance movements around the world and explorations of protest through poetry. Send us poems that look at injustices and ongoing violence, or poems that advocate for rest in the face of exhaustion from marginalization. Send us poems that oppose the status quo, withstand attacks and temptations, and refuse to be categorized. Submissions on this theme will be accepted until July 15, 2026.

Poetry Submission Guidelines

• Submissions must not exceed three poems or 360 lines of poetry. (Note: poets may submit to this themed call as well as our general poetry submissions; submissions to this call do not count towards our limit of considering three poems per poet per calendar year.)
• Submissions of more than one poem must be broken up into two or three documents and submitted separately along with your biog­ra­phy. In order to submit the files separately you must go through the submission process for each piece you wish to submit. This allows you to provide each submission with the title of your poem, and it allows us to group the submissions more easily and update you about the status of each individual poem.
• Submissions must be typed and sin­gle spaced (dou­ble spaces will be inter­preted as blank lines). Submissions of visual poetry or concrete poetry should be in PDF format. Spoken Word poems can be submitted as text or audio or video recordings.
• Submissions must include your name and email address on each page.
• Cover Letters must include the poet’s name (as it would appear in the publication if accepted), email address, and mailing address, as well as a brief biog­ra­phy, which should be two to three sentences or approximately 30 words long.
• Submissions of visual poetry or concrete poetry should be submitted as PDFs. Spoken Word poems can be submitted as text and/or audio or video recordings.
• Poets may submit poems that are simultaneously submitted elsewhere. However, poems that have been accepted by another publication should be withdrawn from Arc immediately, using Submittable.

Arc‘s rate for poetry of $50 per page. Payment is issued upon pub­li­ca­tion along with one free copy of the issue in which the work appears. With acceptance, Arc secures First Cana­dian Serial Rights, meaning the poems should not appear in any print or digital publication before the release of the issue in which the work appears. All rights will revert to the author upon publication.

Arc cannot promise to respond to inquiries regard­ing the sta­tus of sub­mis­sions before the com­ple­tion of a reading period.