a style from a despair.

ILK journal, edited by Caroline Crew, is now online, along with its first issue. Its manifesto is certainly bracing:

1. We want to sing the love of danger, the habit of energy and rashness.
2. The essential elements of our poetry will be courage, audacity and revolt.
3. Literature has up to now magnified pensive immobility, ecstasy and slumber. We want to exalt movements of aggression, feverish sleeplessness, the double march, the perilous leap, the slap and the blow with the fist.

An amusing article with some almost serious conclusions about how, as I have been thinking lately, contemporary poetry spreads itself rather thinly.

For the past several years, I’ve taught a class at the University of Pennsylvania called “Uncreative Writing.” In it, students are penalized for showing any shred of originality and creativity. Instead they are rewarded for plagiarism, identity theft, repurposing papers, patchwriting, sampling, plundering, and stealing. Not surprisingly, they thrive. Suddenly what they’ve surreptitiously become expert at is brought out into the open and explored in a safe environment, reframed in terms of responsibility instead of recklessness.
We retype documents and transcribe audio clips. We make small changes to Wikipedia pages (changing an “a” to “an” or inserting an extra space between words). We hold classes in chat rooms, and entire semesters are spent exclusively in Second Life. Each semester, for their final paper, I have them purchase a term paper from an online paper mill and sign their name to it, surely the most forbidden action in all of academia. Students then must get up and present the paper to the class as if they wrote it themselves, defending it from attacks by the other students. What paper did they choose? Is it possible to defend something you didn’t write? Something, perhaps, you don’t agree with? Convince us.

The Poetry Society’s National Poetry Competition closes for entries on the 31st of October. The first prize is £5,000. I wrote about last year’s winner, Paul Adrian, back in March. Currently I am trying to write a poem for it about animals & personal hygiene & (unsurprisingly) it is not quite working out.

The theme is ‘skin’. I sit & try to think of what poems I know that are about skin.

It is a great journal; I reviewed its second issue. You can read the first & second issues here.