Mission statement
Angel Exhaust 24: Your mind is a locked room and Maria has the key
Mission Statement: Are you sure Hank done it this way?
We don’t have any poems at present, but we have a plan for an anthology of poems under 30, for a collection of poets from Angel Exhaust’s local tradition, and for a campaign where we ask for poets we don’t know to contact us.
In the initial high-level plan, the temporal span between poets born in the 1940s and potentially poets born in 2004 is a large-scale shape and possibly the largest shape in the project inventory. This span is likely to be foregrounded in the blurb and related material. That material will not be able to claim that the poets resemble each other, since obviously they won’t. Of course we have a new draft of editorial talent to look after all that.
Each poem has to be at the centre of its own space. Because that is the responsibility of the editor to the poet. However vast the linguistic space, however vast the gaps between the poems, we hope for contrasts and mirrorings to throw the poems into deeper relief.
We can’t use the word “heritage”, or related vocabulary which implies for young poets that their ideas were there before they arrived. The presentation can suggest continuity, but in terms of a growing audience, linguistic resources, opening of new space, dismantling of inhibitions and rules, etc. Terms like “genealogy” are inappropriate because they suggest a transmission of DNA which doesn’t match up to the (abundant and publicly available) data. As for the idea that poets active around 1980 devised a future and that poets young around 2010 or 2020 are acting out that future, that is a fantasy – a territorial claim in the form of a myth.
We can refer to an audience, inhabiting a set of attitudes, and to a linguistic space of open and unused possibilities. The space may not be a real thing. Arguably, it is like the Polar ice-caps, nobody put it there and it is very old. Arguably, it is like space itself, essentially neutral and essentially without bounds. Drawing a boundary around it is highly doubtful, so it may not be an area at all, but simply the state of potentiality, edgeless and isotropic. It is easier to describe the audience, and they arrive at the wharf by means of being unpredisposed. Everyone conventional excludes themselves, and perhaps that battery of limits and conventions is the easier thing to describe.
Evidently people do not always arrive at this state of responsiveness through poetry, quite likely they have had a formative exposure to radical cinema, visual art, avant grade music, radical philosophy, etc., and have an open attitude to poetry as a fringe benefit of that.
In general, the poets are animated by a fund of anxiety which is perhaps the generator of speculation and sequential invention. The anxiety is expressed as constraints which limit the poetic space, except in the direction which is pursued.
Deterritorialisation, deprogramming, speculation. The latter can also be described as experiment. Each of these can be summed up by the word entgrenzen (title of a 1981 volume by Erich Arendt), which means loss of boundaries. A definition is, unconditionally, itself a boundary and so something outside the project.
A simpler description is to say that, on every day since about 1965, one person has said I can’t stand being that kind of poet, let me go, quickly! and has broken out of the endless cosiness of conventional poeticism. The idea that all those refugees converge has never been proven true. However many people have tried. Maybe there was a day where nobody tried to escape. That is also possible.
It is common to define the new poetry which arrived in the 1960s as being Modernism over again. It seems plausible now that this was a lazy description which missed essential points and imposed a set of expectations which were not easily adjusted to reality. Phraseology about “the heritage of Pound and Eliot” skated over the fact that nobody was writing poetry resembling either Pound or Eliot. There were deeply felt objections to the styles of both of them. Other factors affecting artistic utterance were the Cold War, the Marxist tradition, new approaches to revelations between men and women and within the family, and secularism. None of these factors was confined to the medium of writing. Actually, the thing in the Sixties was an exit from Marxism, where people didn’t want rich individuals or rich families controlling the economy, but rejected the whole stony apparatus of Marxist cultural practice.
There is a classic statement of the new thing in a 1974 essay by Eric Mottram titled “The British Poetry Revival”. This lists 36 poets (at p.86). Three of these can be discarded as honourable forefathers from a different age. The others do not, after close examination of their mature work, have any common features. It is difficult, for that reason, to define later waves of poets as being their heirs or successors. Another classic essay by Mottram was “The triumph of the mobile”, and in that situation it is foolish to look for constant elements.
During the poem, a community of sensibility exists which unifies people and which completes the poem. The audience for a radical poetry comes together, and has associations of friendship and shared memories which goes back over many decades. The periphery is also a centre. There is an interior in which to be intimate. (Of course, some people who have rejected the mainstream also dislike poets of the Alternative. They just don’t like other people and their messages.)
This is the first mission statement, but it is likely to change as the poems come in. This is the firts mission statemnt, but it i slikely to evovle as we get peoms in.
