I received a copy of this jour­nal in the mail a few days ago. It’s one of the most inter­est­ing new jour­nals of poetry I’ve seen in years: a U.S. / UK pro­duc­tion, New Haven / London.

http://www.hotgunjournal.com/

You can view the Table of Con­tents by putting your mouse over the cover image. (The strange visual effect of this cover is ren­dered by a reversed, remov­able “wrap band” that enfolds the issue, i.e., the top­less woman on the front cover is accom­pa­nied by the famous B.R. Haydon por­trait of Wordsworth on the back, but the breasts of the woman, on the wrap, are super­im­posed on the face of William on the back, while the face of Wordsworth is super­im­posed on the front, where the breasts of the woman should be. I have no idea if I’m making any sense in the attempted descrip­tion of that.)

I’ve so far read the intro­duc­tory pieces by the edi­tors, the essay on Women and Lan­guage Poetry, by Emily Critch­ley, and the two essay-​reviews on Keston Sutherland’s “Hot White Andy” by J.H. Prynne and Neil Pat­ti­son. The piece by Prynne is a rare review by him. I’ve heard a rumor that the Guardian com­mis­sioned this review from him, then turned it down upon sub­mis­sion, in pun­ish­ment (the request was a set-​up, the rumor goes) for Prynne’s “rude” refusal of poems to a recent Oxford com­pi­la­tion of the country’s poetry. I hope that’s true. It’s fated to be a famous anec­dote, if so.

Some read­ers of dig­i­tal emu­nc­tion will know of the spe­cial issue on new British Poetry from Chicago Review nearly two (or is it three?) years ago. Sutherland’s “Hot White Andy,” which a few com­men­ta­tors have by now spoken of as one of the most impor­tant and orig­i­nal English-​language poetic achieve­ments of the past decades (see, for exam­ple, John Wilkinson’s essay in Jacket), had its first U.S. appear­ance there. Some read­ers of DE will also know that this spe­cial issue received vir­tu­ally Zero notice from the U.S. “post-​avant” crowd: nary a word in the mag­a­zines, zilch on the blogs.

Why this would be is some­thing of a small scan­dal and mys­tery. One might spec­u­late the silence has had not a little to do with cer­tain sharply crit­i­cal atti­tudes toward U.S. Lan­guage poetry held and expressed by a number of the younger British poets writ­ing “out of” Prynne (my own brief essay of some years back, for exam­ple, crit­i­ciz­ing the Lan­guage poets for their atti­tude toward Poets Against the War was appar­ently Xeroxed and passed out by Sean Bonney and com­rades, as people filed in for a read­ing by Charles Bern­stein in London). But who knows? I’m cur­rently in process of dis­cussing some of this bril­liantly artic­u­lated ago­nism with Suther­land in a con­ver­sa­tion we’re having, to be pub­lished as part of a book next year, by Richard Owens’s Damn the Cae­sars Press.

In any case, you can still order the British Poetry issue of CR here.

Trust me, it’s worth it. There’s even a fold-​out map of Post-​War UK poetry inside, by the poet and critic Andrew Duncan.

But if you do order the British Poetry issue, make sure you also order Hot Gun! It’s the per­fect com­ple­ment to it.

We’ve got a lot to learn from the Brits, mates.