dadakuku is a journal of microdadaism, nanononsense, minisurrealism, absurdiku, and experimental poetry of lilliputian length. Life is short and weird, poetry should be too.
“One shouldn’t let too many words out.”
Hugo Ball, Dada Manifesto
dadakuku is maintained and edited by petro c. k., a poet interested in expanding the boundaries of dada, surrealist, and experimental poetry by compressing the parameters down to the intense focus demanded of short-form poetry.
Follow dadakuku on Twitter @da_da_ku_ku. Dadakuku also listed in Chill Subs and Duotrope!
How to submit:
Use the submission form below. Please enter in and send only one poem, and please wait for one week from your submission date to submit again. Multiple poems/submissions sent together will be deleted unread. Additional submissions sent in less than one week apart will be deleted unread. Your verse must not have been published before either in print or online (including social media and personal sites).
Dadakuku is looking for:
a wide world of weird which includes (but is not limited to) absurdist humor, contrast, and satire; fragments, cut-ups, appropriations, and recontextualizations; found poems and dialogue; anti-poems (whatever it means to you); the surreal, bizarre, nonsensical, irreverent, and iconoclastic; counterculture and protest; the unconscious and the uncanny; verses created with chance, intuition, irrationality, automatism, absurdity, or dreamstates. The stranger, the better.
As dadakuku is a journal of micropoems, brevity is the key. There is no hard-and-fast definition of what constitutes a micropoem, but think of the minimalism of Japanese short-form poetry, text messages, or Twitter posts. Generally if you can’t read it out loud in one breath or fit it in a tweet it’s too long.
Response and wait times:
You will get a response if your verse is selected. You may get a response if there are editorial suggestions or questions. If you do not hear back within one week of submitting, then your verse is available to submit elsewhere, and you are free to submit another one here.
Please note that you may only submit once a week, or if you have been accepted, please wait two weeks from the date of acceptance to submit again.
Formatting instructions/notes:
The submission form allows you to input special formatting but then strips it out when the form is sent, so it won’t show up in the dadakuku mailbox. This includes tabbing, indentations and other unusual spacing, italics, bold, strikethrough, superscript, subscript, but the journal does support them. If your verse includes such formatting, please provide detailed instructions in the provided field such as “5 spaces before [word], italic [these words], 6 spaces between [word] and [word].” If necessary, I will email back a preview to ensure it appears as intended. If there are no instructions necessary, you can leave that field blank.
If you would like to include a note about your process (i.e., cut-up, found, predictive text) that will help in creating tags for the post. It also appreciated to include sources for cut-ups, erasures, found, etc. If you have a Twitter handle, please include it to be tagged in the notifications.
Payments and fees:
There will never be any submission fees. At the moment there is no monetary payment available, but you already know there is no money in dada. All poets who have works published this year will appear in the annual year-end print anthology, and they will get a free digital copy and the ability to get the print copies at cost.
Copyrights:
By submitting you agree to be published here online if your verse is accepted, and reproduced in social media promotion as well as in the print anthology that is published at the end of each year, after which the copyright reverts back to you. If your work here is reproduced elsewhere later, a credit of dadakuku as the original publisher would be very welcome.
Thank you, your submission is always appreciated!
dadakuku 