Sixty-four years on from the original survey, The London Magazine speaks to fifteen poets, including Jorie Graham, Don Paterson, A. E. Stallings and more, about the state of contemporary poetry.
Essay | Imaging the Invisible by Oriol Ponsatí-Murlà
‘When something like this happens then the image isn’t merely a banal transposition of reality. It creates a certain reality, of a very particular character, because it has the capacity to go beyond itself. To transcend itself.’
Oriol Ponsatí-Murlà on the advent of photography and documenting the dead.
Essay | Flags Made in China by Marina Garcés
‘If we take a closer look at them, flags don’t express the eternal identity of nations but the power relations upon which today’s nation states have been constructed and consolidated.’
Marina Garcés on Catalan flags and nation states.
Essay | Inside the Vanishing Point by Zoe Guttenplan
‘It seems as though we have gone through the painting and are living inside the vanishing point: creating the means of our own self-effacement, using them, bemoaning their existence and continuing to use them anyway.’
Zoe Guttenplan on invisible media, AI and the age of sameness.
Essay | 41 Numbered Paragraphs About Dementia and Fiction by Caleb Klaces
‘The words of reassurance assume something like this: David remains David, whatever happens, as long as someone remembers who he was. But I kept asking myself: When was he who he really was? When exactly was that? And what’s to say that it is not right now?’
Caleb Klaces on dementia and fiction.
Essay | The Aesthetic Life by Zsófia Paulikovics
‘Several broadly millennial acquaintances confess that reading the book made them feel a sort of sickening recognition.’
Zsófia Paulikovics on Perfection and Allegro Pastel.
Essay | No Designated Venue: An Oral History of London’s Music and Poetry Scenes
Yasmina Snyder spoke to writers, poets, musicians and event organisers based in London about the connections between live music and poetry, and the spaces that host them.
Essay | Why Magazines Fail by Tristram Fane Saunders
‘There’s big trouble in the world of little magazines. In the last two years, an alarming number have vanished into that second-hand bookshop in the sky. Each leaves the world a little quieter, a little poorer.’
Tristram Fane Saunders on ‘little magazines’.
Essay | North Facing by Aidan Harte
‘I don’t suppose one who has been shadowed by spies and hunted by soldiers is truly knowable, but I believe I captured a sense of the man.’
Aidan Harte on meeting and sculpting Gerry Adams.