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.
A Village as Small as a Thimble by Gabrielle McClellan
‘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.
Cloughed Up by O. J. Williams
‘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.
The Practical Limits of Daylight: In Memory of J. H. Prynne
‘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.
Wayfaring Stranger: An Interview with Andrea Luka Zimmerman
‘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.
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.
On Not Knowing English by Sergi Pàmies
‘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.
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 | Sylvia, the Ghost Writer by Melanie McGee Bianchi
‘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.
Post-Pastoral: An Interview with Zakia Sewell
‘As someone of mixed heritage, I contain or embody the oppressor and the oppressed.’
Joseph Williams interviews Zakia Sewell.
Rishi Dastidar in Conversation with Sarah Howe
‘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.
Interview | Will Self on the End of Satire, the Rise of Fascism and Writing His Own Death
‘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.
Poetry | Monrovia, 2010 by Nathaniel Calhoun
‘there were war criminals around. that was / in the air. in our ice cubes. it made you feel like a decent guy.’
New poetry by Nathaniel Calhoun.
Poetry | Dear Dolly by Jasmine Gibbs
‘And when // they upped your dose of anaesthetic, from lucid haze to euthanasia, / it was almost a mercy.’
New poetry by Jasmine Gibbs.
Essay | The Windy Moors of Đà Lạt by Nguyễn Bình
‘Perhaps, in Wuthering Heights, Nhất Linh saw a likeness of what was happening around him: endless divisions and cycles of violence, one side propped up as the opposite of an oppressive other, only to show itself just as capable of oppression as that sworn enemy.’
Nguyễn Bình on Nhất Linh’s Vietnamese translation of Wuthering Heights.
Review | Hawai‘i: Another United Kingdom by Alex Wong
‘“Fearsome” is a word I heard almost as soon as I stepped into the gallery. And perhaps this is a good corrective to the soft, all-giving image of Hawai‘i as the paradisal realm of flower-garlanded aloha. There isn’t a hula girl anywhere in sight here.’
Alex Wong reviews ‘Hawai‘i: A Kingdom Crossing Oceans’ at the British Museum.
Poetry | Consumers, Global Capitalists, Environmentalists, Weirdos by Stephen Kampa
‘the global capitalists / were thrilled, too, because to make / every consumable product organic, // a veritable living thing, is to guarantee / perpetual repeated / obsolescence’
New poetry from Stephen Kampa.
Interview | Folk for the Future: An Interview with Lally MacBeth
‘For folk to make sense now, it has to change to reflect communities and the times that we live in. It doesn’t make sense to cling desperately to the past.’
Rose Brookfield interviews Lally MacBeth
Review | Under Laboratory Conditions by Joseph Williams
‘History in Minor Black Figures is not so much a ‘vaster social context’ than something to be looked at, discussed and then turned away from. Like a painting, or a petri dish.’
Joseph Williams reviews Brandon Taylor’s Minor Black Figures.
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.
Dogelon Mars by Adrian Nathan West
‘In his own life, money had been nearly but never wholly absent, manifested in quantities of just-barely- and almost-enough.’
Short fiction by Adrian Nathan West.
Poetry | Time Management by Nasim Luczaj
‘So what that it was okay to call it / a day? Does delight ever feel done? And hell / will come, whether or not you schedule it.’
New poetry by Nasim Luczaj.
Poetry | The Erymanthian Boar by Rachel Curzon
‘We’re going now, I said, // to say something definite. / And when the car began its song / the street sang it back, // all lamentation.’
New poetry by Rachel Curzon.
Interview | In Conversation with Rob Doyle
‘I feel that each book I write, and particularly each novel, becomes a monument to a phase of life, and more often than not to the crisis it coincides with.’
Jamie Cameron speaks to Rob Doyle.