Fou No. 2
The second issue of Fou is up. I’ve never seen a website that conceptualized the innate scrolling aspect of the internet so well. The entire issue is on the main index page, braced by a rather tall tree. One immediately scrolls down, having nowhere to click. Various animals reside on segments of the tree. One reaches a cluster of birds, each marked with a writer’s name. A click on a bird throws you off a branch, falling virtually, to each respective poem.
This sounds annoying, the way many journals are self-suffocated under flash and other cumbersome scripts, but there’s something light, intuitive, and fresh about this.
Brad Soucy, who I assume is the designer, has taken a usually boring trait (scrolling) and transcended its medium into something viscerally evokative.
(Btw: if you try to view this in internet explorer, you have major issues.)
Uncategorized / 16 Comments
November 4th, 2008 / 2:44 pm
November 4th, 2008 / 2:44 pm
MEAN WEEK: ‘The Editor/Multi-Book/Duh Named Effect’
I like new journals. I like journals with their own aesthetic and who invent themselves primarily because they want to put words in the world: words that likely would not have found a way to get read if that journal hadn’t existed. There can never be too many high quality journals. A node is a node.
Though not all new journals, or even existing things, seem bent for these reasons. It seems semi-frequent, and perhaps most pointed to the world of poetry publishing, where you see a tendency to publish well-known names and no one else. Scanning the contributor notes of certain journals you can often see what I now will call the EDITOR / MULTI-BOOK / DUH NAMED EFFECT.
When this effect is applied, it means the journal has been infected wherein all the words published in their particular nook are 90-100% consisting of writers who are themselves the editor of a journal, who already have one or several full length books out at indie presses, or are a combo of both, being a name that literally most everybody in the publishing world is already very familiar with. They don’t both with searching for new voices, with including some people as yet unexposed who can then be read as others can to the journal seeking the ‘bigger names,’ no, everyone in the journal is someone who likely would have little to no trouble getting their work in almost any existing poetry journal already out there.
So then the question is: Why do you exist?