Posts

Unfading Memories

The Jaguar Shoes post is quite long now, so we have located longer memories in this new post, like this. David Annwn wrote to remember: Black police vans speeding through evenings towards pickets. The Sheffield sound. All the patriot furore over the Falklands. People at college talking about ‘yomping’, Meetings in London/designing books/ publishing poets, Being with Eric Mottram, Lee Harwood, Jonathan Williams and whisky-fuelled evenings at Corn Close, The endless round of lecturing/marking. Going out for meals and being in my 30s but falling asleep over my food so exhausted. Spending twelve hours with Gyorgy and Marianne Gordon in their Joiner’s Shop house at Heath and never stopping the conversation on and on /hearing about Fascism and Communism they knew first hand. Jazz and Tom Verlaine. Adrian Clarke wrote to us to say this. - ​ In the period covered by the anthology there was much discussion of a Cambridge/London divide. Its existence seems to have been forgotten or dism...
Post a Comment
Read more

Eighties moments: Jaguar Shoes

Eighties moments Before the London launch of the anthology, Arcadian Rustbelt , we had a social for the poets, in a pub in Hoxton. The point of the gathering was to collect memories of the era which the anthology reflects, as part of the memory exercise involved in a retrospective anthology. The planning involved a summoning of all 28 poets in one place to reach a critical mass, which would make the truth emerge from under the ground as if by divine command. We actually got as many as seven (rising to eight at the reading itself). The recovery really got going in the evening, after the readings had taken everyone back to a lost time, after a journey through strata of intervening experience. In the end it was all flowing, and the experience was more one of taking part in an avid memory conversation at one end of the table and being aware that another, equally crucial, one was taking place at the other end of it, unseizable and actually vanishing for a second time. H remembered stand...
Post a Comment
Read more

Launch

The London launch of Arcadian Rustbelt is being hosted by the Xing the Line series. It will be at a café called Jaguar Shoes, in Kingsland Road, Hoxton, on Sunday March 9th, 2025. You will hear a line-up of specially selected poets: Harry Gilonis Khaled Hakim Elizabeth James Frances Presley David Rees Simon Smith The café is near the junction with Old Street.       The gig is on a Sunday, and the trains stop earlier on a Sunday. This is why Xing the Line has an early start, 6 pm. “Doors at 6pm for a 7pm start. £5”.        The reading will probably wind up soon after 9.30. Then we will probably hang in the Jaguar Shoes bar. "This is a generational anthology and a once in a generation anthology. -editors Where does the first generation of British underground poetry end and the second begin?  Really, of course, there's too much overlap to create periods of this sort.  You can only have an arbitrary cut-off according to date or publication of a previously cons...
Post a Comment
Read more

chatter on publication

This collects most of the comments made on Facebook in the week following publication -apologies to people who have seen these already. facebook really isn't configured to let you drain text out of it, so this has been a bit clunky as an operation.(AD) more chatter picked up circa 4 January Khaled Hakim November 18 I've just received the bumper anthology 'Arcadian Rustbelt' and notwithstanding reservations about the clumping front in red white & blue, it is otherwise beautifully laid out on luxurious thick cream paper. Andrew Duncan John Goodby and Waterloo Press have done the contributors proud. Only £12 which is a marvellous mystery. — with John Goodby and Andrew Duncan. Andy Wilson where can a copy be bought? John Phillips Any chance of a shot of the contents page? John Phillips replied · 2 replies John Goodby 'Clumping'? John Goodby We pitched the price v low to shift it quick & maximize its reach - a beautiful production as said ...
Post a Comment
Read more

space for comments

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.
Post a Comment
Read more

Consensus?

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,...
Post a Comment
Read more

When did the counter-poetry start?

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 ...
Post a Comment
Read more