Taper is an online literary journal for computational poetry and literary art published twice yearly by Bad Quarto.
Submissions for Issue #17
All are welcome to submit for possible publication in future issues, but please see the information about our reading periods and the specific calls for each issue. We plan for the information about each N+1th issue to be included with the release of the Nth issue.
For Taper #17, we invite submissions in response to the theme “Prime.” Here at Taper, we are at the precipice of new beginnings while looking back on our origins. For our seventeenth issue, which will launch on our new home at taperzine.org, we welcome computationally poetic explorations with prime numbers, of which 17 is a member (as well as both a Leyland prime and Fermat prime), or works drawing from words that have “prime” as their root, denoting what is first and fundamental (e.g., primal, primordial, primate, primer). Incidentally, there are 17 elementary particles in the Standard Model of physics; the Tarot’s 17th Major Arcana card, The Star; and the 17th letter in the English and Latin alphabets, Q, which might also suggest a Prime Directive. Several of these terms also invoke cultural antecedents and origins (sometimes through a colonial gaze), pointing toward the pasts, ancestral inheritances, and philosophical traditions we revive, forget, or recombine in new arrangements. Works that engage with 17-syllable poetic forms, such as haiku or Allen Ginsberg’s “American Sentence,” are also encouraged.
Check out Taper #16: For Good Measure for inspiration!
Submission Details
- Download our template in a zip file so that you can edit it. After you have it and have unzipped it, edit only two parts of the file: the long comment at the top, which will hold your title, your name, and a creative statement from you, and the very end of the file, where your tiny computational poem is to be placed.
- All code (in the form of ES6, CSS, and HTML) must be placed between the template’s closing header tag (</header>) and the closing body tag (</body>), must be valid HTML5, and must fit within 2KB (2048 bytes).
- After completing your work, please use the W3C validator to check for warnings and errors. Identifying these errors is essential to ensure the piece functions correctly across different browsers and continues to work well over time. Features that are supported across browsers may be accepted even if they result in a warning, but there is value in getting work to validate. (An exception is made for using <style> tags within your poem code; please do not modify the template’s stylesheet.)
- Although standard compression and minification can make the source code of many Taper works difficult to understand, we must establish limits on the code’s complexity and (lack of) legibility. Consequently, we won’t publish pieces that use exec or regex eval functions.
- Submissions should not use any external libraries or APIs, nor link to any external resources, including fonts. This is so that pages will be self-contained following Taper’s vision. It also has the practical purpose of allowing all of Taper’s work to be viewed without a network connection, for instance, in a gallery setting.
- Please follow the spirit of the constraints and avoid bypassing the size limit through techniques such as parsing the comment section to inject assets or content into the code. When in doubt, please reference prior issues and works to see what we have published in the past. This is also helpful when questions arise regarding use of the template.
- While Taper has prioritized desktop display and interaction, please also check that your work is reasonably viewable on mobile and narrower screen widths.
- Please refer to this About page for license terms under which all poems have been and will be released; by submitting to Taper #17, you agree that, if we accept your work, we may release it, copyright by you, under this same short all-permissive license. Since you are submitting the work to us in the provided template, this will be part of your submission.
Timeline
Submissions for this issue will be accepted until August 17, 2026 at 11:59 PM AoE. Taper #17 will be published in Fall 2026. There will be no deadline extensions.
We invite submissions for Taper #17 at submit@taperzine.org. Simply attach your work in one zip file containing your HTML files (up to five per author will be considered). You should then receive an email acknowledging our receipt of your work within a few days.