Unlikely Stories Mark V is the new incarnation of the electronic magazine, Unlikely Stories, which has been published on the Web, more-or-less continually, since 1998. We publish poetry, fiction, and creative non-fiction, including firsthand accounts of sociopolitical activism. We publish galleries of visual art, music, spoken word, other forms of aural art, and audiovisual presentations, by which we usually mean short movies, but we might mean something else. We publish criticism of all these art forms, when that criticism engages with the reader and aspires to art itself.
Unlikely Stories Mark V is an electronic magazine of literature, art, and culture that attempts a direct engagement with society and sociopolitical issues. We believe that art and philosophy are synonymous, and that they are the appropriate source of all social activism and political thought. By tracing our social work back to this source, we are able to explore sociopolitical concepts freely, and hope to do so in an engaging way. We strive to avoid both snobbery and populism and simply publish cool shit.
We are activist and transgressive (and describe our thoughts on both terms, below). We are unapologetically antifascist, however you want to define that. We are not necessarily a collection of politically-themed art. We publish a lot of politically-themed art, but also are interested in any art that strives to interact with, and possibly even expound on, social realities, be they obviously political or uncomfortably personal.
We emphasize poetry, but have no patience for simple political opinions expressed with line breaks and rhyme. In fact, we are not interested in simple opinions, at all. Unlikely Stories Mark V is a magazine of artistic and social experimentalism. We do not simplify artistic expression for the purpose of literal political thought. Rather, our goal is to elevate sociopolitical discourse to the beauty and madness of art.
Our definition of “transgressive” is proprietary, idiosyncratic, and possibly delusional, but we believe that when literature legitimately challenges the assumptions of the reader, it has the power to create pragmatic change. We believe that the creation and curation of art is as immediately and politically valid as street activism, and a great deal more valid than sending checks to whichever Political Action Committee promises to halt or restart public horsefucking this week. We believe in aggressively occupying the PAC’s offices and forcing them to listen to us recite our poetry, instead.
More information and submission links here.
No comments:
Post a Comment