EDITORIAL: Junction Box 9

In a society whose creative instincts seem increasingly in thrall to business-centred principles of production and valuation, hampered by the demands of professionalisation, marketing imperatives, outcome measures and the specious like, it’s refreshing to know that there are still some rough-edged, improvised, human-centred pockets of resistance to such trends.

What a difference they make, these ebulliently bricolaged apparitions. In the poetry world alone, think how much has been contributed over the years by small mags, liliputian publishing ventures, independent reading series etc., in financial terms most of them probably utterly unviable, set up by people for the love of the thing, the excitement of getting into the mix. There’s no doubt that the texture of a culture is profoundly affected by such economically irreligious interventions; you might even say that a culture without them has no texture, is just a kind of shiny botoxed expanse over which pale reflected figures dance eternal. Quite often it turns out that in historical terms these rough knobbly bits actually were the culture – that everything creatively alive and fruitful flowed from them, although at the time not many people may have paid all that much attention to the fact.

These entities may be born in visions of delight, and from certain angles might even  seem to evince the seductive qualities of a romantic idyll, but close up it’s impossible not to recognize the signs of the sheer long term bloodyminded effort it takes to bring an idyll to the edge of realisation and keep it there. Important, then, to give them their due, to recall their histories and to praise their builders. Each edition to come of Junction Box will examine one of these ventures and we’re beginning in the art world with Swansea’s own Elysium Gallery, as vital and open and flexible a proposition as anything existing currently on the British scene.

It should be pointed out that some of the other contributors to this edition are now or have been at some point involved in the imauguration of lively innovative structures in their own field. Stephen Emmerson runs Blart Books; Steven Hitchins The Literary Pocket Book Press; Eleanor Perry co-edits, with Juha Virtanen, Datableed magazine; Louise Ashcroft, a multi-genre artist in her own right, masterminds the fabulous Floating Island Gallery, creating temporary working and exhibiting spaces for artists in buildings all around Britain. All this is something, much more than something, and we need to get behind all such adventures and help them to survive and grow, and not just to turn up to do our own act and then go away. We thank them, here, publically for those efforts and recommend to any reader that they seek out and explore their work.

Thanks to all the contributors for their generous and beguiling offerings to Junction Box 9. What’s occurring? We have poetry, prose poetry, theoretico-discursive poetry, essays, videos, speculations, memoirs, visions, DIY and a review. There are lyrical things, jarring, complex, funny, acid, intriguing, troubling and occasionally downright astonishing things. Junction Box 9: a little bristlingly mossy and complex idyll in its own right.

 

Lyndon Davies

 

Thanks are due to Penny Hallas for this edition’s featured image.

http://pennyhallas.co.uk

 

 

 

COMMENTS

2 Comments

  • Allen fisher

    I’m so glad pleased enthudiastic to receive this. Thank you.

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