Review of Literary Journal!

While searching online and through the library for a good literary journal, I found myself more drawn to poetry journals as opposed to any other kind. And in the era of technology, I was also more drawn to online journals and magazines more than anything else. I wanted to find a journal that could be easily accessible to young, aspiring writers who enjoyed contemporary and experimental writing. I found a journal, eventually, online called Coconut Poetry Magazine which I thought was very interesting.
The online publication is edited by Bruce Covey, a writer and professor at Emory and is published four times a year. Each time the journal comes out online, the number changes. In other words, the most recent publication is called Coconut 14 because it is the magazines fourteenth publication. The edition that I read for this assignment was the most recent Coconut 14. It featured 29 authors which were listed in the table to contents of the journal. I thought the set up of the online journal was very interesting because it had illustrations and organization much like a real magazine or book however everything was through links. The title page featured the title and an illustration which you could click on to bring you to the table of contents. The table of contents simply listed the author’s names which linked you to the poems that they had published in that magazine. Each author essentially had their own page which linked the reader to the 2-5 poems that were published. At the top of each author’s page, they had their name written big (as the title) and then the coconut tree logo in different colors for each. I thought the appearance was very professional and nicely displayed. Underneath their names, the authors had their poems which varied between two and five at the most. Reading each author all together and on a web-page was very different than other journals/magazines I have seen. For one, sometimes authors poems might get spread out or intermingled with other poets in a regular journal instead of having all their poems together. Secondly, because the poem is on a web-page, there is not much restriction to the format, as their might be on an actual printed page, due to margins and such. This aspect was neat because it allowed for the authors to play around very nicely with their format which is something I noticed. On the other hand however, because the reader has to scroll down the page to follow the poem, I thought it lost some of the aesthetic importance or significance of an actual printed poem.
After reading through the poems, though I did not seem to find any linking subject matter between the pieces, I did find that I was reading quite a bit of prose poetry and also very contemporary, experimental poetry. I personally enjoyed a lot of the pieces, especially the prose poems, and thought the subject matter and formats to be very contemporary and interesting. When I read over the bios of each author, it seemed that most authors had been published or written their own books which most of the titles seemed to be very contemporary and different. There was one author whose bio read, “He is 38. He lives in Florida. Florida is a peninsula”. I thought this was pretty funny, and might have been joking at the fact that this particular author didn’t really have a publishing background, but was still published in this journal. His work in particular was very bazaar.
Overall, I thought Coconut 14 was interesting and a great resource for someone who might be interested in publishing their own work in a contemporary online poetry magazine. I think I may go back to the Coconut website to see what the latest authors are up to and see what people are coming up with. I thought it was interesting to find something that was based completely online and was very accessible to the public! Take a look! http://www.coconutpoetry.org/