Please click on the issue you want to see:
I S S U E  # 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10 

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Writers rarely have an audience in mind, these days, except when they address in the most cunning and commercialized way a target group of likely customers.

Still, even while writing for herself or himself, or an audience of one, the writer or poet may well be a concerned individual, aware of many of the dilemmas and unsolved questions, that is to say, the contradictions of a society she or he is a part of. 

Literature, like other arts, may well register aspects of reality in its own ways.

It may safeguard its authenticity and come across as both beautifully intense and clear-sighted while, at the same time, it is not necessarily turning a blind eye to the needs of a population. 

Not pandering to an audience, the writer may indeed take it serious. 

Isn't it possible that while taking care not to be instrumentalized by any one, literature can still succeed to be useful, to address real (and often neglected) needs? 

Perhaps they are specific needs, rooted in the specific histories, calamities, and unsolved problems of different societies, in the North and the South, the East and the West.

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STREET VOICE advocates an increased intercultural exchange. It advocates involvement, or engagement,while posing the question how this can be achieved without ending up producing empty phrases, or suggesting questionable and even discredited "solutions."

While asking authors to "reflect" on more than form and to stick simultaneously to a necessary  authenticity and an honest regard for 
the "needs" of their audience,  we tend to cling to a position defending the autonomy of a debate:  about philosophy,  the arts,  literature.

Aware how poetry is "a world apart,"  we still know and in fact emphasize that poets live in a world of conflicts,  a society that is not a phantasy.

Joan Chen      J. Weidenfels       Andreas Weiland
 

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STREET VOICE is a non-commercial, non-profit internet journal set up to present contemporary poetry as well as short prose and book reviews. 

The 'lingua franca' relied on in STREET VOICE at the moment is English but texts in other languages are accepted, as well.
We hope to create a forum of international cultural debate. 

Send an e-mail to  STREET VOICE
 

Art in Society
 

http://www.
hoelderlin.de
 

Hans Arnfrid 
Astel,
Sand am Meer
 
 
 
 
 

Feedback will have to rely on e-mail correspondence.

(When STREET VOICE was founded, we had naively hoped to find readers using our so-called, now defunct
chat room!)