Respond to 2025: Elegy for a literary journal

Elegy for a literary journal

It’s minor news, nothing deemed too relevant.

Two workers out of work, a lonely welcome mat.

Subscribers suddenly without subscriptions.

Even the art house rags forgot to cover it.

A submission portal closed indefinitely.

 

A journal loses a foot then a leg then not long

afterwards, it begins its maturation into grave-

mechanics, stumbles tongue-loosened yet stitch

-lipped – the stitch-up! – out into that long dark

night, with only its archives trailing behind it.

 

What do we lose, when a journal dies? 85 years

of trumpet song & a poem, perhaps too many,

that no one quite understood at the time but said,

as we later learned, everything we were not quite

ready to hear then. Will we listen now?  

 

Purely financial grounds those on the board declared,

as in to produce good art, one must be rich rich rich

or at least making moolah, one must bend backward

to breaking point & keep bending until the spine

is split & the pages fall like flightless birds or bodies.  

 

I hate to think what future we’ll have without you. For so long,

you were an eye out of which we could see clearly. The world

is slimming & so too the time we’ll take to look. We’ll pause

of course, but keep on moving to keep up the rush. Just know,

Meanjin, you weren’t just necessary, you were loved.   

Tim Loveday is a poet, writer and baby academic living on Wurundjeri country. He won the 2022 & 2024 Dorothy Porter Poetry Awards, the 2025 Calanthe Poetry Prize and the 2023 Venie Holmgren Environmental Poetry Award, and was a finalist in the 2025 DHA, 2024 Montreal Poetry Prize, 2024 Big Australian Yarn, and 2023 David Harold Tribe Prize. Tim’s work has been widely published. He is the poetry editor at Island Magazine. More: timloveday.com.