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publication date

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.

slowed metabolism?

Slowed metabolism? The anthology relies 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, 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] : Moschatel Press, 1983. Gnomery / Simon Cutts.

Stephen Oldfield

CONFUSION SUITE sign this (can you use this?) * the grass is always greener on the other side of the screen * * 'climb out of the small print and up into the flagrant caps' * there are details you notice not getting on with it on Hollingworth lake the eights prang the rowing boats or used to (they sliced the water the cox’s nose his rudder) * sign this you could use the money or at least the soap * over amplified music/the notes each have pastry on * use the grate outdoors if you must * every thing has a vice-versa and some things only that * I can't even hallucinate straight * 'there has to be something else to account for it I mean chemicals do have a little dignity l wonder if there's a top to his head under that hat' * listen I'm not trying to prove anything and if you look at it another way * Parameters? bear in mind that rabbits are civilized and a bird in the cat is worth how mu

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a capture from an interview with Michael Schmidt: Carcanet did not exactly change direction in 1987 but when we took on the poetry of John Ashbery there was, as it were, a second direction running parallel to, and occasionally colliding with, the first. I became much more interested in experimental writing—not the kind that has its being wholly within the walls of universities and is the fruit of literary theory, but the kind that grew out of an experience of language at fruitful odds with convention and sometimes with itself—so there was the New York School, and some of the poets we already published began to loom larger for me—Christopher Middleton, Edwin Morgan. It was a wonderful time: I think writers like the great Irish poet Eavan Boland, whom we have published since 1987, felt more at home in this broadening list. I know I did, too: all sort of temptations could be succumbed to with a sense of righteousness rather than sin. This did not lessen my commitment to the original dir

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Bulletin (March 2021) (AD) we have frozen the length (to reach a cover price agreed with the publisher) and are getting closer to the end. A few elements are outstanding. The contents may have to get cut again if the typesetting affects the page count we have set up. We are trying to collect Plaudits to adorn the back cover, without sending out masses of copies of the text, which would make it too freely available. Rumours have reached us that a rival anthology, Custodial Ragwort , has been set up to include the poets we left out. Edited by Norval Osbick and Fifi Blunkett-Adorno. Naturally they claim that they were first, and we are a splinter group of poets excluded from ‘Ragwort’. Yet a third breakaway/eject anthology, Treuhand Arcade , has been announced, to include little-known poets of the conservative wing. Analysis of Harry's statements [see previous post] shows him listing a whole generation of poets, as the horizon visible from Strongpoint Gilonis. Of our 25 poets, h

Gilonis speaks

Below is a set of replies from Harry Gilonis to questions previously published on this website. The directive here is to find what the poets think so that the prose accompanying the anthology does not shock/ annoy them beyond a certain threshhold value. Obviously, if only 1 of 23 poets (excl. the editors) responds, we don't disengage a clear image. Not at all! Do you have comments on the Intro? I have not seen anything formally thusly designated, so, erm, NO. I can comment on  The Leisure Complex of Discontent  which gesticulates towards such a thing... poets emerging 1980-95 I would avoid the phrase ‘Poets on the Underground’, if I were you... The anthology, alas, appeared in 1999 from Wesleyan University Press: eds. Richard Caddel and Peter Quartermain,  Other: British and Irish Poetry since 1970 . It contains three of your victims, and five more who should be, i.m.h.o.. of course, a third of the book, the ‘70s crew, are irrelevant to your concerns; and there’s a bit (not m

further reading

Further reading version in progress This is not a complete list and we recommend the British Library catalogue for anyone who wants to see every title. Don't Start me Talking is a book of interviews with poets. An essay on some of these poets is at http://angelexhaust.blogspot.com/2018/08 Nigel Wheale a large selected poems is Raw Skies (2006). An autobiographical account in Poets on Writing (1992). Rod Mengham Unsung was a large retrospective from Salt in 1996. Chance of a Storm came out from Carcanet in 2015. interview in Counter Texts magazine, 2018. Edited Equofinality magazine (from 1981) and edits the Equipage pamphlet series (120 titles to date). Adrian Clarke many books going back to Ghost Measure . Possession (2007) was a selected covering one decade. Excess Measures (2015). Millennial Shades and Three Papers includes theoretical statements. Was a founding editor of Angel Exhaust. Andrew Lawson We have little of his poetry to go on, since he withdrew