As the founding editor and executive director of Drunken Boat, Ravi Shankar took some time out to answer questions about his journal.

How did Drunken Boat begin? A visual artist and I founded this magazine in 1999. From the very beginning we tried to take advantage of the web; we try to include audio, imagery, videos, and interactive elements. Our investment is in web-based and web-born artwork in addition to more traditional work. It was a project to promote the work of the people we liked. And all of a sudden we started getting queries and submissions from the UK and people in Australia. And we hadn’t really promoted it. Once it started expanding, we realized we had hit upon something; we were fulfilling an unmet need. We could reach people from all over the globe with this little publication. We’ve just gone forward from there. With this online litmag medium, it’s hard to know what will stick around, what’s worth investing in as a reader. We’ve stayed fresh and relevant by being open to new support, new aesthetics, new projects, and new people. Over the years, we’ve probably published over 1,000 artists/writers. We never expected it to last this long. The opinion of web publication has really changed. You have to Google people to find their work.

What are you trying to do to readers? Activate them in new and energetic ways. We really want our readers to be critically engaged with the work in a way that helps them make their own connection and create their own work. We’re very interested in exposing our readers to different styles, writing from India or China, Native American women poets, Affrilachian arts. In issue #16, we partnered with NPR for a feature on exploration. We brought work from explorers of the arctic, outer space, the deep sea, the Amazon, and anthropologists. We want our readers to be stirred up and provoked in some way, exposed to something they might not have thought about before.

What’s in a good submission? We’re open to collaborative work, using sound or moving images. We’ve published everybody from Pulitzer winners (Kay Ryan, Franz Wright), to people making their first publication. From poems, we want surprise and complexity. A really good poem has surprise and inevitability. We also like writers who are pushing the notion of form. We’re very excited about the Japanese form, the zuihitsu, erasures, and things that are both archaic and modern.

What does an acceptance mean? It means joining a pretty distinguished and special community. It’s work that all of us really love, that we’re really excited to publish. We have launch parties for new issues, and we try to get our contributors to attend. And we like to publicize our contributors’ future work.

A rejection? If you get a “please do send again,” we mean it really seriously. It came close; we’re interested. Sloppy writing or work that doesn’t really suggest the author knows our publication doesn’t do well with us.

What’s good writing? Something that’s memorable and bears rereading. A really good poem doesn’t say, “look at me, look how interesting I am,” but rather, says, “look at how interesting you, the reader, is.” I like work that takes seriously ontological issues: what it means to be alive, what is the effect our culture is having on us, but not work that is overtly polemical. We’re big fans on ambiguity in the Keatsian sense, negative capability.

Any new projects coming up? We are going to have a book contest. We’re leaning toward mixed-genre, including hybrid works. New issues of Drunken Boat will be out in May and September.

Website: http://www.drunkenboat.com