The magazine website and some other sources state that
Drunken Boat was founded in 1999; a few sources say 2000, including an interview with editor Shankar himself. This confusion may also be due to another online literary magazine with almost the same name that started in spring 2000:
The Drunken Boat, edited by
Rebecca Seiferle. Seiferle's magazine was also online, but published traditional poetry and commentaries, not using multimedia in the way that Shankar and Mills'
Drunken Boat did. From the start,
Drunken Boat included multimedia elements, using the possibilities that the internet and the computer gave for new genres of poetry, literature and art. The journal currently describes its content as including "sound, video, hypertext, digital animation, locative media, web art, interactive fiction - alongside more traditional forms of representation such as poetry, prose, photography, and translation." Along with magazines like
The New River and
Iowa Review Web, it has had an important role in developing the new genre of electronic literature: digital poems could not be published in traditional print literary magazines. ==See also==