Call for Submissions - and about this Journal.

Dear poets, artists, and readers.

This post is to share a call for submissions for Volume Three of "Arts and Poetry" - one of the first Web3 literary journals...

Arts & Poetry has been in publication since December 2022, and you can see a preview of the first edition here: ⤵️

Each volume has consisted of poems and artwork from some of the rising stars of Web3 - and the goal of the journal is to leverage some of the unique attributes of NFTs as a distribution mechanism for arts and poetry.

First - to ensure fairness - each contributor receives an equal share of all sales, which is made possible by blockchain technology. The poets and artists come from around the world - Kenya, Brazil, Turkey, the Netherlands, Canada, Australia - and the list goes on.

There is no way that I could send payments to each of them in a timely fashion under ordinary circumstances if this were a "paper" journal - nor do Web2 sites like Amazon allow for equal profit-sharing. Yet, with Web3, it's easy.

Second - to allow for a wider range of creativity - doing things which could not be done with the traditional formats. Our second volume (shown below) incorporated both GIFs and embedded MP4 files - which allowed our contributors to use sound, music, and motion in their works.

Third - to empower readers - because this NFT journal can be resold, and displayed in virtual galleries, readers have more choices about what they can do with the copies that they purchase, and the journals are also designed to allow readers to have direct access to their favorite artists and poets through a special Discord.

These are all values which I beieve that both t2 and Twigg are integrating in their platforms - which is why I chose to share this here - and the following GIF shows a partial preview of the second edition ⤵️

I say "partial" because that volume integrated an MP4 poem which utilized sound as well as words and visuals to bring Futuradora's amazing "Birth of Futuradora" into the world - you can experience it at this link, if you like - volume up, and you will be surprised at around the 20-second mark!

Arts & Poetry is one of my “passion projects” – and through it, I’ve learned a lot. How to deploy interactive NFTs on Objkt... that AI poets can write poetry which humans consider to be “good” – and that there are a lot of great artists and writers whose works can and should be more widely celebrated.

In the course of the first two volumes, we shared the work of 28 human creators and one AI across two blockchains (Tezos and Polygon) – with our future volumes, I hope to expand the range of blockchains on which these journals can be collected, and to expand their distribution to other mediums, new and old… t2 itself, I hope – Twigg’s new platform when it launches, and yes, even perhaps some paper editions!

If you'd like to support great art and poetry - to support creatives around the world who share equally in all sales of this journal - and if you collect NFTs using Tezos, you can find both volumes here - they are just 10 XTZ each (until they are sold out) - and you will be making a lot of people very happy...

I’ll also be looking for new ways to help ensure that our creators earn a fair return for their works – last time I won a prize in the t2 “Friends Who Write” contest, I took half of that prize money and used it to buy up copies of the first two editions and give them away – thus putting a little extra crypto in the pockets of my fellow poets and artists around the world, and helping to distribute their creations to more people. And should I be lucky enough to win anything this time, I will use some of my winnings to again buy up and give away copies - giving precedence to anyone who has read, ❤️ and commented on this post (especially if you list your Tezos wallet address in your comment!)

And, if you would like to be a part of a future volume, please reach out to me on X/Twitter – and as I noted in the beginning of this post, there is an open call for submissions for Volume 3 – which is going to have the theme of “minimalism.”

As long as this link is working, we are accepting submissions in a simple, nine-question format! ⤵️

[LINK TO GOOGLE FORMS = SUBMISSIONS FOR VOLUME 3]

So, "minimalism" - what does that mean?

Well, for example, consider this piece which will form the basis for the cover of Volume Three ⤵️

It says a lot with very little, don't you think?

There are many forms of minimalist poetry – some examples include haiku and tanka, cinquains, asingbol (which Desmond Kon Zhicheng-Mingde introduced at the 2016 Singapore Poetry Writing Month as an “expedient poetic form created for our expedient society” – this form consists of 140 characters [spaces included] that create a single clause of un-capitalized words, devoid of irony or metaphor, and always ending with a period) – and yes, limericks. Examples of these forms include:

Haiku: The Old Pond

Tanka: Holocene Elegy #1

Asingbol: Commitment

Limerick: A Flea and a Fly in a Flue

Cinquain: Snow

And there are many other short poetic forms – so I will look forward to seeing what people submit.

Flash fiction is certainly an option as well – as are minimalist artworks – either still images or GIFs.

Here is an example of a piece of minimalist artwork that I have collected which says a great deal with very simple construction.

Hopefully, this gives those of you who are interested in submitting works for consideration a place to start – but remember, in art and poetry, there are no “wrong answers” – so every submission will be considered – and if it is not a fit for this issue, don’t worry – there are many more still to come!

Thank you for reading, and I look forward to seeing what my friends from Twigg and t2 will surprise me with!

Best always,

Edward