Look: I build my bellowing ark to the best of my love as the flood begins...
–Dylan
Thomas,
Author's Prologue to Collected Poems
A Literary Journal Robert R Ward, Editor
Bellowing Ark was launched in
1984 to remedy a dearth: no market existed for the kind of literature that
we wanted to read and wanted to see published. We set out to create such a
market, and, by example, encourage others to do the same. We believe that
there is more to art than the desire to shock — the glib and facile
expression of nihilism and despair. We are convinced that artists,
particularly literary, have a responsibility to their audience and are
required to present the world as meaningful, for, if the world has no
meaning, how can life? The material we publish is the best expression of
that responsibility that we can command.
Standing solidly in the Romantic
tradition which passes from Blake and Wordsworth through the American
Transcendentalists, to Whitman, Frost, Roethke and Nelson Bentley, then on
to current writers such as Jacqueline Hill, Len Blanchard, Tanyo Ravicz
and others, Bellowing Ark is now the cutting edge in art. How many
times can ee cummings or Alan Ginsburg be reiterated? (We shall leave the other
question, Why bother reiterating them? unaddressed.) While we are in the
Romantic tradition, we also take pride in being one of the most eclectic
magazines ever published. Although we consider novels only by invitation,
there are essentially no restrictions on genre,
length, or style. We have published serialized novels, plays, short
stories, poems, long-poems, epic poems (Nelson Bentley’s Tracking the
Transcendental Moose—
in 14 books, serialized over two years— ran to 20,000 lines), essays, memoirs, drawings, photographs,
all forms of self expression, in fact, that we consider to meet our
single, and sufficient criterion: everything that we publish demonstrates,
to our satisfaction, that life is both meaningful and worth living. We are
biased toward the narrative, both in poetry and fiction; that is, stories
should have a plot, characterization, a beginning, a middle, and an end.
We have not, in our years of publication, ever published a
fiction, nor anything pointlessly minimalist or surrealist—it seems to
us that practitioners of those elegantly academic art forms have
deliberately cut themselves off from an audience. We are interested in
audience; we believe that art must be shared, to be art.
Bellowing Ark
P.O. Box 55564
Shoreline, WA 98155
