-With Jonathan Aldridge- Emma Wright founded the Emma Press, an independent small publisher, in 2012. The press’ titles include The Flower and the Plough, the debut pamphlet from Rachel Piercey, The Emma Press Anthology Of Mildly Erotic Verse and The Emmores, a pamphlet by Richard O’Brien. The Emma Press Anthology of Motherhood is publishing on…
-Reviewed by David Clarke- The Russian critic Mikhail Bakhtin once argued that the distinguishing feature of the novel was its multi-voiced-ness. This distinguished it from the lyric mode, which, he claimed, addressed the reader as a single, undivided voice. Whereas the lyric is a mode of identity, Bakhtin suggested, the novel is multiple, orchestrating…
-In conversation with Claire Trévien- Ira Lightman makes public art around the UK, regularly appears on BBC Radio 3′s The Verbs, writes and performs, and spent a lot of 2013 tracking poetry plagiarism. Claire Trévien: It’s been a busy year for you – it began with the Christian Ward scandal - you quickly became known as the ’poetry sleuth’…
-In conversation with Claire Trévien- Helen Ivory is a poet and artist. Her fourth Bloodaxe Books collection is Waiting for Bluebeard (May 2013) She has co-edited with George Szirtes In Their Own Words: Contemporary Poets on their Poetry Salt 2012. She teaches for the Arvon Foundation, The Poetry School and mentors for the Poetry Society. She edits the webzine Ink…
-Robert James Russell spoke to Ian Chung- Author Bio: Robert James Russell is a Pushcart Prize-nominated author and the co-founding editor of the literary journal Midwestern Gothic. His work has appeared in Joyland, The Collagist, Gris-Gris, Thunderclap! Magazine,, and LITSNACK, among others. Sea of Trees (Winter Goose Publishing, 2012) is his first novella. What inspired…
-Reviewed by Billy Mills- Whitehall Jackals is a collaborative poem sequence written by Chris McCabe, a Liverpool-born, London-based poet whose work is new to me, and long-standing British avant garde poetry landmark Jeremy Reed. The work is a kind of psychogeographic plunge into London in alternating voices, a tangled weave of intersecting, parallel and…
Dr Fulminare, excommunicated alchemist and editor-in-chief of poetry anthology publisher Sidekick Books, turns investigator and interviews one of his own editors, Jon Stone, about the latest Sidekick offering, Coin Opera 2: Fulminare’s Revenge, and what it means for poetry. Me, the eminent, pre-eminent and always extraordinarily busy Dr Fulminare, performing an interview? Just because the…
-Interviewed by Claire Trévien- 1. Tell me about this new anthology you’re editing, Aliens: Recent Encounters. I was particularly intrigued by the fact that they will take different approaches to the alien encounter. Did you feel a need to distance yourself from the kind of images the word Alien would immediately conjure (the film franchise and…
1. You’ve just launched 79 rat press as part of the literary exhibition Nothing to Say, can you tell me a little bit more about what inspired both these things?
79 rat press has grown organically out of eight cuts gallery, which I have run since 2010, and under which umbrella I’ve published some wonderful books that have had remarkable critical success for such a tiny outfit, such as Penny Goring’s The Zoom Zoom and Cody James’ The Dead Beat. It also hosts The New Libertines and all sorts of other events.
I think I have become aware though that I can make most of a difference through very sharply focussed, very small events and editions. I also wanted to get back to my original intention with eight cuts gallery of something literary based on a model from the art world. As you probably know, I am obsessed with both Modernism and 20th century art, culminating in the Young British Art movement. Tracey Emin is the biggest influence on my own writing, and what I have felt for a long time is that to get people truly talking about what literature can do, we need more events like art’s Freeze and Sensation, and more figures like Jay Jopling and Nick Serota to push challenging literature into the public consciousness. I think the last time that really happened was in the 60s and 70s when Carmen Callil launched Virago and Lawrence Ferlinghetti brought the Beats to the world through City Lights. I’ve always thought of myself as some kind of very weak shadow of Ferlinghetti, the guy behind the scenes who writes himself but whose pleasure is bringing other people to the world.
Anna Percy will be reading at Penning Perfumes in Manchester on 23rd February. .