As the
economic hope of the internet has famously proven
to be exaggerated, much has also been written
in recent months about the decline in interesting
content online. While the average computer
user may spend a little less time scouring the
web, constantly amazed with the wealth of quirky,
humorous, and informative web-sites, we believe
that losing its novelty may be the best thing
that's happened to the internet yet. While being
new has perhaps been the reason behind the popular
and corporate fascination the internet created
in its infancy, the true power of the medium has
nothing to do with simple novelty. Work
that has an artistic need to exist online will
still appear there.
As it evolves and carves out a place for itself
alongside the forms of human expression and communication
that have existed for millennia, the web is proving
that it can do things that could never be attempted
in the media that preceded it.
Our
goal is to help find and showcase excellent work
on the web, as well as to add to the artistic
ouvre of the internet by bringing previously unpublished
work online. Often web artists and writers have
their own sites, so the work is literally 'on
the web.' Self-publication is central to the vitality
of the internet, but we feel an important function
is served by the editorial process. Like
responsible fishermen we're doing two opposing
things when we look for and publish work: fishing
from the pond and stocking it anew.
We're also interested in restoring to the watered-down
arts of criticism the piquance of strong opinion,
the kind of response to an artist or to a work
that elicits an equally strong reaction. Whether
we agree or disagree, extreme assessments engender
dialogue, while vague, lukewarm, or prefabricated
turns of phrase do little to augment our ability
to produce and to proliferate meaning. Since April
is National Poetry Month, it's incumbent upon
us to decide anew what role poetry can play and
more importantly, what exactly constitutes a poetics.
What effect, if any, does the mainstream embrace
of a particular species of poetics have on the
production and reception of other related and
unrelated poetics? As Leslie Fiedler concludes
in a review of Norman Mailer's Ancient Evenings,
"the final ironies of an author's work are always
beyond his conscious control." The critic's charge
is to tease out those ironies while spurring the
reader on to make his/her own interpretive decisions,
which we are happy to reprint if you send your
opinion to editors@drunkenboat.com.
A Note on Format
Drunken Boat has changed from a semi-annual to
a quarterly schedule of publication. We decided
that presenting a smaller selection at a time
better serves both the audience and the contributors
better. Particularly in issue 3, we unleashed
a huge amount of content all at once, and we fear
some of the great work in that issue has gone
unread. Consider this a plug to go back and check
out some worthy visual art, sound, and writing:
archive
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