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Poet Paul Stubbs: the primordial cry.

Posted by on November 27, 2011 in Articles | 4 Comments

I’m reading The Black Herald #2 in preparation for a review.

I wanted to share this quote by Paul Stubbs in his excellent introduction to the magazine (about which I will wax lyrical later)

“… It must at all costs remain the brutal single-mindedness of the writer to endure and locate what Paul Celan described as the ‘ways of a voice to a receptive you‘. And this should become de rigueur for all the mental processes that conclude with a language arriving at the nerve-terminals of experience before the act itself of writing. Any desire to write or read or worse, ‘talk’ about literature, should not be part of any kind of a pedagogical need or want, it should merely be by biological necessity that any discourse is begun. The ‘professional’ poetry ‘performer’, after a hard day ‘teaching’ at a creative workshop, will retire to his study to tell himself how important his work is – a depressing all-too-familiar tale  of the contemporary writer who works the ‘circuit’; and it is all mostly vacuous, whether by empty intellectual titillation or by constant self-gratification. For there is no literary ‘world’, there is (or should be) only the ongoing search for a language that might just begin to alter and destabilize, not just any redundant literary forms, but also entire biological systems of thought and ideas, and geographically solid terrains of mind.”

I will be reviewing this magazine in the next day or so, but in the meantime you can read more or purchase a copy here.