mission statement
The Leisure Complex of Discontent: Mission statement
Poets emerging 1980-94
There was no anthology of new poets on the Underground in 1992. This project is designed as what that would have been. It fills a void.
This anthology is:
1, About finding a generation The poets concerned notably developed in isolation from their contemporaries, even if the presence of an older generation was a guide. This is the first generational anthology for this generation. Juxtaposition can at this stage reveal common ground so far as it is there.
Is the Underground an organism or just a negative state embracing those who do not conform efficiently?
2, Opening a vista
The anthology is designed as a way in to a whole era of innovation and artistic achievement. It is not a lifeboat mission to rescue shattered spars from an area of sea we quickly want to leave.
3, Exhibiting
We make some of the best poems from this era available in one place and invite everybody in to see. For this duration the earth will roll back and the underground will emerge into the full light of day.
4, Indulgence
All you can eat.
5, Composition
These poems have never been put side by side before. They may be parts of a hitherto unseen whole, the sound of a time. Will a melody emerge from so many notes?
6, Documentation
This is an era where poems have complex backgrounds and increasingly those backgrounds are not widely shared, and change rapidly. The poems will be supported by documentation to exhibit patterns of artistic theory and recover complexes of the era.
7, Making something visible to a market
The market is confused by the ungraspable variety of cultural products. A focused anthology is designed to reduce the confusion and firm up an area of shared knowledge. An anthology can contribute to a shared vocabulary even when there is no agreed term either for the period or for the cultural zone (what used to be called the Underground).
8, an act of Recollection
The 1980s are long enough ago for an act of memory to be possible which brings essential new realisations. It is time for a verdict both on certain cultural positions and on certain political doctrines and their clauses about economics. The poems embody shared experience - emotions, even a feeling of dread, moments of realisation, feelings of solidarity.
9, Critique
The collection provides the means of comparison and so makes it possible both to critique the methods of the truly significant poets of the period and, tacitly, the conventional and prize-wining poets of the day.
10, Historicising
As decades have passed the evidence has become massively available and the temporal distance has come to allow a view of the period as a whole and from the outside. It is time to put the evidence into a coherent form and to describe the period as part of cultural history. Both successes and failures have now reached fixed form; too late to mend and slowed-down enough to think about.
The anthology will be a demonstration of certain truths and a refutation of certain falsehoods.
11, Legitimation. The context of other wonderful poems makes a single wonderful poem detach itself as such. A flood that carries a flood.
12, Desecration, of prevailing teleologies projecting over and obscuring the poetry. The evidence is available and collecting it together automatically supplies the means of disproof of various doctrines invented more or less recklessly by ideologues of Left and Right. So far the only people who have claimed that the Underground has a set of shared artistic precepts have been those who want to close it down and blow up the entrances to its territory. The truth appears as objects obstinately retaining their shape over years hidden beneath a lake of facile and malign generalisations.
Poets emerging 1980-94
There was no anthology of new poets on the Underground in 1992. This project is designed as what that would have been. It fills a void.
This anthology is:
1, About finding a generation The poets concerned notably developed in isolation from their contemporaries, even if the presence of an older generation was a guide. This is the first generational anthology for this generation. Juxtaposition can at this stage reveal common ground so far as it is there.
Is the Underground an organism or just a negative state embracing those who do not conform efficiently?
2, Opening a vista
The anthology is designed as a way in to a whole era of innovation and artistic achievement. It is not a lifeboat mission to rescue shattered spars from an area of sea we quickly want to leave.
3, Exhibiting
We make some of the best poems from this era available in one place and invite everybody in to see. For this duration the earth will roll back and the underground will emerge into the full light of day.
4, Indulgence
All you can eat.
5, Composition
These poems have never been put side by side before. They may be parts of a hitherto unseen whole, the sound of a time. Will a melody emerge from so many notes?
6, Documentation
This is an era where poems have complex backgrounds and increasingly those backgrounds are not widely shared, and change rapidly. The poems will be supported by documentation to exhibit patterns of artistic theory and recover complexes of the era.
7, Making something visible to a market
The market is confused by the ungraspable variety of cultural products. A focused anthology is designed to reduce the confusion and firm up an area of shared knowledge. An anthology can contribute to a shared vocabulary even when there is no agreed term either for the period or for the cultural zone (what used to be called the Underground).
8, an act of Recollection
The 1980s are long enough ago for an act of memory to be possible which brings essential new realisations. It is time for a verdict both on certain cultural positions and on certain political doctrines and their clauses about economics. The poems embody shared experience - emotions, even a feeling of dread, moments of realisation, feelings of solidarity.
9, Critique
The collection provides the means of comparison and so makes it possible both to critique the methods of the truly significant poets of the period and, tacitly, the conventional and prize-wining poets of the day.
10, Historicising
As decades have passed the evidence has become massively available and the temporal distance has come to allow a view of the period as a whole and from the outside. It is time to put the evidence into a coherent form and to describe the period as part of cultural history. Both successes and failures have now reached fixed form; too late to mend and slowed-down enough to think about.
The anthology will be a demonstration of certain truths and a refutation of certain falsehoods.
11, Legitimation. The context of other wonderful poems makes a single wonderful poem detach itself as such. A flood that carries a flood.
12, Desecration, of prevailing teleologies projecting over and obscuring the poetry. The evidence is available and collecting it together automatically supplies the means of disproof of various doctrines invented more or less recklessly by ideologues of Left and Right. So far the only people who have claimed that the Underground has a set of shared artistic precepts have been those who want to close it down and blow up the entrances to its territory. The truth appears as objects obstinately retaining their shape over years hidden beneath a lake of facile and malign generalisations.
'A focused anthology is designed to reduce the confusion' - is it unduly literal to feel that, with this strong and useful emphasis on 1980-94, it needs spelling out that the dates relate to the poets and their emergence, and *not to the poems selected for the anthology? which may date from much later. - Elizabeth J
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