Literary Rebellion 2008

NEW LITERATURE like all new art can't be confined to institutions. The literary revolution underway is greater than conglomerates or MFA programs. Only by breaking out of the current system can one see literature for what it truly is: a great moving transcendent art.

Those inside the system are blind to what's happening. Their institutional walls mirror the aesthetic walls erected around their brains.

Can one live inside the walls and understand what happens outside them?

Can living art be catalogued and confined, quantified and put into a box?

One can't be revolutionary, an advocate of new literature, without breaking from the institutional walls of the old. Non-criticism of the status quo means you still are one with that status quo. You haven't broken with the present and so are unable to build a new future. Instead you're co-opted, subsumed, consumed by what is now-- the rigidly dead and decaying corpse of literature now. You're one with a corpse.

The Underground Literary Alliance is a vehicle for that which is literary and revolutionary. Nothing more.

To break with the present and become part of the new world of literature means embracing the historical break that has taken place-- a break in time, visible, which occurred on October 8, 2000; the onset of literary rebellion, of an upturned and renewed literary world.

The literary revolution can't be destroyed. It's an idea, an energy-- not a building or one person or group of persons. The flag has been planted. The break recorded. The call for new literature documented.

If the vehicle of the movement stalls and crashes, the movement continues anyway.

If the members of the cause are betrayed, or betray their own cause, yet the movement continues anyway.

The basis of the new movement is truth, honesty, integrity, independence, cooperation, commitment, desire for change and unflinching FEARLESSNESS in implementing that change in pursuit of revived literature-- literature not of dead words and borrowed postures but living art.