This interview is taken from PN Review 201, Volume 38 Number 1, September - October 2011.
Small Presses, Large Ambitionsa conversation between John Killick and Peter Sansom
JK: You published a sort of poem in The North 7 by Geoff Hattersley called 'Acknowledgements'. It begins:
[laughter]. And I thought, looking at that, does it not tell us something about the small press scene?
PS: Oh yes, it's lovely - so inventive and ludicrous.Writing Men as opposed to Writing Women, of course. And there's Ambit in Ambidextrous...
JK: Yes, there are puns, lots of ridiculous plays on words. But it's not just the funniness of it, it's a portrait of a lunatic fringe to the poetry scene. And it's rather charming, very wayward... and it's never going to get us anywhere, is it?
PS: The Wide Skirt took its name from the opening of Günter Grass's novel The Tin Drum - so the name has a kind of hidden seriousness - like many of the poets it published in fact. It was influential, wasn't it, it was a completely new place to see and be seen - the poets it published were often working-class and/or American-influenced, most of them new to the game or sidelined. There was an explosion of small presses and magazines around that time, the early eighties, that gave poets ...
are due to the following magazines/ periodicals
where some of these poems first appeared:
Ambidextrous Testicles; The Bleeding Heart's
Journal; Colonel Colonel; The Dog's Dinner;
Excuse me, I Have a Contagious Disease; The
Frozen Foreskin; Melville's Dark Anus US)...
[laughter]. And I thought, looking at that, does it not tell us something about the small press scene?
PS: Oh yes, it's lovely - so inventive and ludicrous.Writing Men as opposed to Writing Women, of course. And there's Ambit in Ambidextrous...
JK: Yes, there are puns, lots of ridiculous plays on words. But it's not just the funniness of it, it's a portrait of a lunatic fringe to the poetry scene. And it's rather charming, very wayward... and it's never going to get us anywhere, is it?
PS: The Wide Skirt took its name from the opening of Günter Grass's novel The Tin Drum - so the name has a kind of hidden seriousness - like many of the poets it published in fact. It was influential, wasn't it, it was a completely new place to see and be seen - the poets it published were often working-class and/or American-influenced, most of them new to the game or sidelined. There was an explosion of small presses and magazines around that time, the early eighties, that gave poets ...
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