I was playing Mario Carts on the Wii last month with my adult friends. Donna was driving a cute turtle avatar in a mushroom-like car and was being advised by our friend Marty. She was attacked by a flying squid and was unfortunately inked. It was then the Marty told her to keep on fighting through the ink. It might have been the drink, but for the rest of that evening, that phrase meant the whole world to me. I could imagine it as a great motto of the publisher; the hopeful cry of the displaced poet; the method to read Gravity’s Rainbow; and so on. You can keep going on with your own meanings, as it is quite the fun little quip; and since we cannot use Zukofsky quotes anymore, we might as well use what is to hand. We needed something suitable to express a way to get to discuss our new formats for BlazeVOX 2k9 and felt Marty was really on to something. So there it is, keep on fighting through the ink and everything will be fine.
We are testing out a new Portfolio PDF for the full issue of BlazeVOX 2k9. This is in a fun way to navigate through long anthology-like groupings of files. More like iTunes than a liner book, you can flow through the texts like the covers of albums. Should you hate this format, please email me and I’ll be sure to change on back :-)
We are also adding in new forms of content. When e-poetry was still big we were very open exploring new formats of the literary experience. We have a full poetry reading in English and Spanish in MP3 format and a production film of a conceptual book. It is our hope to continue to bring you not only great poetry and fiction in print, but also in film, audio, taste and smell when available.
And a to top it off we have a very special BuffaloFOCUS featuring a swath of poems from Sherry Robbins’ Or The Whale, which will be published by BlazeVOX [books] in 2010. We had a great time in putting together this issue, and we hope it will be as much fun for you. Hurray!
Best, Geoffrey
Geoffrey Gatza
Editor & Publisher
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BlazeVOX [ books ]
Publisher of weird little books
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