Grant Durando

Poet — Writer — Philosopher
| ZO Magazine’s First International Poetry Director

Grant Durando was a true blessing as ZO initiated its first Poetry Expo to an international community of creatives in 2014.  Our mission’s goals include developing lasting relationships, and we will forever be grateful for the inspiration and seeds planted by everyone who has helped us develop, whether for the short or long term. These words that Grant wrote for our beginning poetry pages are timeless and still true.

PROSPECTUS

Poetry has a unique quality of unifying diverse perspectives and experiences through representational symbols, or language. The power behind these symbols creates internal sensations (affects) that, unbeknownst to the reader, create a universalizing phenomenon with anyone reading those same symbols, lines, or poems. It is our belief that this realization of our unity through affect, as poets and poetry readers, can distill the tribulations caused by our realities and re-energize us to produce and reorganize, rather than remaining in an inactive and closed entropic state.

For ZO Magazine and myself, this aim of production through a universalizing aesthetic affect holds the possibility to offset an often-disconcerting reality that sometimes seems to solely emphasize replication, representation, and mimetic reproduction. If poetry can make us all feel the same ineffable way, and this sensation can be accurately and conclusively exposed through a medium such as ZO, perhaps we can move away from the aims and pitfalls of aesthetic representation and recirculate to the abstract, essential, and dynamic beginnings of our reality.

ZO Magazine and its poetry sections will aim to elucidate this circularity, combining disparate artistic and poetic methods and materials to make sense of our broader world – ultimately with the hope to improve it.