SHEARSMAN BOOKS
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This page contains a list of recommended web links, which will take you to sites that I have found to be of use and/or of interest. Click on the red buttons to go to sections further down the page, or just scroll down.
Webzines Poetry Library of Great Britain — Online magazine database – includes some back issues of Shearsman, but also several other magazines, rare old issues and more recent publications alike. An invaluable resource with good design. Jacket is the best literary webzine that I have come across. Edited by Australian poet John Tranter, Jacket pursues a resolutely independent path, but is markedly friendly to the more innovative strain in modern writing. The magazine is genuinely international in character. Jacket is actually off the web. The Argotist is a busy new website, edited by Jeffrey Side, and carries poems, essays and interviews with a wide range of authors. alligatorzine is a Dutch/English magazine edited by Kurt Devrese in Ghent. The Drunken Boat – a fine US-based webzine. Fascicle – edited by Tony Tost, this is the best newcomer on the block. A huge compendium of fascinating material, both original English-language poetry and translations. New issues come about once a year. Flashpoint – A mixture of the fascinating and the infuriating. Worth the time, though. Free Verse – Good US webzine; poetry, interviews, and essays. Issue 9 had a good section of "experimental" Irish poetry, which features a number of Shearsman authors. Freebase Accordion – Peter Manson's site, which is not really a magazine but is close enough. GreatWorks – Peter Philpott's webzine. Of particular interest here is Philpott's own long poem sequence In the Present Historic Sense, which is in the archive area now, but can be accessed from the Quick Index. That long poem-sequence has since been collected in Peter Philpott's Shearsman volume Textual Possessions. Well worth constant checks, as the site updates with new work frequently. Green Integer Review — edited by Douglas Messerli, this is an online offshoot of the excellent Green Integer Press. First issue was in January 2006. The link here takes you to the press home page; cick on the Review link top-right to get to the 'zine. Intercapillary Space — Edmund Hardy's blogzine, which includes poems and book reviews, new in January 2006. This 'zine has provided a welcome home for some quality reviewing, interviews, essays and, more recently, new poetry. Litter is a promising online magazine, and an offshoot of Nottingham's excellent Leafe Press. Pages – is the online continuation of Robert Sheppard's long-dormant journal. Poetry and criticism, and well worth following. It's in a blog format which is ideal for this venture. PORES - which stands for POetry RESearch. Some excellent stuff here for serious students of poetry. Shadow Train – Ian Seed's monthly online magazine. It's made a promising start with its first few issues and bids fair to become an important part of the landscape. Slope – long-running webzine and small press. Good design, usually interesting contents, and this is one American zine that looks across its national borders. Stride Magazine – webzine from the Exeter publishing house Stride (see below). Well worth following. Tarpaulin Sky – new online journal from an interesting US publisher. The website has one of the best designs I've seen in recent times and navigation is easy. Good work, mostly from the experimental end of the spectrum, but seemingly without adherence to any particular school. Terrible Work – webzine successor to the Plymouth-based print publication, but wholly devoted to reviews. It seems that the editors are doing their best to maintain a welcome-all-comers approach, while still making it clear what really interests them. This is one to bookmark / add to favourites (depending on your browser), as it's one of the few places where you can find out what's been published by the UK small presses and, what's more, often get a review of it. The site is worth visiting frequently since updates seem to occur more or less as the reviews are ready. Aesthetica — cultural journal in the UK, with some material also online. Chicago Review is probably the best literary journal from a US university at the present time. I'm biased because I've contributed to it and also co-edited a special issue in 2002, but it's fair to say that anyone who likes what they see in Shearsman or in the jacket webzine will like Chicago Review. If the link doesn't work, paste this in to your browser address field instead: http://humanities.uchicago.edu/orgs/review/ Dark Horse is a Scottish-American poetry magazine with a rather more conservative approach than I normally enjoy, but it's hard to argue with the nose for quality demonstrated by recent issues. This website has excerpts from current and past issues which can be downloaded as PDFs. Despite the Scottish-American axis, work is taken from elsewhere too. First Intensity Fine magazine from deepest Kansas. The Gig is a magazine devoted to modern UK poetry, as well as US and Canadian work, edited from Canada by Nate Dorward, which is consistently worth reading. Mandorla is a bilingual English/Spanish magazine now published from the University of Illinois. It's an invaluable resource in both languages. Nerter is a Spanish magazine edited by Manuel Brito, who also produces the English-language (but mostly with North American content) Zasterle