Letter from the Editor"One of the ways Welcome to the third issue of Megaera and our third website host. This issue marks our first year of publication as well as our first rejection letter. We also received our first request to review a book and first threatened litigation. You could say our existence is a bit tenuous. Nevertheless, the quality of our writers and poets has never faltered. Many people have asked us what we look for in Megaera. OK, nobody has, but maybe someone sometime in the future will wonder. In the past, we’ve published nearly everything sent to us, but now that we’ve established a kind of foothold in the electronic literary community, we have the opportunity to be more selective. Some e-zines say you should look to past issues to find out what sorts of things they like, but as far as I’m concerned, past issues aren’t that reliable a source. I mean, tastes change. I’m not into the same types of things I was when I and the other guy started this zine way back in 1999. We don’t have any kind of real philosophy about what gets in here. There’s no theme or anything. It’s just whatever we happen to like at the time. How about let’s just say this: For me, “art” and “new” are nearly synonymous. If something’s been done before, it just isn’t art in my eyes. Show me something I haven’t seen yet. That includes style as well as subject. And whatever you do, don’t try to copy other writers, especially living ones. Have you ever read a “Best Poets of the Nineties” anthology? Geez! It’s like there’s just one poet with fifty-two different names. Why oh why do editors of other magazines, especially print magazines, have to publish the same poem over and over. Clonophiles are all print literary magazine editors are. But we’re different. We want writers as different from each other as icebergs are different from synonyms. It takes a large mass quite a bit of time to slow down or change direction. Likewise, the mass of people who compose a culture take quite a bit of time to adapt to what’s new. Therefore, art will usually be that which is unpopular. Once it becomes popular, it ain’t new and ain’t art no more. Art is of necessity loved only by a very few people. When it becomes something old, then it is accepted by the masses. People are content doing what they did yesterday, listening to yesterday’s music and reading yesterday’s poetry. Art escapes these people for they don’t seek it out. Art is rejected because of its newness, its jarring from the established, its insistence that people get out of their daily ruts. The impulse to create is equal to the impulse to destroy. Also, every destruction leads to a creation. Once a city stops tearing down its buildings, it's dead. In order to construct a new building, an old building, a forest, or rock quarry must first be destroyed in order to make it. There's a finite amount of matter in the universe, a new building has to come from somewhere. So really, the process of creation/destruction are both the process of reordering matter. The destroyer is the creator. We've got a forest. To create anything from it, we need to destroy it. Same you could say about writing. New writing challenges or tears down the writing which came before it. If new writing copied old writing, we'd be stuck without change. To make something new, we've got to get rid of something old. And no matter how hard we try to preserve something, it will eventually need to be renovated and besides, once we're all gone, everything we created will be reabsorbed back into nature. Truly it is said, Stasis = Death. Change = Life. Singularity is Satanic, Variability is Divine. Society without art stagnates just as a language, after its rules have been set in stone and the definitions of all its words may no longer be changed, is called a dead language. -- dm |
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