NEW WEB JOURNAL'S PREMIERE ISSUE

Call for contributions and Editorial Board announced

Chapter&Verse is a new web journal that explores the creative intersection between popular music and the written word - novels and short stories, plays and poetry, journalism and criticism.

The site, launched with the Spring 2004 edition, will carry essays, articles and reviews which cover that inter-cultural territory where rock stars publish short stories, novelists tap in to the energy of jazz, soul and hip hop, poets forge alliances with hippies, b-boys and rastas, sci-fi visionaries influence prog rock and cyber punk, Gothic voices inspire nu metal, and music critics and columnists eulogise and crucify.

Chapter&Verse plans to include pieces on Bob Dylan and the Last Poets, Gil Scott Heron and Patti Smith, Jack Kerouac and Tom Wolfe, Poppy Z Brite and Genesis P-Orridge, Jim Morrison and Jewel, Hanif Kureishi and Salman Rushdie, U2 and REM, Allen Ginsberg and Henry Rollins, Adrian Henri, John Cooper Clarke and Benjamin Zephaniah, Julie Burchill and Joolz Denby, William Gibson and Sam Shepard, Nick Hornby and Steve Earle, Douglas Coupland and Irvine Welsh, Nik Cohn and Greil Marcus, Nick Kent and the Nu Yoricans, to name only a few.

It will consider literary movements that have become entangled with popular musical forms - the Beats, the Angry Young Men, the Mersey Poets, the Blank Generation writers and those more recent voices of the Chemical Generation - and musical genres - from blues to reggae, country to punk, acid house to industrial, rap to drum'n'bass - that have dipped into the literary well for intellectual sustenance and emotional inspiration.

The journal will also contemplate those literary figures - from Shakespeare to Blake and the Romantic poets, Rimbaud and the Symbolist poets to Joyce, Orwell and Greene to Nelson Algren and John Dos Passos, Anthony Burgess and Joseph Heller to Hubert Selby, Jr and J.G.Ballard - who have inspired popular musicians to react and respond.

Chapter&Verse will attempt to understand better the interplay between the printed and spoken word and music-making, on stage and in the studio: Is a song lyric ever poetry? How do musicians utilise the literary in their creative lives? Is there such a thing as jazz literature? Is punk verse simply oxymoronic? Where do New Journalism and recent rock criticism overlap? And why do many latterday writers turn to pop culture as a source for their work?

But its main objective will be to broadly investigate the terrain, open up some windows of opportunity, for writers and commentators who want to say something about this fertile crossroads in the contemporary cultural landscape.

NOTES FOR CONTRIBUTORS

If Chapter&Verse is of interest to you and you have articles - or ideas for articles - that might fit the brief, do write to the Editor, Simon Warner, at chapterandverse@writersinc.net

Please note that the second issue of Chapter&Verse is scheduled for Autumn 2004. Potential contributors to that edition should be aware that there is June 30th, 2004 deadline for proposals which should come, initially, in the form of a 300 word abstract. Proposed submissions will then be considered by members of the Editorial Board.

Articles may range in length from 3,000-6,000 words. Shorter contributions - reviews of relevant works in print, recordings or live events or comment pieces, for example - are also invited with a suggested length of 1,000-1,500 words. Do contact the journal if you have suggestions for items you might wish to cover.

EDITORIAL INFORMATION

EDITOR

Simon Warner teaches popular music at the University of Leeds in the UK. He has been a rock reviewer with the The Guardian, published the book Rockspeak: The Language of Rock and Pop in 1996, and writes for various websites including the "Anglo Visions" column for Pop Matters (popmatters.com). His next volume, Text and Drugs and Rock'n'Roll: The Beats and Rock from Kerouac and Ginsberg to Dylan and Cobain, has just been commissioned by Continuum.

EDITORIAL BOARD

David Amram
Jazz musician and composer of more than one hundred orchestral, chamber and operatic works, whose ground-breaking collaborations with Jack Kerouac are recalled in his memoirs Vibrations and Offbeat.

Daphne A. Brooks
Assistant Professor of English and African-American Studies at Princeton University and author of two forthcoming books, Bodies in Dissent (Duke UP) and Jeff Buckley's Grace (Continuum Press).

Sarah Champion
Editor of the Chemical Generation short fiction collections Disco Biscuits and Disco 2000.

Michel Delville
Teaches on the Modern English Literature and American Literature programme at the University of Liege in Belgium.

Oliver Double
The first person in the country to receive a PhD for a thesis on stand-up comedy, for 10 years he worked as a professional comedian. He now teaches at the University of Kent, UK, and has a particular interest in spoken word and performance poetry.

Simon Frith
Professor of Film and Media at the University of Stirling, UK, and author of Sound Effects and Performing Rites, he has also been a rock critic with numerous publications.

Bruce Horner
Director of Composition in the Department of English of the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. He is co-editor of the volume Key Terms in Popular Music and Culture.

David Meltzer
Poet, novelist, folk performer, rock artist with Serpent Power and editor of Reading Jazz and Writing Jazz., he teaches humanities at the New College of California, San Francisco.

Thom Swiss
Professor of English at the University of Iowa and co-editor of Key Terms in Popular Music and Culture and Mapping the Beat, he is also a widely published poet in print and online.

Sarah Zupko
Founder and editor of the webzine PopMatters (popmatters.com) and the website Sarah Zupko's Cultural Studies Center (popcultures.com). Based in Chicago, she is an Internet executive at Tribune Media Services.