Number 1
When pressed to say something, when pressed to utterance, we have the responsibility of response. Sometimes the most responsible thing to say is nothing at all, which is not nothing, since it is (often) a (profound) response. Saying something more than nothing entails a risk, it risks saying “we”. That pronoun risks exceeding itself improperly, irresponsibly, but the risk itself is, nevertheless, and also neverthemore, completely necessary. “We” always risks itself, “we” are always a risk, an impossibility that must risk its possibility…
We are sitting in Pat’s backyard, tapping away on three laptops, Nick is fielding calls. Pat has just made some excellent gnocchi, and now empty bowls with stains of red sauce are on the table with the computers. We are splicing sound, cropping images, shaping code, writing; trying to work out how to show this work best. We have tossed back and forth words like this – ‘showing’. ‘arranging’, ‘curating’ ‘exhibiting’ - trying to find out what it is we are doing.
We began gathering work for this collection simply by asking people whose work we admired. Issues grow in this way.
After a tragically predictable six months of namelessness ended, Pat and Nick quickly knocked up the ‘puzzle piece’ When Pressed icon by taking out the shape formed from the space between the E and the S in PRESSED and turning it on its side. This shape seemed to work as a talisman for the approach this collection has since taken. We all wordlessly agreed to allow design and language to talk to each other, an approach that was only natural given our different backgrounds and interests. I think: turning scribbled words into the cool invincibility of pixels, like walking with your mouth open…
This collection is both an exploration of the diverse practices being used by poets today, as well as a special feature on the work of Amanda Stewart. The selections chosen here look particularly at the correspondences between visual and aural inscription in her work. As anyone who has seen Amanda perform knows, her work pushes at the limits of what the voice can do, exploring voice as the fabric of speech, utterance and life-force.
Jason Nelson is one of the most adept artists at bringing language poetry and cultural geography, always playfully, into the digital context, and his collaboration here with Christine Hume continues to ply its wonderful messiness in an age of inviolable pixels. Dan Disney’s three poems function like meditative documentaries on three northern cities and the experience of travel, while Keri Glastonbury’s short sharp lines return to your mind like lines in an askew pop gem. Prague-based poet and artist Louis Armand has three pieces in this issue, including the exquisite long poem Circus Days. In Derek Motion’s essay, he looks openly at his own writing and the inventive processes that keep it awake and moving; while Tom Lee’s series of poems create hypnogogic spaces within the domestic. Michael Farrell’s poems continue an interest in exploring and remixing and thinking again about colonialist poetry. Patrick Jones work says: Stand on a city street at an odd angle, and this – of course, why not? - is poetry.
The first issue, like the first pancake, can look a little strange (but no less delicious, uncovered from the bottom of the stack). Be patient. Give it time. It’s a test, a stretch to see what can be done. The website will go on to be different things that we, always anterior, couldn’t have thought of.