Editorial
Ox-bridges
In 2005 Neil Astley delivered a bilious StAnza lecture attacking the white male Oxbridge-educated ‘poetry police’, who publish white male Oxbridge educated poets writing about white male Oxbridge-related things for white male Oxbridge-educated readers. If Oxford Poetry has ever deserved such a Bloodaxing, we hope that this issue does not.
OP moves with its editors. Its offices are now somewhere between London and Florence. Windows open onto Wall Street (via Bunyah, Australia), Hydra and Acapulco. The Ox is not for the chop: a strong connection to the cultural happenings of the city and university of Oxford remains, with reviews of new collections from David Constantine and Polly Clark, and photographs from an artist in residence at the Ruskin; but our poets are of many breeds, and our reviewers have rounded up collections big and small, famous and infamous, on both sides of the Atlantic. No one senses ‘these new world conditions of center and periphery’ more than Susan Stewart, who sets sail for the antipodes on our behalf.
There are no stylistic, thematic or formal prescriptions for appearing in Oxford Poetry. We have no manifesto. The editors select simply what they believe to be the best of the solicited and unsolicited submissions. Here, the reader will find meditative discourse (John Fuller) alongside the humble snapshot (Kevin Halligan). Lyricists (Mark Wunderlich, Michael Nardone) cuddle up to cynics (Francis Gallagher, Mary O’Donnell) and wags (Adam O’Riordan). There is conceptual cleverness (C. E. J. Simons), metrical dexterity (C. J. Driver’s terza rima) and fancy unleashed (Caroline Bird).
Looking ahead
The second issue this year, due in the Autumn, will be dedicated to the memory of Mick Imlah, who successfully relaunched Oxford Poetry in 1983. He went on to Poetry Review and the TLS before publishing "The Lost Leader" with Faber in 2008. Tributes, essays and remembrances from Alan Hollinghurst, Alan Jenkins, Andrew Motion, James Fenton and many others will feature alongside unpublished Imlah poems.
The next opportunity to submit work will be for OP’s centenary year in 2010.
Congratulations
Only time will tell whether the fossilized feet of Homo poeticus are markers of a true species, or mere products of some pathological condition. But it is clear that the creature suffers from low self-esteem: is underappreciated, is rarely invited to court, wants subsistence. The community responses that have developed – from gentle pats on the back to public tub-thumping – are natural and inevitable.
No need to rehearse the arguments whether vestigial titles and honorific posts are worthwhile. There is no question, however, that Andrew Motion’s online Poetry Archive is a more lasting legacy than any occasional verse from a recent Poet Laureate. We wish Carol Ann Duffy similar and deserved success. As for the Oxford Professor of Poetry, we owe some loyalty to Ruth Padel, who reviewed anonymously in these pages (OP X.1). Nevertheless, we hope, at the time of writing, that congratulations are in order for Derek Walcott’s appointment this month.
Hope
There can be no doubt that poetry is greatly helped by its champions – and Walcott, for example, would make for the most inspiring figurehead – but poetry can be unassuming as well as self-important. It is epiphenomenal. Poetry occurs in between and in spite of. Poems are conceived walking down the street. They gestate in the bathwater and, later, pen in hand, they are agonizingly midwived, or miscarried. They live printed in little magazines and, from time to time, beyond them.
Here’s hoping that your copy of OP, once thumbed and enjoyed, slips onto your shelves, or down the back of the sofa; that it becomes part of the furniture.
Page(s) 5-6
magazine list
- Features
- zines
- 10th Muse
- 14
- Acumen
- Agenda
- Ambit
- Angel Exhaust
- ARTEMISpoetry
- Atlas
- Blithe Spirit
- Borderlines
- Brando's hat
- Brittle Star
- Candelabrum
- Cannon's Mouth, The
- Chroma
- Coffee House, The
- Dream Catcher
- Equinox
- Erbacce
- Fabric
- Fire
- Floating Bear, The
- French Literary Review, The
- Frogmore Papers, The
- Global Tapestry
- Grosseteste Review
- Homeless Diamonds
- Interpreter's House, The
- Iota
- Journal, The
- Lamport Court
- London Magazine, The
- Magma
- Matchbox
- Matter
- Modern Poetry in Translation
- Monkey Kettle
- Moodswing
- Neon Highway
- New Welsh Review
- North, The
- Oasis
- Obsessed with pipework
- Orbis
- Oxford Poetry
- Painted, spoken
- Paper, The
- Pen Pusher Magazine
- Poetry Cornwall
- Poetry London
- Poetry London (1951)
- Poetry Nation
- Poetry Review, The
- Poetry Salzburg Review
- Poetry Scotland
- Poetry Wales
- Private Tutor
- Purple Patch
- Quarto
- Rain Dog
- Reach Poetry
- Review, The
- Rialto, The
- Second Aeon
- Seventh Quarry, The
- Shearsman
- Smiths Knoll
- Smoke
- South
- Staple
- Strange Faeces
- Tabla Book of New Verse, The
- Thumbscrew
- Tolling Elves
- Ugly Tree, The
- Weyfarers
- Wolf, The
- Yellow Crane, The