The Guest Editors for Issue 5 were Flo Sunnen and Dylan Williams. Here’s what they were looking for.
Flo said:
For this issue, I’m looking for words, sound and images that repurpose and modify the pre-existing, adding new connections and tracks to follow. I’m looking for the symbiotic rather than the dominant, bridges and layers rather than monuments – the rhizomatic and the interrelated. Sounds, tracking the spectrum of human to non-human, organism to machine, effacing the difference. Rewrite a narrative you’ve taken for granted. Erase half of something and see what’s left. Take a step outside the symbols and value judgments we’ve traditionally imposed on the things that surround us (flora, fauna, ecological phenomena), and ourselves. Life forms as hybrid and recomposed, empathetic and connected, the personal and collective as strands among the same, threaded mycelial mass. Be like mycelium, a mushroom’s threaded soil-dwelling web, and wrap yourself around the roots of trees, taking their sugars and giving information in return, connecting them to the state of the forest you both inhabit. Show us the things you grieve for, and where in the world’s body these things are carried. Let your forms and modes be many, and allow yourself to play.
Dylan said:
I want issue 5 to hum with cross-pollination between media, forms, traditions and social contexts. I’m looking for writing that attempts to ‘open up’ poetry to new directions of travel, e.g. in terms of form, tradition, genre, language, theme, limits of signification, and relations with other media. In this regard, I find collage particularly interesting - as a site of exchange and adjacency. Video, photography and visual artwork too. I’d especially love to receive more sound poetry, and audio submissions of any kind, especially work that sits outside the neat brackets of traditional compositional forms. Even if it’s not the main focus of the work, it would be great if contributors want to submit a sound file with their submission, where they feel it adds something to the experience.
