This is a beautifully produced, intelligent and forward looking new magazine; it deserves our FULL SUPPORT.
Charles Boyle’s ‘Preamble’ minces no words:
A word on independent bookshops, whose quarter-page adverts in this issue were offered free. Without good small bookshops it is very hard for small publishers to get their books out into the physical world. In February 2014 the Booksellers Association reported that the number of independent bookshops in the UK had fallen below 1,000, following on a year-on-year decline over the previous decade. This massacre is in part the consequence of ebooks and online buying, but a key moment was the abolition of the Net Book Agreement in 1997. The ending of the NBA—which required retailers to sell books at the cover price—led to aggressive discounting (which actually forces up the cover price of books, as publishers struggle to maintain their margins); concentrated bookselling in the hands of chainstores, supermarkets and Amazon; and forced the closure of hundreds of bookshops. The literary culture of the UK was changed overnight; but while France and Germany legislate to restrict discounting and offer good breaks to independent bookshops, none of the political parties in the UK cares a damn, this not being a vote-winning issue.
This issue of Sonofabook is worth buying immediately and it is clearly going to be worth subscribing to such a brave venture. Two delights for me in this first issue are:
1. ‘Springtime in the Rockies’: fourteen sonnets by Nancy Gaffield which have echoes of the world of Gary Snyder and Ed Dorn
Boulder sees first measurable snowfall
of the season, but sunny skies set to return.
Another year on or forty pass & we’re still
2. A translation of Francis Ponge’s 1947-48 essay ‘My Creative Method’. Translated by Beverley Bie Brahic this is a central Ponge document which does not often find its way into English. The introduction to this delightful piece is clear and to the point:
In 1947, during a trip to Algeria, Francis Ponge wrote ‘My Creative Effort’ at the invitation of Trivium, a Swiss magazine. Five years had passed since the publication of Le Parti pris des choses (The Defence of Things), his now classic collection of prose poems. Sartre had made the book a springboard for reflections about poetics and philosophy; painters like Braque admired Ponge’s close-ups of such prosaic objects and phenomena as a pebble or rain pinging into a courtyard. Although some of his poems, or description-definitions as he calls them in ‘My Creative Method’ (the title is in English in the original), prove on closer reading to be metaphors for the processes of language itself…
When Jeremy Prynne wrote his first two letters to Charles Olson in November 1961 he referred to Pokorny’s 1923 etymological dictionary as ‘sitting on my shelf like a bomb, ready to explode at a touch with the most intricately powerful forces caged up inside, a storehouse of vectors’:
Things are nouns, and particular substantives of this word order are store-houses of potential energy, hoard up the world’s available motions.
To subscribe to this new magazine go to http://www.cbeditions.com
Ian Brinton St. Botolph’s Day 2015
Tears in the Fence 