Free Poetry, Wordless Books, and Not a Literary Festival by Dan Holloway
A last minute edit to add a touch of controversy. This is from an interview with Adelle Stripe, who is headlining next week's Not the Oxford Literary Festival which I have been running for 4 years now. In 2006 she was the founder of Brutalism, often called the first literary movement spawned by the internet, and her latest collection, Dark Corners of the Land was 3am's 2012 Poetry Book of the Year (and the best poetry book published in the UK in many years IMO). What she says could apply just as much to contemporary prose as contremporary poetry and is an object lesson to all of us when we think that what we need is to produce better-edited, more professional works in order to make our mark. “Most poetry I have come across in recent anthologies has a peculiar corpse-like quality to it. It’s as though you have walked into an art gallery, and under glass boxes, on whitewashed plinths, sit a collection of porcelain roses. They are elegant to observe, immaculately rendered, objects...