News Archive
The Archive hosts recordings by over 60 UK–based poets, many of which have been newly commissioned, and individual webpages providing bibliographic information, sample texts, reviews, statements and graphic work by each of these poets. Files are available for free download. Over time, additional recordings, performances, video and other documentation will be posted on the site for these and other poets.
It is hoped that the Archive will offer new approaches to difficult poetries through the pleasures of vocal performance. The site is not-for-profit, and focuses on what can for brevity and controversy’s sake be called experimental or late modernist writing. The site will expand to include as many poets working within this tradition as possible; the present collection provides a foundation for discussion, enjoyment and study. Readers’ feedback will be essential in helping to structure and build this new resource.
The Archive is intended to facilitate conversations and collaboration, to support emerging writers and to contextualise the work of established practitioners within an extended and diverse literary community. It celebrates friendly exchange, cultural fortitude and solidarity. Rather than firing off another polemical volley in the boring ’poetry wars,’ it offers the multitude of practices of these extraordinary writers as a working definition of what experiment is, what banality is not, and where a politicised aesthetic might keep going from here.
Visitors to the website are encouraged to download, give feedback, link up and send your own links.