In a society\u00a0whose creative instincts\u00a0seem increasingly\u00a0in thrall to business-centred principles of production and valuation, hampered by\u00a0the demands of professionalisation, marketing imperatives,\u00a0outcome measures and the specious\u00a0like,\u00a0it’s refreshing to know that there are still some rough-edged, improvised, human-centred pockets of resistance to such trends.<\/p>\n
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\u00a0publishing 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\u00a0were<\/em> 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.<\/p>\n These entities may be\u00a0born in visions of delight, and from certain angles might even \u00a0seem to evince the seductive\u00a0qualities of a romantic idyll, but\u00a0close up\u00a0it’s impossible not to recognize the\u00a0signs of the\u00a0sheer long term\u00a0bloodyminded\u00a0effort it takes to bring an idyll to the edge of realisation and keep it there. Important, then, to give\u00a0them\u00a0their due, to recall\u00a0their histories and to praise\u00a0their 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\u00a0the British\u00a0scene.<\/p>\n 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;\u00a0Louise Ashcroft, a multi-genre artist in her own right, masterminds\u00a0the fabulous Floating Island Gallery, creating temporary working and exhibiting spaces for artists in buildings all around Britain.\u00a0All 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\u00a0and then go away. We thank them, here, publically for those efforts and recommend to any reader that they seek out and explore their work.<\/p>\n 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\u00a0lyrical 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.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Lyndon Davies<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Thanks are due to Penny Hallas for this edition’s featured image.<\/p>\n