ABOUT
A not-so-well-kept secret: Most literary magazines are boring. Above all else, La Petite Zine seeks to be un-boring, to at once challenge what a literary magazine is meant to be and do, and also to go toe-to-toe with the desiccated tradition of literary magazine. La Petite Zine started, from its first issue, as a kind of community. Drawing from a new tradition of poetry bulletin boards and local readings, LPZ contained the multitude a reader would see in those Web days of yore -- the writer that, in a sense, homesteaded the URLs. That was fine and dandy. Then,
starting with Issue 4, La Petite Zine adopted another community,
or coterie, and has never looked back. In the tradition of Alfred Leslie's
The
Hasty Papers, a 1960 one-off that both depended on friends and
correspondents (from Sartre to Castro), La Petite Zine depends
on the goodwill of e-mail and conversation to generate its issues. Like
Frank O'Hara's idea of poetry's intimate phone call, e-mail has been
the way we publish writers and, heckle the cosmos with them. Heckle
heckle heckle. From Bob Holman to Ethan Paquin, from Mojo Nixon to Wang
Ping, from Rick Rockwell to Joe Wenderoth, La Petite Zine is
nothing more and nothing less than the most diverse and far-reaching
best Web mimeo out there.
|
