The Poetry Revolt is a journal for poetry only, whose goal is to publish vividly imagined and intensely alive poetry that exhilirates and delights the reader.
All but a few of our poems, including satires and parodies, will be contemporary, but Ovid,Apollinaire and Gerard de Nerval will occupy a prominent place in the journal as poets who combine sensuality, brilliant imagery, a flair for drama, and passionate interest in the complexities of relationships, human motivation, and the foundations of identity itself.
Please explore the Poetry Revolt buttons on the left side of the page linking to pages which showcase the work of all of our poets and provide comments and detailed analyses of their work, with URLs for further exploration.
Today's poetics typically expresses allegiance to two conflicting sets of desiderata:
1) vividness, emotional expressiveness, poignancy, a powerful impact on the mind and emotions of readers
2) a tone of uncertainty and confusion about what is happening, an ironical or pained or numbed distancing from the experience, a muting of emotional response, descriptions featuring blurred outlines and fleeting sensations, and insistent foregrounding of the instability, fragmentariness, and incomprehensibility of human experience.
I believe that allegiance to this second set makes achieving the first--emotional expressiveness and impact--almost impossible--as a survey of poetry journals of the last three decades shows all too clearly.
The mission of the Poetry Revolt is to showcase poems that are not fragmentary, muted, and helplessly baffled. Poets, send us the dramatic, intense ones --those with focus and bite.
The print journal, to appear three times yearly, will include
-- an initial major section of poems chosen for drama, vividness, and use of evocative language
-- a second section of humorous and satiric and political verse, including parodies, which will also appear on this website's Satiric and Political Poems pages
-- a third section presenting essays on poetics, outlining new directions for poetry. These will address new conceptualizations of diction and structure, and explore issues of poetic obscurity, disjuncture, Modernism and Postmodernism, indeterminacy, and other topics crucial for constructing a new poetics.
The journal will showcase close readings and analyses de texte of both older and contemporary texts. on the website and in print.
The Poetry Revolt hopes to encourage cross-fertilization between the poets of different countries and different ages. We are attempting to showcase poets whose work gives us ways to move forward toward a new poetics, including British poets such as Harsent, Padel, and Duffy on the British Poets page, and Apollinaire, and Ovid. Ovid's love poems provide a complex mixture of drama, dialog, lush sensuality, psychological portraiture highlighting conflict and cruelty as well as playful tenderness, social satire of the deceptiveness and commercialization of relationships, the portrayal of a fascinating urban milieu that resembles our own, and passionate fantasizing about sensual, paradisial, and sometimes disturbing myths.
