Poetry Magazines - The best collection of poetry magazines online - Simon Armitage

Strange Attractor: Journal Three edited by Mark Pilkington (Strange Attractor, £13.99) 304pp.
Available from www.strangeattractor.co.uk

The third issue of Mark Pilkington’s Strange Attractor: A Journal of Unpopular Culture declares its intention upfront:  “We declare war on mediocrity and a pox on the foot soldiers of stupidity. Join us”. As mission statements go it has the virtue of aiming high, but more surprisingly the magazine itself goes a long way towards fulfilling its promise. Beautifully designed and lavishly illustrated, this is like a version of Granta designed for those whose intellectual curiosity extends beyond the broadsheet literary supplements. In truth, Strange Attractor seems to be quietly redefining the possibilities of a magazine of new writing, blending fact and speculation, essays and studies of artworks, phenomena and places that have fallen off the edges of the cultural map. Some is certainly recondite, as in Catherine Eisner’s ‘Contra Genesis’, a sampling of medical case histories of “extra-genital conception, extra-uterine gestation and other anomalous exits”, or Erik Davis’ ‘Burmese Daze’, in which the author visits a present-day “transgender spirit possession festival” in Burma. Like Richard Rudgley’s ‘A Psychoactive Bestiary’, which catalogues the hallucinogenic effects of various living organisms and their secretions, and undermines the idea that drug use is necessarily unnatural, both pieces touch on questions of pressing concern in contemporary life. After all, when the concept of a ‘normal’ birth becomes subject to technological and genetic intervention, or ideas of the opposition between sexual blurring and traditional cultures are widely, and wrongly, assumed, it seems more than reasonable to discuss the byways and wrinkles that disprove and complicate our cherished certainties. Elsewhere, Ken Hollings explores the fictional sonic exotica of the 1950s American musician Martin Denny, Gary Lachman looks at the influence of the nineteenth-century spiritualist Annie Besant’s book Thought Forms and its role in the development of abstract painting when its illustrations were adopted by artists such as Kandinsky and Mondrian, and David Rothenberg writes about the elaborate collaged screens made by the Danish author and fairy-tale creator Hans Christian Andersen. The writing throughout is excellent, and whether it is Robert Irwin discussing the ideas of Arab alchemist Abu’l-Qasim al Iraqi or contemporary artist Richard Brown describing the alchemy of a series of evolving ‘electrochemical glass’ pictures, the complexity of the ideas never overwhelms the sheer pleasure of the prose. Doug Skinner offers an introduction to the surrealist poet Xavier Forneret, Alexis Lykiard looks at Arthur Koestler’s Encyclopedia of Sexual Knowledge, Stewart Home offers a satirical and highly entertaining account of his efforts to become a conceptual artist in London and John Reppion’s ‘The Mole Of Edge Hill’ excavates the intricate network of tunnels – its true extent still being uncovered today - built beneath the city of Liverpool by philanthropist Joseph Williamson. Add further items on Victorian time-travel entertainments, medieval legends concerning Virgil and a house of unknown authorship in provincial France, entirely encrusted in dolls and known as La Maison de Poupées, and this latest issue of Strange Attractor ought to be on the radar of any reader with an adventurous spirit and a desire to track down good writing on fascinating subjects of every kind except the familiar.