CR Literary Journal Review: Drunken Boat

Assignment 8, Literary Journal Review:
Drunken Boat, Issue 9, Winter 2007/2008
Week of 17-21

URL: http://www.drunkenboat.com/db9/index.html
MySpace page: myspace.com/drunkenboatlit

My decision to read the literary magazine, Drunken Boat, I’ll be the first to admit, was because of its title. Although I will say it was my second choice out of the list Theo gave to us, my first one being Fiction International in hopes that I could have found literary articles about/by Japanese authors. Not finding the kind of article I wanted quick enough, I turned to Drunken Boat and immediately headed for their poetics section, and I was impressed. Not only was the quality of poetry that I read superb, but the layout of the website made for easy and accurate reading (as in, they made sure we are looking at the poems the way the authors intended us to see them), author biographies were provided (even pictures), and most impressing for me, audio of authors reading their poetry they imagine it to sound played with the text via Quicktime.
Many of the authors have previously been published elsewhere, and had excellent credentials (many of them are also professors). But what pleased me the most was that the authors came from all sorts of different backgrounds, from all walks of life, races and religions, and so naturally the range of topics differed vastly. The poems were all both well written and well recited, and well worth the time to sit, read, listen and analyze.
This was Drunken Boat’s first time having a Poetics section, and they were partly inspired by the poet and critic, Dana Gioia’s essay in The Atlantic Monthly, “Can Poetry Matter?,” “in which he compared poets to “priests in a town of agnostics,” pushed out from the mainstream of cultural life in America, into ever-more hermetic enclaves where no one, save other poets, had any interest in the art form.” Noticing a “paradoxical boom in the poetry business” despite poetry’s move towards “virtual obsolescence,” the editors at Drunken Boat wanted to provide an adequate means for readers like us to discover the answer to Giors’s question for ourselves. I’d say they did a fine job in providing us with a solid foundation and starting point: forty-one experienced authors, each having one to four of their best poems on the website, free, for us to indulge ourselves in.
Drunken Boat also has fiction, nonfiction, photos, web art, videos and sound on their web site, all available free for our enjoyment. I highly recommend this online literary magazine for all people that want to read quality work from experienced writers.