FEAST is a not-for-profit bi-annual (at the moment) journal celebrating the concentrated art of poetry and its craft. In our eyes, the creation of art is just as much a part of the final product as the creation itself. This journal, therefore, will be a kept record of both poetry and process.
We find words edible and poems especially nourishing. We view language as a buffet of sensuality. To us, as to the Masters who came before, will come after, and are here now, the shaping of language is the most extraordinary sensuous faculty of the human mind. Our aim is to find and publish the ones who are here now and remain thus far undiscovered, and also to place in a unique contemporary context those established Authors whose work resonates distinctly in our shared consciousness.
We are generally on the lookout for succulent verse: poems that evoke visceral reactions in some way culminating from the experience of sight, taste, touch, smell and sound, and that probe for other senses that remain undiscovered. Poems which seek to translate - painfully, with pleasure, or otherwise - the richness of physical existence and its effect on our interiority. Poems that heighten our awareness, make our perceptions more acute. The kind that are absorbed through the skin, leave their kiss or their bite on your lips, elevate the heart into the mind. Poems that bring us into the now, for just an instant. Poems that leave us changed.
A poem need not be about a physical experience in order to compel a sensory response. We are interested in every form and type and structure and subject matter. We particularly enjoy ones that leave us perspiring a bit and a few muscles bulging. We like surprise and contradiction and incongruity and paradox, clumsiness and grace, stuff and nonsense, brevity, meticulousness, and the accomplished abandonment of meter, rhyme, and rules. We love to meet economical writers who have noticed, like us, that good poetry more often than not uses nouns and verbs to create the impression of adjectives. Simply put, we are looking for condensed, intentional verse that is quietly on fire, and craft essays that approach the subject of process with sincere deliberation.
At FEAST, much of our excitement and inspiration derives from explorations in and out of the Canon. We celebrate the "impassioned unreason," for example, that drove Dylan Thomas. To him, poetry was a "rumpus of shapes" that came from "a pen dipped in fire and vinegar." He was fascinated by "each bright and naked object in the literal world" that contributed to the adventure of the human experience, and so are we. FEAST is the next step in that evolution: a hunting and gathering party of editors searching for the modern-day literary descendants of those Masters who came before.
More than anything, we seek those who, by the force of their work, astonish and embarrass us into re-evaluating our notion of what a Master really is.
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The editors of FEAST are mainly southeastern Pennsylvanian graduate writing students and published poets who feel a dedication to the Arts in general and a love of language in particular.
about feast