Mission Statement: Are you sure Hank done it this way?
We don’t have any poems at present, but we have a plan for an anthology of poems under 30, for a collection of poets from Angel Exhaust’s local tradition, and for a campaign where we ask for poets we don’t know to contact us.
In the initial high-level plan, the temporal span between poets born in the 1940s and potentially poets born in 2004 is a large-scale shape and possibly the largest shape in the project inventory. This span is likely to be foregrounded in the blurb and related material. That material will not be able to claim that the poets resemble each other, since obviously they won’t. Of course we have a new draft of editorial talent to look after all that.
Each poem has to be at the centre of its own space. Because that is the responsibility of the editor to the poet. However vast the linguistic space, however vast the gaps between the poems, we hope for contrasts and mirrorings to throw the poems into deeper relief.
We can’t use the word “heritage”, or related vocabulary which implies for young poets that their ideas were there before they arrived. The presentation can suggest continuity, but in terms of a growing audience, linguistic resources, opening of new space, dismantling of inhibitions and rules, etc. Terms like “genealogy” are inappropriate because they suggest a transmission of DNA which doesn’t match up to the (abundant and publicly available) data. As for the idea that poets active around 1980 devised a future and that poets young around 2010 or 2020 are acting out that future, that is a fantasy – a territorial claim in the form of a myth.
We can refer to an audience, inhabiting a set of attitudes, and to a linguistic space of open and unused possibilities. The space may not be a real thing. Arguably, it is like the Polar ice-caps, nobody put it there and it is very old. Arguably, it is like space itself, essentially neutral and essentially without bounds. Drawing a boundary around it is highly doubtful, so it may not be an area at all, but simply the state of potentiality, edgeless and isotropic. It is easier to describe the audience, and they arrive at the wharf by means of being unpredisposed. Everyone conventional excludes themselves, and perhaps that battery of limits and conventions is the easier thing to describe.
Evidently people do not always arrive at this state of responsiveness through poetry, quite likely they have had a formative exposure to radical cinema, visual art, avant grade music, radical philosophy, etc., and have an open attitude to poetry as a fringe benefit of that.
In general, the poets are animated by a fund of anxiety which is perhaps the generator of speculation and sequential invention. The anxiety is expressed as constraints which limit the poetic space, except in the direction which is pursued.
Deterritorialisation, deprogramming, speculation. The latter can also be described as experiment. Each of these can be summed up by the word entgrenzen (title of a 1981 volume by Erich Arendt), which means loss of boundaries. A definition is, unconditionally, itself a boundary and so something outside the project.
A simpler description is to say that, on every day since about 1965, one person has said I can’t stand being that kind of poet, let me go, quickly! and has broken out of the endless cosiness of conventional poeticism. The idea that all those refugees converge has never been proven true. However many people have tried. Maybe there was a day where nobody tried to escape. That is also possible.
It is common to define the new poetry which arrived in the 1960s as being Modernism over again. It seems plausible now that this was a lazy description which missed essential points and imposed a set of expectations which were not easily adjusted to reality. Phraseology about “the heritage of Pound and Eliot” skated over the fact that nobody was writing poetry resembling either Pound or Eliot. There were deeply felt objections to the styles of both of them. Other factors affecting artistic utterance were the Cold War, the Marxist tradition, new approaches to revelations between men and women and within the family, and secularism. None of these factors was confined to the medium of writing. Actually, the thing in the Sixties was an exit from Marxism, where people didn’t want rich individuals or rich families controlling the economy, but rejected the whole stony apparatus of Marxist cultural practice.
There is a classic statement of the new thing in a 1974 essay by Eric Mottram titled “The British Poetry Revival”. This lists 36 poets (at p.86). Three of these can be discarded as honourable forefathers from a different age. The others do not, after close examination of their mature work, have any common features. It is difficult, for that reason, to define later waves of poets as being their heirs or successors. Another classic essay by Mottram was “The triumph of the mobile”, and in that situation it is foolish to look for constant elements.
During the poem, a community of sensibility exists which unifies people and which completes the poem. The audience for a radical poetry comes together, and has associations of friendship and shared memories which goes back over many decades. The periphery is also a centre. There is an interior in which to be intimate. (Of course, some people who have rejected the mainstream also dislike poets of the Alternative. They just don’t like other people and their messages.)
This is the first mission statement, but it is likely to change as the poems come in. This is the firts mission statemnt, but it i slikely to evovle as we get peoms in.
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