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| Readers, we here at American Oral would like to welcome
you to the debut of a revolution. The internet has freed literary
publishing from the constraints of cash and opened up the canon to a new
breed of public voice -- a voice not based upon reputation, not based upon
publishing credits, not based upon academic achievements. American Oral is
for writers who write not for fame or publication, but who write for a
five minute stretch of life on a Friday night where they will have the
authority of a microphone in front of them and the waiting ears of an
audience who needs to hear what they have to say. We are bringing
literature back to its oral roots, but that's not our only concern.
The Web is the MULTI-media. It has the ability to synchronize all the realities that make up our imaginations. It puts the history of entertainment, the history of literature, cinema, theater -- even the history of history -- instantly accessible. American Oral uses the internet in its full capacity in order to offer the full experience of the texts we publish. A work will appear as text, but it will also exist orally in the voice of the author who wrote it and with the intensity and pacing that the poet imagines for it. The work will be supported visually with anything from a rapid-fire slideshow of relevant images to a single moment of video footage looped back upon itself over and over as the poet's voice plays and the text of the poem is displayed. The web is an interactive technology, and so readers will interact with what we publish. If the poem alludes or refers there will be hyperlinks to those allusions and references. Publishing on the Web has limitless possibilities and we are hoping that you help us stretch every one of those possibilities. These are not things that we have thought of. There is nothing original here. You, the writer who submits to us, has created all of this. Open your mind. Find poems on answering machines, at pep rallies, inside the monotone drawl of a telemarketing call. See texts everywhere and adapt them to the fullest of the Web's imagination. You can hyperlink every word of a stanza, each link bringing up an imbedded stanza, and create levels upon levels of living words moving in space and time. The internet is a choose-your-own-adventure-book fleshed out before us -- push the capabilities of this new text to its limits. This is your web magazine. Log on and create it. American Oral will only publish works that want to be read aloud and writers who believe in the importance of this practice. Also, we will only publish works that we feel are original and inspiring. What we will not publish are texts that ignore voice, rhythm, and flow. We will ignore writers who have not read aloud their work and made sure that it came across orally to an audience. We will ignore writers that are afraid of the microphone. Writers afraid of the hip-hop in all of this intellectualizing. American Oral is about voice, poetry, prose, America, and the amped hum of a microphone. There is power in that microphone. Feel it in your mouth. |
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