Press books from La Laguna in the Canary Islands (see below for Zasterle). PN Review Often thought of as conservative and dull, PNR is in fact well worth reading in its role as the house organ of the Carcanet Press. Every issue has something of interest somewhere and most recent issues have been full of excellent material. poetryfoundation.org — Website for the magazine Poetry (Chicago); new as of early 2006, and full of interesting material. Well worth tracking on a regular basis. Poetry Salzburg Review – Austrian magazine devoted to (largely) British poetry. Good reviews section, and an increasingly interesting selection of original material. This magazine has been growing into one that needs to be read seriously. Poetry Society of Great Britain & Poetry Review The magazine improved greatly under the editorship of David Herd and Robert Potts, and under Fiona Sampson it continues to be good, if on a slightly different path. Rain Taxi is a fine US-based magazine. Excellent reviews section. Tinfish — magazine and small press producing interesting work in Hawaii, mostly from the USA and the Pacific Rim. Edited by poet Susan Schultz. A good place to find material that doesn't turn up in regular magazines in quantity. Anvil Press Poetry Rather conservative small-press with a fine record. Authors include Michael Hamburger, Harry Guest, Carol Ann Duffy, Paul Celan, Vasko Popa, Ivan Lalic, Marius Kociejowski. Excellent translation series. Their books are superbly produced. Bad Press Interesting new press started by Marianne Morris but also involving Jow Lindsay and Jonathan Stevenson. There are stylistic and political overlaps with Barque (see below) but Bad Press seems to be attempting to establish its own niche as a younger-generation alternative / innovative press. Worth tracking. Barque Press New-ish Cambridge publishing house devoted to younger authors and the occasional senior figure such as J H Prynne or John Wilkinson. Carcanet Press Manchester-based publisher of PN Review and a solid list of poetry volumes. Duration Press – US site for Duration and a number of other small presses and journals. Good archive of downloadable e-books, including the complete run of Jennifer Moxley & Steve Evans's journal The Impercipient dating from the early-mid 1990s. Flarestack Poetry – site for the Somerset-based publisher of poetry chapbooks and the magazine Obsessed with Pipework. Both sides of the enterprise are worth tracking and show commendable taste. Back issues of the magazine can be seen at the Poetry Library's Poetry Magazines site. hardPressed Poetry Irish publishing and mail-order operation, run by Shearsman author Billy Mills. Kater Murr – David Miller's publishing venture, with useful links. National Poetry Foundation Publishers of Paideuma and Sagetrieb magazines as well as the invaluable Man and Poet / Woman and Poet series of biographical/critical anthologies. Phylum Press – remarkable small press in the US (and currently based in New Haven, CT), run by Richard Deming and Nancy Kuhl. Their chapbooks are fascinating collaborations between artists and poets and are given away free to the deserving. A press worth following. Poetry Salzburg – Austrian publisher of British poetry, including David Miller's Collected Poems, and the magazine Poetry Salzburg Review. Qua Books – Ambitious new press based in Rhode Island, run by Michael Gizzi and Craig Watson, and producing on average one book per annum. Worth checking in every now and again to discover their publishing plans. Reality Street Editions Publisher of consistently challenging new work, now based in Hastings. Well worth supporting: the current list and forthcoming publications show that the press is continiung to grow. Publisher is poet (& Shearsman author) Ken Edwards. Salt Publishing A fast-expanding press which produces books by poets from the UK, the USA and Australia, well-known and not-well-enough-known. The press has a fine site that showcases its astonishingly ambitious publishing programme, and also has a webstore from which you can buy their own titles as well as those published by Shearsman, Stride, and other independent presses. Stride Formerly Exeter-based, but now ensconced in Cornwall, Stride is a publisher of poetry and prose of an innovative persuasion, mainly British and American. Also publisher of the webzine Stride magazine (see link & description above). Tarpaulin Sky – print publisher allied to the excellent online mag of the same name. I've not read the titles, but designs look splendid and the general tone of the list looks very positive. Wild Honey Press Based in Co. Wicklow, Ireland, not far from Dublin, poet Randolph Healy has produced a number of fine hand-stitched chapbooks under the Wild Honey imprint. An excellent place to start for anyone interested in the Irish late-modernist poets, many of whom (Trevor Joyce, Billy Mills, Maurice Scully, Catherine Walsh) have also been published by Shearsman. Zasterle Press is edited by Manuel Brito from La Laguna in the Canary Islands, and is mostly devoted to North American avant-garde work, in English. The books are distributed by SPD in the USA. Ulrike Draesner is one of the best contemporary German poets. Her website provides excerpts from her various books, photographs, and details of her readings etc. In German only. Andrew Duncan is a frequent contributor to Shearsman and author of two Shearsman collections. He is also well-known for his trenchant critical essays. This