Well, here it is. The first issue of 2007, and perhaps an opportunity to talk candidly about the future directions that this little magazine may take.

Issue 22 is an exciting installment in our evolving poetic project--which is not so much to participate in dialogues about how poetry and prose can evolve in the online medium, but to generate new conversations about how online formats can invite new ways of reading, new readerships and new ways of energizing that reader/text continuum. Too often, online journals merely reproduce the social and aesthetic relations of print--but as anyone who reads a poem online knows, it is quite a different proposition to read a poem in the "pages" of 5_trope than it is to leaf through a yellowed copy of Athenaeum in the upholstered comfort of a Victorian smoking room. It was Marshall McLuhan who first pointed out, before the internet, before the actualization of his vision of a "global village," that the "content" of a medium is not its "text" (that is merely another medium). Rather, the "content" of a medium is the social relation that the medium summons into existence. It is our hope and intention to create a new social relation, with experimental language at the center, one which emphasizes the new modes of reception that are possible today, in the frantic age of youtube and MySpace.

This is what we mean by "experimental" prose and poetry--our new mission is literally to "experiment" with new ways of undermining the "official" language uses that we find in the mouths of our Ari Fleischers and Tony Snows, not to mention in the controlled dictions of literature professors and pseudo-Marxist defenders of a newly invigorated official culture. 5_trope aims to be unofficial--to be, rather than unified, disjointed and untameable. Rather than overtly and abstractly political, to be connected directly to the real, abject circumstances of our readership. Great things were never accomplished without great vision. The past year has vastly broadened our belief in the possible cultural interventions that our site can perform.

Our submission volume has increased dramatically, and we've merited mention in a few places around the web. With that in mind, I've decided that inasmuch as 5_trope has a "reading public," we owe it to them to take on a more regular publication cycle. We will now publish on a strict trimesterly cycle--that is to say, we will have a fall issue, a winter issue and a summer issue, due out each year in September, January and May respectively.

We will continue to publish poetry, prose and reviews--we will continue to hew to a standard more fluid than dogmatic in finding the best and the bravest literature around. That's our New Years' Resolution; we hope you'll join us.

editor's note

gunnar benediktsson, ed.