‘While it must be stressed that Rankine’s lyric practice is capacious and stylistically thrilling, that her insights are always valuable in isolation, I am left slightly unsure of what Triage’s greater intentions are.’
Devki Panchmatia on Claudia Rankine.
‘Partly due to critical neglect, partly due to the single-minded determination to be a poet who survived on nothing but his poetry, Harrison’s prose is doomed to be a footnote in his career.’
Dane Holt on Tony Harrison’s underappreciated prose.
‘Might there be something, beyond backwater nihilism, in the vanishing of the Tree at Sycamore Gap that speaks to us about a country increasingly unable to protect its social and civic structures in the most basic ways?’
Alex Niven on the Sycamore Gap and cycles of decline.
‘Growing up in suburban Chicago, I was often told that there were two topics I should never raise with strangers: politics and religion. This was a time where secular individualism was the ultimate marker of freedom.’
Martín Francisco Saps on the rise of a new religious politics.
‘There is no such thing as a reliable narrator, and efforts to achieve real truth often destroy it.’
Harriet Armstrong interviews Aea Varfis-van Warmelo.
‘How do you write silence? That’s what I’m trying to do. How do you write death before you’ve experienced it? That’s what I’m trying to do.’
Luke Dunne interviews Victoria Chang.
‘A water company running up debts to enrich its investors is permissible, but a government that borrows to invest in the public realm, not so much.’
Sruti Basak interviews Hettie O’Brien.
‘Why would you do that – visit cemeteries?’ is a sentiment often expressed to me, voicing some kind of disgust, as if I did something like, I don’t know, collect vomit.
Konrad Muller interviews Mariana Enriquez.
‘Once I knew I was writing about Crumb, I knew I wanted to write about perversion.’
Gabrielle Sicam on comics artist Robert Crumb.
‘Cities, as Brecht depicts them, live double lives. Their inhabitants live cheek to jowl and are given to exchanging pleasantries and meaningless conversation ad nauseam.’
Luke Dunne on Bertolt Brecht’s poem ‘Of Poor B.B.’
‘My face was not the most beautiful / but any person was entitled to think it was / and what terrifying pleasure in that.’
Nina Reljić’s winning poem in this year’s Poetry Prize.
‘Britain, whoever is in power, is a small-c conservative place.’
John Merrick on the 1926 General Strike.
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.
‘If Müller’s oeuvre captures the absurdities of this dogmatic regime, then Heimatliteratur is the paradox of village and fatherland, the intractability of home and violence.’
Gabrielle McClellan reviews Herta Müller’s The Village on the Edge of the World.
‘As well as fulfilling a boyhood fantasy of building a hillside village, Portmeirion was Clough’s propaganda piece, the culmination of a career spent campaigning against unchecked “bungaloid growth” by pestering the local authorities.’
O. J. Williams reviews Sarah Baylis’s Portmeirion.
‘Here, then, is the inevitable clarion call to Prynne sceptics: read, read quickly, submit to the strange music, resist the cop in your head, be persuaded to rejoice, let the healing fountain start.’
Will Fleming on J. H. Prynne.
‘At the cinema people ask questions on process, whereas at the outdoor screenings I don’t think I’ve ever gotten a question about process; the audience talk more of themselves, their own experience.’
Lydia de Matos speaks to Andrea Luka Zimmerman.
‘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.
‘I distract myself with the idea that human beings can be divided into two categories: those who wait, and those who make others wait. If forced to, I’d describe myself as one of those who wait.’
Short fiction by Sergi Pàmies.
‘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.
‘If she’s tampering with me and my middlebrow money-grubbing from some supernatural plane, perhaps it’s just another chore to check off for the overachiever who once journaled, “What horrifies me most is the idea of being useless”.’
Melanie McGee Bianchi on Sylvia Plath’s guest editorship of Mademoiselle and Plath’s cult of perpetuity.
‘As someone of mixed heritage, I contain or embody the oppressor and the oppressed.’
Joseph Williams interviews Zakia Sewell.
‘I lean on the Clive James idea that a poem is the only art form where you can order a coffee, and even before the drink has gone cold, you could have written something that will still be read in five hundred years’ time.’
Rishi Dastidar in Conversation with Sarah Howe.
‘Someone who can’t read a book cannot deliberate, cannot think and cannot conceptualise, and therefore is a threat. We couldn’t have picked a worse time to become more stupid than when we needed more intelligence.’
Alex Dommett speaks to Will Self.
