If you’re interested in contemporary poetry — and you’re already reading this, so — there’s something you should treat yourself this summer.
It’s the new issue of the Dublin-based The Stinging Fly. As well as being a rich gathering of new poems (including several in Irish with English translations), it contains the best set of critical writings on poetry I’ve ever seen in one magazine. Cal Doyle, who edited this special Poetry issue, deserves some sort of Special Poetry Issue Editor award.
Why, yes: I’m in it, with an essay called “Get in Line: Poetry and the Flow of Form”, about various things, from the e-books of John Ashbery to recalling lines of poetry during lockdown (and, overall, arguing in favour of poems that look like prose).
But here are just a few other reasons — in the form of sentences about poetry — why you need The Stinging Fly Summer 2022 in your life, and why I will be asking my MA Poetry students to read and discuss it this autumn — it’s an education:
I’m really interested in something we all have in common but rarely think or talk about; something Denise Riley, following Beckett, describes as “the voice without a mouth that is inner speech”. My hunch is that lyric is the form of writing closest to this voice without a mouth.
Gail McConnell, “On lyric”
Working on the poetics of Old Norse and the implications of translating Old Norse into English for my doctorate […] it was shiningly obvious to me that any text, translated or not, is soaked in the unwritten; that receiving any text involves listening to failure, in the weightlifting sense of “training to failure”, that is, to the point where something becomes impossible, unbearable.
Vahni Anthony Capildeo, “Notes on the power of the unwritten”
For poets the music of the poem is something we’re heard by, harmed by, it isn’t ours to possess, it’s something we’re allusive to, it isn’t ours to clarify, it’s a method that demands the dethroning of speech, it isn’t ours to cash in on.
Holly Pester, “On music”
For all my various loose-cannon moments in those days, I became aware that my thing, as a critic, was very much more telling people to go read Gwen Harwood, George Oppen or Kamau Brathwaite, than placing myself on stand-by to squash the latest folly of the age.
David Wheatley, quoted in Kenneth Keating, “Metre Poetry Magazine, 1996—2005”
about [the] england magpoemscene — since Allen Ginsberg arrived early May, a wierd [sic] poem fever has infected the whole country. Everything happening every day. And now he’s left, the fever still raging — thank god.
Lee Harwood to Ted Berrigan, 4th July 1965, quoted in Nick Sturm, “‘Wivenhoe is enrolling en masse’: Notes on the New York School in the UK”
Plenty of gossip sits in these pages, but no narrative prose fiction. It’s glorious.
Cal Doyle, “Editorial”
Print and PDF editions are available to order here: https://stingingfly.org/product/summer-2022/