Skip to main content

Battersea Press Release: A New Source of Poetic Energy

Press release: The Battersea Review: for immediate release

The staff:

Publisher and Managing Editor: Umit Singh Dhuga
Contributing Editors: Ben Mazer, Philip Nikolayev, Todd Swift (UK), Jeet Thayil (India)
Art Director: Drew Vanderveen

Editorial Offices: USA

Editorial and Business Contact: email Umit Singh Dhuga at usd2001@caa.columbia.edu

The magazine will appear quarterly, in both online and print formats. The first issue will debut on the Battersea Review website, http://thebatterseareview.com/ ; on June 1. The print version of Vol. 1, No. 1 will appear in September.


Submissions are rolling, i.e. read continuously, as we are a quarterly.
Exceptional criticism or prose is especially desired.

There are two versions of the cover floating around facebook. The one that includes Todd Swift's name (the one that appears most recently on my own wall) is the most recent one, but three names are yet to be added to the cover: Greg Delanty, Anna Razumnaya, David Meltzer.

Contributors include: Ben Mazer (the entirety of 'The King'), Philip Nikolayev ('Juvenilia'), Stephen Sturgeon, Gerard Malanga, Todd Swift, Katia Kapovich, Jeet Thayil, John Hennessy, Stephen Burt, Joe Green, Robert Archambeau, Greg Delanty, David Meltzer, Ailbhe Darcy, Kathleen Rooney, Ernest Hilbert, Matthew Silverman, Mark Schorr, Unpublished Weldon Kees, edited and introduced by James Reidel, Nora Delaney on Archie Burnett's Philip Larkin, Mario Murgia on translating Ariosto, and Anna Razumnaya on the interrogation of Mandelstam and 'The Stalin Epigram'.

Editorial Policy:
The Battersea Review seeks especially gifted poets and people who can write first rate critical essays. We may at times be looking for critical essays on particular topics or written in a diversity of modes. 1940s poetry or poets could be a topic of particular interest. Any really brilliant essay analysing first rate poetry to a greater degree of precision and complexity and definition than one would ordinarily find in a contemporary literary essay would be highly suitable to our pages. We are hoping for a revival of first rate criticism, and that Empson for example would be familiar reading to the serious critic. We want aesthetic criticism, and we want philosophical criticism. Historical criticism is also of interest. We also want material from the past, biographical essays that are original and cover uncharted territory, works in various forms such as letters or interviews or transcriptions, first rate verse drama, essays about first rate contemporary poets, and of course exceptional poetry. Brilliant hairbrained schemes are always acceptable. Oh, and topics of especial interest are (in no particular order) Keith Douglas, Henry Reed, poets of the 1940s, Donald Davie, Empson, Richards, A. S. Eddington, the Order of the Golden Dawn, Yeats, Beckett, T. S. Eliot, Hart Crane, Robert Lowell, Robert Graves, Dylan Thomas, aesthetics, classical poetry, Indian poetry, Scottish and Welsh poetry, British cinema of the 1940s, the BBC radio, The Criterion, Encounter, poetry of earlier periods, essays about distribution and communication in the modern period, essays about distribution and communication in the cold war period, royalty, the Anglican church, Rome, and espionage. This is not a complete list, but only meant to be suggestive. We are not looking for prose that is blatantly academic, except where it suits some dignified purpose.

Comments

Delighted to see Keith Douglas, 1940s poets, Yeats, Eliot, and espionage as subjects of particular interest for this journal - some of my absolute favourite topics - it sounds amazing!
This sounds like an exciting new poetry journal. I look forward to reading the first issue in June.

Christian Ward

Popular posts from this blog

IQ AND THE POETS - ARE YOU SMART?

When you open your mouth to speak, are you smart?  A funny question from a great song, but also, a good one, when it comes to poets, and poetry. We tend to have a very ambiguous view of intelligence in poetry, one that I'd say is dysfunctional.  Basically, it goes like this: once you are safely dead, it no longer matters how smart you were.  For instance, Auden was smarter than Yeats , but most would still say Yeats is the finer poet; Eliot is clearly highly intelligent, but how much of Larkin 's work required a high IQ?  Meanwhile, poets while alive tend to be celebrated if they are deemed intelligent: Anne Carson, Geoffrey Hill , and Jorie Graham , are all, clearly, very intelligent people, aside from their work as poets.  But who reads Marianne Moore now, or Robert Lowell , smart poets? Or, Pound ?  How smart could Pound be with his madcap views? Less intelligent poets are often more popular.  John Betjeman was not a very smart poet, per se.  What do I mean by smart?

"I have crossed oceans of time to find you..."

In terms of great films about, and of, love, we have Vertigo, In The Mood for Love , and Casablanca , Doctor Zhivago , An Officer and a Gentleman , at the apex; as well as odder, more troubling versions, such as Sophie's Choice and  Silence of the Lambs .  I think my favourite remains Bram Stoker's Dracula , with the great immortal line "I have crossed oceans of time to find you...".

THE SWIFT REPORT 2023

I am writing this post without much enthusiasm, but with a sense of duty. This blog will be 20 years old soon, and though I rarely post here anymore, I owe it some attention. Of course in 2023, "Swift" now means one thing only, Taylor Swift, the billionaire musician. Gone are the days when I was asked if I was related to Jonathan Swift. The pre-eminent cultural Swift is now alive and TIME PERSON OF THE YEAR. There is no point in belabouring the obvious with delay: 2023 was a low-point in the low annals of human history - war, invasion, murder, in too many nations. Hate, division, the collapse of what truth is, exacerbated by advances in AI that may or may not prove apocalyptic, while global warming still seems to threaten the near-future safety of humanity. It's been deeply depressing. The world lost some wonderful poets, actors, musicians, and writers this year, as it often does. Two people I knew and admired greatly, Ian Ferrier and Kevin Higgins, poets and organise