Present Tense Zine (PTZ) is our inhouse publishing project. It is primarily an audio-zine, but spans digital & printed works, live performance and other physical formats. Each edition gathers poetic submissions in sonic form, honouring the voices of poets and sound makers in ways that amplify both their work and its context.

For PTZ 3: Almost Nothing, we will work with Paris-based musician Hugo Abraham to develop our most sonic edition of the zine yet. Together we will explore a poetics of "using really almost nothing": an economy of material, radically less, and the quality of silence. Sound makers, using singular focus and materials (string, record, tape, voice), will unwind essential works to be performed and recorded in Paris in November 2026, alongside the launch of the printed and audio zine.

We ask for the hand of poets to juxtapose the temporality of snow with winding works that both pattern and patina the windowpane of silence. We are looking for longer works, akin to Alice Notley's At Night the States. Works that exert their force on time by insisting it curve, welding the line, finding its tail, losing it; using refrain and broken syntax to confuse learned order and fuse new logics.

We are looking for works that abandon logic entirely for the intrinsic meaning of sound, and others that use ordered language against itself, retaining the attention of the listener/reader while reshaping it across the page.

Feel free to respond to everything in this dossier, or ignore it entirely.

Submissions to PTZ are made with voice-note audio recording — please see the submissions form for details. Alongside your audio, include a text or image version of your work.

Selected participants will be featured in the digital and audio release of Edition 3, with a printed edition to follow. Accepted participants will also be invited to perform their pieces live at Present Tense in November 2026.

You can listen Edition 1 & 2 of PTZ or buy a copy of the printed edition via bandcamp.

We review the first 100 submissions each edition.

SUBMISSIONS OPEN > July 1- August 31