Part 1 of this year’s Big Bridge is now online!
As usual, it includes balanced presentations of arts and genres, aesthetic approaches and socio-political statements, compact anthologies and stand-alone works.
The issue opens with a collection of essays and examples of Slow Poetry, one of the leading contenders for the first major shift in 21st century art. Not a movement, but rather a means of approaching, rethinking, and appreciating virtually all modes and genres. A measure of the importance of this feature is that its URL got passed around before the issue officially went online. It thus officially appears after being mentioned in blogs, and even satirized by another group. In one way or another, we hope our features tend to be similarly ahead of the curve - at times going so far as to generate response before official publication.
We do, however, try to present work that keeps response from distorting our environment, as we try to reclaim poetry from preconception. This issue’s anthology of poetry and fiction from South Africa, for instance, makes no attempt to fill in news stories or confirm simplifications of huge problems and unusual successes, but present a glimpse of the diversity of a complex nation’s poetry and the individuality of its writers.
Standard features such as the continuing group statements in War Papers and another in the series of paintings by Jim Spitzer, judicious essays and terse reviews, short fiction and a suggestive sample of current little magazines published on paper in the digital age continue the scope of the magazine. A simplified table of contents appears below.
This issue differs from its predecessors in several ways. It intersects with the ROCKPILE program of transcontinental readings lead by David Meltzer and Michael Rothenberg and including local participants.
It also appears several months before the omnibus New Orleans anthology, which, in itself, is larger than everything else in the issue. Later this year, we will also add a compact, bi-lingual Anthology of Venezuelan Women poets, another tri-lingual Anthology of Galician writers and a few small contributions. We feel that dividing the issue up this way keeps the New Orleans feature from throwing the issue off balance and giving our readers some breathing room. Opening ROCKPILE at this time also gives us a chance to test the interaction of an annual magazine with an on-going project.
Although we are adamant partisans in some areas, such as opposition to senseless wars in places the U.S. does not understand and where it does not belong, and in celebration of the history and resurrection of one of America’s greatest cities, we hope to maintain enough diversity to present some work that will appeal to nearly anyone who looks for progressive poetry on the web, and perhaps promote interchange between people with different ideas and orientations.
At a time when economic crisis brings out the perennial name for boondoggles, we’d like to move as far away from being a bridge to nowhere as we can but rather see how close we can come to being a big bridge that can act as a focal point for the cyberbridges that lead everywhere.
http://www.bigbridge.org