Arcadian Rustbelt

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...

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...

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...