ctrl + v



To submit to ctrl + v, email 1 – 5 images (.jpg, .png, .tiff, .gif, .bmp, or .pdf), 1 – 3 sound clips (.mp3, .wav, .m4a, or .aiff) of no more than 10 minutes, or 1 – 3 videos (.mp4, .mov, .avi, .mkv, or .wmv) of no more than 10 minutes to submit@ctrlvjournal.com. For inquiries about forms of collage, or any other questions, feel free to email us.


ctrl + v is a quarterly online journal. Online because we are committed to accessibility. We want to see news clippings you pasted together + scanned at the library; we want to see the gum wrappers you've collected since you were ten arranged by color or size or emotion; we want to hear clips of your best friends talking overlayed with the inside of a toaster oven. What happens when you put things together?

Poetry + visual art have long shared a process of gathering, assembling, + condensing until what's left is a composed, moving whole that elicits that greater electric ache within the body, out the top of the head. We can only catch that movement when we pin it down again, into another form. Collage is perhaps the most obvious manifestation of this process. Taking pieces of existing representation (image, sound, texture, language, object, living forms—we have delicately placed the bodies of dead stink bugs on a scanner) + rearranging, combining, destroying, reconfiguring, bending them to mean to others what they mean to you. And in that final act of taping or gluing or stitching, you've sealed it: there is one movement where once there was chaos.

ctrl + v explores collage as a versatile, accessible, + continuously reemerging form of art. All forms of collage—digital, scissor-and-glue, mixed media, fabric, sound—are encouraged + adored. We are particularly interested in what happens when fragments of language move through the space of other materials. In this way, we are exploring the intersection of poetry + collage. Let's figure out what it is together.