Join Coldfront and Hatchet Job on Jan. 9 to Celebrate a Successful 2013
As of this moment, Coldfront Magazine has pushed over its $5,000 goal, with 10 days left in their Kickstarter campaign to redesign the magazine. Congrats! Funds raised will go toward "more efficiency, easier access, and to allow for more regular posting of poetry reviews, features, interviews, and more." The more abstract import:
The number of under-informed attacks on contemporary poetry in major media seems to increase every year, and these attacks almost always rely on baseless generalizations about the "state of poetry." Yet it is never clear that the attacker has actually made an attempt to read widely before leveraging his or her generalizations. We believe the work of contemporary poets to be as thriving, vital, and viable as work done in more mainstream venues; no one generalization about the "state of poetry" can really hold anymore, as there are hundreds of thousands of poets in the U.S. and abroad working in every conceivable mode.
Our goal is to help shine a light on this work, wherever we can find it. Poetry will likely never reach the wide audience that these other media enjoy, and our goal is not "advocacy" so much as it is serious journalistic inquiry and our own contribution to a sense that this is a viable, necessary, nuanced art form that can provide clarity in a distinct and ever-evolving way. If people don't want to read it, they don't have to, but anyone interested in learning about what happens in poetry ought to get a broader view than the ones promoted in these seemingly annual takedowns of an entire genre.
Our goal to promote serious discussion not only of poetry, but of the ways that it overlaps with various other modes of expression, especially music -- our Poets Off Poetry section, for example, has for many years featured the unique insights of poets into music that they enjoy. Again, we assert that poetry has a very real place in our culture, and that given its presence online, on social media, and in the public square, it is poised to grow.
Fun part: Coldfront has teamed up with the New York reading series Hatchet Job for a year-end reading and celebration on January 9 at Home Sweet Home, featuring Timothy Donnelly, Dorothea Lasky, Sampson Starkweather, Bianca Stone, Zach Savich, M.A. Vizsolyi, and Lonely Christopher. "Epic dance party" to follow, with guest DJs Eric Amling and DJ Dolack. See you there! And give your goodwill if you've still got it in the form of currency at Kickstarter.