New Lit on the Block :: Angry Old Man
“Anger is an energy, according to Johnny Lydon. Who am I to argue?” comments Drew B. David, sole editor and “energy” behind Angry Old Man, a new print and online quarterly publishing all textual and visual forms, with mixed media (or intermedia) especially encouraged. Angry Old Man is a lit mag dedicated to textual-visual hybridization and true aesthetic experimentation.
“Anger is an energy, according to Johnny Lydon. Who am I to argue?” comments Drew B. David, sole editor and “energy” behind Angry Old Man, a new print and online quarterly publishing all textual and visual forms, with mixed media (or intermedia) especially encouraged. Angry Old Man is a lit mag dedicated to textual-visual hybridization and true aesthetic experimentation.
Despite the name, Drew B. David doesn’t actually describe himself as an “old” man. “Honestly,” he says, “I’m just a regular middle-aged guy living paycheck to paycheck with a ton of credit card debt and no formal affiliation (or experience) with the mainstream literary/art world. I have no academic bona fides either. Consequently, I’m thoroughly ignorant of the professional expectations and etiquette of the MFA universe. For me, though, this is preferable. I’m DIY through and through – to the bitter (angry) end – no matter what the outcome.”
It was this DIY outside-of-the-mainstream attitude that led David to start Angry Old Man: “I feel we have reached a dead-end in the Arts, especially in poetry and visual art. The mainstream has so thoroughly monetized (and thus ossified) creativity that it has become almost impossible (and unthinkable) for truly innovative ideas/voices/techniques to be taken seriously or given a proper platform. I don’t think this regrettable tendency is relegated to the mainstream either. So-called experimental artists/poets/etc. are just as dogmatically close-minded and caught up in the game of the ‘market’ as their mainstream sisters.“
To that end, David encourages submissions that will shake new form into the world of literature, and readers can expect to find these and more in the publication: genre hybridization of poetry, poems that look like visual art and visual art that looks like poems, mixed media, conceptual poetry that embraces mixed media techniques, any literature and art that is not tied to the shackles of either mainstream or experimental conventions. Some recent contributors to the publication include Audrey Rhys, Blaize Dicus, David Baptiste Chirot, Horst Tress, Sacha Archer, Laura Ortiz, Jennifer Budke, Bill DiMichele, Joe Balaz and Veronica Lupianacci.
Issue 1 featured the Editor’s Comment “On Dogma and Conceptualism” and Mark Staniforth’s essay “First Find Your Island: The Quest for a Mega-Subjective Space,” both of which give readers a clear idea of what Angry Old Man Magazine in all about.
Writers who submit to Angry Old Man can expect that David will handle all submissions and make all final editorial decisions with some advice and opinions from fellow readers. What David hopes for is “to publish the most exciting (and often unpublishable) work out there, while adhering to the highest standards (though standards are purely subjective). It is also my goal to embrace openness. I’m against the rigidity and small-mindedness of literary/art movements. Sure, there is an aesthetic bent to all lit mags, but that should not preclude a spirit of openness.”
