Angel Exhaust 22

(from Andrew Duncan)        Angel Exhaust 22

The false, heroic head he once lifted above more or less the same crowd as that to which Captain Fuller and the anarchist Aldred proclaimed the new aeon has become cumbersome, monstrous. In the dim stale light it resembles nothing so much as the skull of a horse, but is sealed, lacking all seven apertures.

At length he becomes too irked by my pursuit to ignore it further and makes as if to summon me, but no power resides in him now, and when he swivels to claw at my shirt, the effect is merely comic. So he turns and brushes his fingers against the hedge wall afresh, flustered.

AE is overwhelmed by the wealth of material in this issue. First, we print book V of ‘The Memory of the Drift’ in its entirety. Next, a David Chaloner memorial. By singular good fortune AE has been given access to the archive of his letters. We chose a time of dialogue with John Hall. David's poems take place in a 'permanent present' and these remarkable letters are meant to recover a 'deep present', the Now in which the poems were written. This feature presents a moment of time preserved like a crystal, a formative moment for poetry. It is 1969 and: & just abt to begin Jeremy Prynne's book The White Stones have you seen that at all What have you been doing since our last letter & where are your poems appearing I've not seen any for such a long time Did you see the last copy of collection & the last resuscitator I thought you'd've been there

Then, we open the window on a new generation with an anthology of Ninerrors poems. This field is so new that it can't be described. The concept is ‘Twin Peaks': two moments, one of around 1969 and one of 2010. There is a 'continuity of the unknown' and the course of brilliant innovation which David was embarking on resembles the course of the poets around Freaklung.

as the freedom of information act failed to demand a
supposed ‘transparency of normal speech’, it turns upon
us to decolonize rhetoric & the wider sphere of language,
syllable-by-syllable. we are to start with ‘radical’, ‘fairness’,
‘social’ & it’s derivatives, ‘rhetoric’, ‘free’ & words used in
justifying a notion;
there is now animal fat in the extinguishers; we have begun to
bribe refuse collections;
we have deduced the frequencies of sound that enact violence
on private property, we
are counting heads

Maybe the comparison allows us a sense of deep time, the experience at levels beneath consciousness of a ‘group identity’, always dissolving in time but sustained by the linguistic or symbolic net of shared poems.

The third strand is what magazines are signed up for, a display of new poems and some information.

Poems by: Colin Simms, Rhys Trimble, Paul Holman, John Powell Ward, Graham Hartill, David Barnett, Harry Godwin, Nat Raha, Alan Hay, RTA Parker, SJ Fowler, Linus Slug, Gareth Durasow, Stephen Emmerson, Owain Lee, James Harvey, Michael Zand.

When we subtract the certain and the possible, there is the new poetry. What will they think of the poetry of the recent past?

160 pp. cost £7.00 including postage. cheques payable to Andrew Duncan. at 21 Querneby Road, Nottingham, Notts NG3 5JA.