AWP had a quick interview with Caroline Crew of ILK, an online poetry journal to keep your eye on.

Why start an online journal? Why start ILK? In the months before it was born, I moved to America [from the UK]. Meanwhile, Chris Emslie, co-editor, was still living in Scotland. Primarily, we wanted a commitment to keep up a friendship we’d fallen into. Having come from the traditions of British poetry and poetry communities in Britain… I began to send Chris some of the new poems I was experiencing in America, particularly the work of Heather Christle and Bob Hicok. For both of us, their work was eye-opening in the retina-burning sense. This was new, and we wanted in. The online format allowed us to work across time zones and explore these new things. We want to give our readers the cleanest, most convenient experience—and that’s where our simple design comes from.

What does ILK’s tagline “we are your kind” mean? We’re committed to being as inclusive as we can, and this is a continuous and never fully achieved effort. And I suppose it’s a thank-you to a community that welcomed both of us from across an ocean. If you’ve let us be your kind, dear poems, then we’re open to all.

Can you talk about the ILK blog? What’s it a space for? The Internet poetry community is super active. We don’t just want to say, “Our contributors have work appearing here and here,” so we ask our contributors to write on our blog, to respond to other poems in issues of our magazine. It’s a response area. It’s nice for us [poets] to be aware of each other as comrades.

What should submitters expect if they send poems to you? We ask for submitters to “tell us something good” in their cover letter. It really does give us a smile. We treat submissions as another guest to our slumber party. Within that, we know that you want to go home in the morning, so we try to respond as promptly as possible.

In the description of ILK online, you have this line: “We want to sing the love of danger, the habit of energy and rashness.” What is the habit of energy? For me, it’s always being open to being excited about things. It’s maintaining a large lack of cynicism. Is inspiration luck, a bolt of lightning? Or something you train yourself for? I think reading is the way to stay open to [energy, inspiration.] I gasp, I squeal, it’s like I’m watching a horror movie, and I’m really excited.

After eleven issues in about two years’ time, what’s next? We never had a long-term plan, which has been great as ILK has grown up, grown weird, and keeps evolving. We’re sticking to putting up a new issue every two months—we might switch to quarterly. We’ve done a few readings, and we want to do more. We’ve also thought of making an annual chapbook, a kind of compilation, but I think the digital format is the place for us. Themed issues are hard in terms of skewing the types of submissions you receive, but we’re going to stick with every fifth issue being all-women-all-the-time issues. Maybe we’ll do an Oulipo issue.

And if the latest issue were the final issue? If this were it, if we just had the perfect eleven issues, it would be great to be remembered as a kind house, with plenty of chairs at the kitchen table, and tacos for everyone.

Website: http://ilkjournal.com