Arcadian Rustbelt

I now have a single hard copy of the book, and the full production run will happen soon. This is a shared project, so I am setting up this space so the contributors can make comments on the finished book. Please use the Comments facility.

Consensus? The files have gone to the publisher and we have chosen this moment to send parts of the same files to the poets, for checking. This includes the biographical snippets and this was inherently likely to provoke the poets. To recall, the project didn’t have these and the initial editor didn’t think they were helpful. More like a DJ talking over a record, so why not get straight into the poems. He was overruled by the other editor and the publisher, so we now have Bios, but it turned out that the person who thought they were a bad idea had to write them all. Mysterious. Anyway, we expect the files to go to the designer/ typesetter soon. Correspondence about the proofs has produced some interesting material, of which we give some excerpts below. “as for huddersfield, there was indeed a period there of synergy, or perhaps synergies, plural, would be more accurate, when we made a lot of noise in an effort to get attention for poets in the area, and in the north more generally,...

The current version of the Introduction is still the object of fierce debate among a few people being consulted. One issue is the start of people “dropping out” of the poetic mainstream. The text reads at present “This constricted focus is the reason why young poets left the mainstream and moved into an alternative world – why, in fact, they had been steadily walking out on this set-up since the late 1960s.” Of course the date around 1960 for the origin of the Underground is more traditional. A popular moment of transition is Roy Fisher’s City, coming out from Migrant Press in 1961. One comment: “This must refer to an extension of the AR timeframe, as you say "had been...since" and it seems to me palpably the case that that behaviour goes back a lot further.  (Andrew would know about the Apocalypts better than I, but didn't, say, Keidrych Rhys opt out of the standard-model literary rat-race?  And some of the Angry Young People?  There were a few British Beats...  I ...

Notes on ‘Rustbelt’ anthology Wheale. Caspars: French slang for “rats”. cf. the book Gaspard de la nuit by Aloysius Bertrand. Caspar was in legend the Black one of the Three Kings (with Melchior and Balthasar). Mengham. Nomenclature: the Communist Party had lists of the loyal and dependable, who were the only ones acceptable for jobs above a certain (menial) level. These lists were known as “nomenclatures” ( nomenklatura ) and the word became a sceptical term for the whole Communist power elite. Marriott. Mr Claude: is this the poet Claude McKay? Pahouin: “The Fang people, also known as Fãn or Pahouin, are a Bantu ethnic group found in Equatorial Guinea, northern Gabon, and southern Cameroon.” “the extent of my perversity overwhelms me! But why impenetrable jungle are you still hiding the total zero of my mendacity and from a self-conscious concern for nobility not celebrating the horrible leap of my Pahouin ugliness?” Aimé Césaire, Cahiers d’un retour au pays natal . So we ha...

The final text has gone to the book designer who does the work on behalf of Waterloo Press. We don’t have a firm publication date because Waterloo’s schedule has been affected by illness – but we are announcing March 2023 as a basis for planning. Everything is fixed except maybe the blurb. All our sympathy goes to Simon at Waterloo. And, all thanks to him too for resuscitating the project in 2020. That deisgner resigned from his job and the anthology did not go ahead in 2022. It is impossible to reconstruct exactly what happened, but detailed and exhausting discussions about the text already written took up several years. Writing biographical snippets for the poets, not part of the original design, took up several months. New poets were added. But the end is in sight. (June 2024)

Slowed metabolism? The project had, early on, a claim that alternative poets emerging during the 1980s had difficulties and that the metabolism of the scene had slowed down to near-deathly rates. By coincidence, I have retrieved poetry titles from 1983 from the British Library catalogue (and the Poetry library catalogue), and I thought to excerpt from that list the “alternative” titles. Like this. A bit brink green quartz-like / Tony Baker. Durham : Pig, 1983. Testaments / Chris Bendon. Lampeter : Spectrum, 1983. Throw out the life line, lay out the corse : poems 1965-1985 / Asa Benveniste. London : Anvil Press Poetry, 1983. Sweet cicely / Richard Caddel. Durham : Taxvs, 1983. The tulpa index : A stairway Half locked at The human gate / B. Catling. [Norwich] : St George Press, Norwich School of Art, c1983. Twenty poems / Thomas A. Clark. Matlock. Robertswood, Farley Hill, Matlock, Derbyshire : Grosseteste, 1983. The hollow way. Thomas A Clark [Nailsworth] : ...