website contains a large number of unpublished essays and reviews which will fascinate or annoy you, depending upon your point of view or, perhaps, whether you are the target of one of his criticisms. Sometimes wrong-headed, always entertaining, this site is well worth a trawl for those of you with an interest in modern British poetry. There's even a very amusing essay on modern German poetry which I would recommend to those of you interested in that field. Almost guaranteed to offend someone. Peter Finch has long been a fixture on the UK small-press scene, as editor, poet, performer, bookseller, promoter and Lord knows what else. This site is very well-designed and entertaining. Irish writers in the modernist tradition. Trevor Joyce Shearsman Books author – this site contains more of his work, more for you to sample before buying his splendid Collected Poems, with the first dream of fire they hunt the cold. Palabra virtual – Latin American anthology online: Antología de poesía hispanoamericana — this also includes Spanish writers, so it's not quite what it says on the tin. It is nonetheless a fascinating and informative database of work that is very difficult to get hold of by other means. It's an essential resource: according to the entry page they have 772 poets and some 5,500 poems on the site. I could spend hours in it; come to think of it, I already have. Mexican poets of a younger generation than I had previously come across can be found at El Cocodrilo Poeta Virtual. Check out the Antología section for a number of complete books. The music that comes with it is irritating, but the poetry ranges from the excellent (Claudia Hernández de Valle-Arizpe, Ernesto Lumbreras, for instance) to the merely interesting. Nothing worse than that, which suggests that the editorial hand is good. The site contains the complete texts of a number of hard-to-find volumes, usually a few years old, but none the worse for that. Tom Raworth's own site. Lots of entertaining material here, including photos, artwork, bibliography, corrections for typos in the author's 2004 Collected Poems, itinerary, reading schedules etc etc. Peter Riley's website contains a lot of useful information on his work as well as biographical data and selections from his work. Ron Silliman's poetry is not really for me (at least thus far), but his weblog is consistently stimulating. I try to catch up on it at least once a week. John Tranter – editor of jacket (see above) and one of Australia's finest, has two sites devoted to his poetry. One is devoted to the early work, and the other to more recent work. The AA Independent Press Guide – A free online guide to literary magazines and publishers compiled by Dee Rimbaud. British Electronic Poetry Centre – still under development at Southampton University, but progress is worth monitoring. Factory School – The Factory School Digital Audio Archive contains a large number of digital transcriptions of live readings. All kinds of gems here that you can stream to your desktop: Brathwaite, Berrigan, Bronk, Bunting, Creeley, HD, Dorn, Duncan etc etc etc and a fine 20-odd minute reading from the year 2000 by Tom Raworth. There's also some really weird readings by Pound of Mauberley and some of the Cantos. His reading of Canto 1 in particular is a travesty, but it's a glimpse of another age and of a man who probably got his reading style from Yeats. There's even one of Pound's WW2 radio broadcasts, which you can just about understand through the static. You'll need Real Player or RealOne Player to hear these but most modern browsers have them installed already. Mac OS X users can now download an OS X-compatible version of RealOne Player, so they're no longer excluded. Famous Poets and Poems.com is an interesting new venture in the USA which displays the work of a large number of classic poets, as well as a number of modern figures. The selection leans towards North America, inevitably, but there is a lot of good work to be had here. Treat it as a virtual library or as a huge anthology. Well-designed site and easily navigable. The best of its kind for English-language poetry that I have yet seen, and it can only get better as it adds more poets. Little Magazines Directory - UK and Ireland only. Little Magazines Project at Nottingham Trent University. Lollipop – List of Little magazines and small presses. The Page – is a guide to current writing on the web - poetry, poetics, etc. Useful portal. Poetry Library of Great Britain — Online magazine database. This went online in 2003 and includes the early series of Shearsman (1981-2), as well as the first 10 issues of the current series. Apart from Shearsman, the magazines featured are: Ambit; Blithe Spirit; Borderlines; Brando's hat; Dream Catcher; Fabric; Fire; Magma; Oasis; Obsessed with pipework; Orbis; Painted, spoken; Poetry Nation, Smiths Knoll, The Coffee House, The Frogmore Papers, The Interpreter's House, The London Magazine, The North and Thumbscrew. Other magazines are added from time to time. There's a lot of good material in there, and it's particularly good to see magazines included which have never had a web presence, such as Oasis and Fire. The Poetry Kit – List of mags and publishers. Spencer Selby's list. An invaluable list of magazines worldwide that are committed to innovative and challenging poetry. An excellent place to start if you're exploring this complicated little universe. There is now a page devoted to this subject here. |
