Submission Guidelines

Shanshui, Ecopoetry and the Canadian Landscape

Open for submissions: December 15, 2025

Deadline: February 15, 2026

The research-creation project to which this anthology belongs is interested in the ways that shanshui, literally “mountain-water,” intersects with the ecopoetics of contemporary Canadian poetry. Shanshui is a classical Chinese art form that gained prominence in the fifth century, during the Tang dynasty. Its crucial elements include, as the name suggests, mountains and water, which often appear as rivers, streams or waterfalls. These elements exist alongside an essential, and often neglected, third element called the Middle Void. As a negative space within the piece, this void is particularly interesting in the context of poetic expression. It is a space of balance and tension between the other elements, and is where the viewer (or readers) can contemplate the interactions between mountains, water, and the bareness of the void. The Canadian landscape is defined by its waters (a mari usque ad mare), its varying geographies, and its many peoples. It is a place where mountains and valleys brush up against oceans, rivers, and lakes. The vastness of the landscape, and the empty spaces—the voids—between human communities, invoke wonder, fear, and, in the face of the climate crisis, dread for the fate of the natural world.

We invite poets of all backgrounds to work with this sense of emptiness, which is particularly charged given the current climate crisis. Emptiness, voidness, eradication. Are these the terms that define our relationship to the natural world? And, if we back away from our own subjective relationship to the world, what other perspectives emerge? Curator Silke Schmickl of the M+ gallery’s exhibit Shanshui: Echoes and Signals points out that a key feature of the shanshui tradition is the “multitude of perspectives inherent within individual paintings, ranging from close-ups of rocks, water streams, and trees to aerial views of mountains and seas.” If, as Schmickl suggests, this multiplicity of perspectives is in contrast to the Western, singular and linear viewpoint, how might poetry offer an avenue towards embracing these scattered and varied viewpoints? How can poetry propose different access points into the idealized natural scenes that shanshui paintings embrace? What would a poetics that embraces these tenets of shanshui reveal about the communion between human and nature?

We believe the spirit of shanshui lends itself to the familiar conceptual framework of contemporary ecopoetry. Ecopoetics are concerned with the relationship between poet and the natural world, and especially with questions of responsibility, stewardship, and engagement with that world. These poems contain a sense of urgency around the crisis of climate degradation, bringing risk and destruction to the forefront of both the speaker and the readers’ experience. Poems in this tradition are ecocentric, not anthropocentric; the perspectives they offer extend beyond the human to dissolve the subject and embrace a sense of insignificance. We ask what might happen when we (re)enter the middle void today; when we create silence to contemplate human and nature in the midst of crisis.

What are we looking for?

Unpublished or previously published poems from Canadian writers.
Original poems written in any form that engage with our themes.

Submission Guidelines:

We are looking for work from emerging and established Canadian poets.
We will accept up to three poems, no longer than three pages each.
Please submit your work to soundlesspoems@gmail.com as one .docx or PDF document and include a bio of no more than 50 words with your submission.
If submitting previously published work, please include the name of the publisher(s) and the location of the piece (in an anthology, journal issue, book, etc.) as well as the publisher’s contact information, if possible.
Diversity and inclusivity are crucial to ecopoetics and to the conversations that arise from it. As such, we strongly encourage submissions by writers from intersectional and underrepresented communities.

Themes:

Water
Mountains
Transience
Emptiness
Extinction
Regeneration
Nature poetry
Loss
Dissolution
Healing
Protection
Perspective

Possible topics may include, but are not limited to, the following:

Mountains, water, and the middle void in shanshui paintings
Mountains and water in Chinese folk mythology, Daoism, and Confucianism
Mountains as sites for spirituality, pilgrimage, and reverence
The art/act of wandering or meandering as an exploratory relationship with nature
Journeys, walking, wanderlust
Responsibility and engagement between humans and the natural world
Art and nature through non-settler and Indigenous lenses
Indigenous land stewardship and communion with waters and mountains
Urban yearning for the natural world
Urban guilt over broken land stewardship
The agency, or thing-power, of the natural world
The role of mountains and water in poetic inspiration
The overlap between poetry and painting
Poetry as a path towards climate action
The role and significance of hope in crisis
The art of looking/seeing; listening/hearing