Curious

[theflyingrabbit]

If there were a national-level lit journal that focused on performed poetry, and included criticism of performed poetry, interviews with poets, and essays by poets about their craft, would you subscribe? Would you submit? How much would you be willing to pay for a subscription?

Comments

[sirenoftitan1]

This would depend how good it was. For reference, I cough up $35/year for Poetry, and usually spend about another $50/year buying journals off the newsstand (Jubilat, Rhino, Iowa Review, Paris Review). The problem, IMO, is that I don't know how much I'd get out of a written journal of performance poetry. Far too much of it falls flat and would bore me on my train ride. Essays and critiques are intriguing, but knowing the spoken word community, I have a hard time believing they'd be honest enough.

[theflyingrabbit]

HAH - what's ironic here is that you were a person I had in mind to ask to be one of the poem-pickers of said journal. But yes, the matter of how a performed poem does well on the page cuts out a lot of poems that might do well on the stage. I think that might be okay. I've thought of trying to collaborate with Mungo and/or Kurt Heintz to include online audio/video submissions in some way. But apart from that, I think that I'd want it to lean toward performed poetry as against performance poetry -- i.e. poems that are performed but were not written with only performance in mind. Which would make all the difference in the world, to me.

[sirenoftitan1]

I think it's a cool idea, especially because I don't know of anything else that is out there like it (and I've been spending a LOT of time on duotrope lately). I also like the idea of poets who are not top slammers getting some recognition and the effect that may have on the community.

[sirenoftitan1]

Oh, also, one of the things I'm discovering is the tendency of poets to submit to journals they don't read. I wonder if you could be sneaky about it, and say you did 4 issues/year for $20, if you could offer either a contributor copy or the whole year's for $10.

Also, also, could you get this in the PSi store on a consignment basis?

[theflyingrabbit]

I don't know about the PSI store obviously, but it'd be cool to have some kind of event at Nationals connected to the journal -- say, a slam between the poets who'd made it into the journal or something like that...

[thevanisher]

i'd pay 15 bucks to subscribe, just like I do for Rattle, IF you could come up with some kind of prize. maybe collaborate with PSI and make it so that the winning poet gets to read for ten minutes on finals stage at a national competition or something.

and honestly, a good critique or two for slam would be fucking AWESOME. I'd submit, and I'd fucking review, and I'd write scathing articles that made everyone hate me, and yeah.

i like this idea.

[semaqeel]

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