In this issue:
Maria Stadnicka
George Messo
Janet Sutherland
Lawrence Upton
Rhea Seren Phillips
Julie Sampson
Michael Farrell
Molly Bloom
David Rushmer
Mark Totterdell
Carrie Etter
John Goodby
Martin Stannard
"Poetry’s greatest asset may be its unimportance" – Charles Bernstein
Some time in the mid-1980s, about five years after publishing the original Molly Bloom magazine, I gave up poetry. Or so my memory and my personal mythology have it. A few forgotten small-press magazines turned up in the loft contain a scattering of poems under my name which I have no recollection of writing, let alone sending out into the world. Aberrations of various kinds, though some good editors – Tony Baker, Michael Haslam, Jim Burns, Stephen Romer – obviously saw something in them. To all intents and purposes, though, I was in my own mind for around 15 years an ex-poet. A prime reason – the one I told myself and others – was that there were far more people writing poetry than reading it. Which made it seem a fairly redundant exercise.
So what changed? One was the realisation that there was no shame or loss in writing purely for my own satisfaction, to explore and play with my own thinking; if in the process anything emerged that anyone else cared to read, that was a bonus. The other major factor was the internet. In rural Suffolk I might meet few, if any, people interested in contemporary poetry, and fewer still who might care for the same kind of thinking or writing I did: but in the world at large that niche within a niche still has room for plenty of readers and writers, and online one has a chance to meet them, be they in the next village or the other hemisphere of the globe. And so I re-emerged, blinking, into a world I found had been going on all that time without me.
A decade later, largely at the prompting of Alan Baker, Molly Bloom was re-born, in a form where today the stats suggest she has as many readers in any average week as the original printed edition – as excellent in its content as I still believe it was – ever had in total.
In a sense, neither the old doubts nor the old certainties seem to apply any more, or at least not exactly as they did. There must be many times more people now who consider themselves poets than there were 30-odd years ago, when I decided the field was too crowded. A glance down any one of the many recently appearing lists of "best poetry books of 2017" hints at a huge number of publications out there, most by people I've never heard of, still less read. There are too many even to try or pretend to keep up with. So why do we all do it? Simply, I suppose, because we can.
And among them all, what is a Molly Bloom poem or poet? What or, as I like to think of it, who is this Molly Bloom? No magazine is about its editor – this one certainly has her own distinct identity, made up from the varied works of all 128 poets who have appeared so far in her first five years of online incarnation. The content of each issue is informed not only by my selection, by also by those writers who see Molly as a suitable site for their work, and presumably which of their works seem to them to fit. With no manifesto, no prescriptive or proscriptive vision, a more-or-less clear sense of a Molly Bloom character seems to have arisen, albeit perhaps somewhat mutable.
Nine of the poets whose work appears in this 15th issue are newcomers to Molly, all but one having arrived here unsolicited. The exception is a writer I encountered for the first time, both in print and in person, at David Caddy’s excellent Tears in the Fence Festival in Dorset in September – my new favourite poet, Maria Stadnicka. The poet whose submission was addressed not to me by name, but To Whom It May Concern, does not appear here (though may do in a later issue). The most unexpected offering was from the poet whose pen name is also the name of this magazine. It would no doubt have been less confusing had I rejected it out of hand. But good work is good work, so allow Molly Bloom the magzine to present, among what I hope you’ll agree is another excellent line-up, the poet Molly Bloom. How postmodern, how internet-age, is that?
Aidan Semmens, editor, January 2018
Maria Stadnicka
George Messo
Janet Sutherland
Lawrence Upton
Rhea Seren Phillips
Julie Sampson
Michael Farrell
Molly Bloom
David Rushmer
Mark Totterdell
Carrie Etter
John Goodby
Martin Stannard
"Poetry’s greatest asset may be its unimportance" – Charles Bernstein
Some time in the mid-1980s, about five years after publishing the original Molly Bloom magazine, I gave up poetry. Or so my memory and my personal mythology have it. A few forgotten small-press magazines turned up in the loft contain a scattering of poems under my name which I have no recollection of writing, let alone sending out into the world. Aberrations of various kinds, though some good editors – Tony Baker, Michael Haslam, Jim Burns, Stephen Romer – obviously saw something in them. To all intents and purposes, though, I was in my own mind for around 15 years an ex-poet. A prime reason – the one I told myself and others – was that there were far more people writing poetry than reading it. Which made it seem a fairly redundant exercise.
So what changed? One was the realisation that there was no shame or loss in writing purely for my own satisfaction, to explore and play with my own thinking; if in the process anything emerged that anyone else cared to read, that was a bonus. The other major factor was the internet. In rural Suffolk I might meet few, if any, people interested in contemporary poetry, and fewer still who might care for the same kind of thinking or writing I did: but in the world at large that niche within a niche still has room for plenty of readers and writers, and online one has a chance to meet them, be they in the next village or the other hemisphere of the globe. And so I re-emerged, blinking, into a world I found had been going on all that time without me.
A decade later, largely at the prompting of Alan Baker, Molly Bloom was re-born, in a form where today the stats suggest she has as many readers in any average week as the original printed edition – as excellent in its content as I still believe it was – ever had in total.
In a sense, neither the old doubts nor the old certainties seem to apply any more, or at least not exactly as they did. There must be many times more people now who consider themselves poets than there were 30-odd years ago, when I decided the field was too crowded. A glance down any one of the many recently appearing lists of "best poetry books of 2017" hints at a huge number of publications out there, most by people I've never heard of, still less read. There are too many even to try or pretend to keep up with. So why do we all do it? Simply, I suppose, because we can.
And among them all, what is a Molly Bloom poem or poet? What or, as I like to think of it, who is this Molly Bloom? No magazine is about its editor – this one certainly has her own distinct identity, made up from the varied works of all 128 poets who have appeared so far in her first five years of online incarnation. The content of each issue is informed not only by my selection, by also by those writers who see Molly as a suitable site for their work, and presumably which of their works seem to them to fit. With no manifesto, no prescriptive or proscriptive vision, a more-or-less clear sense of a Molly Bloom character seems to have arisen, albeit perhaps somewhat mutable.
Nine of the poets whose work appears in this 15th issue are newcomers to Molly, all but one having arrived here unsolicited. The exception is a writer I encountered for the first time, both in print and in person, at David Caddy’s excellent Tears in the Fence Festival in Dorset in September – my new favourite poet, Maria Stadnicka. The poet whose submission was addressed not to me by name, but To Whom It May Concern, does not appear here (though may do in a later issue). The most unexpected offering was from the poet whose pen name is also the name of this magazine. It would no doubt have been less confusing had I rejected it out of hand. But good work is good work, so allow Molly Bloom the magzine to present, among what I hope you’ll agree is another excellent line-up, the poet Molly Bloom. How postmodern, how internet-age, is that?
Aidan Semmens, editor, January 2018
A painter paints the appearance of things, not their objective correctness, in fact he creates new appearances of things – Ernst Ludwig Kirchner
For somebody to walk into a contemporary art gallery for the first time and expect to understand it straight away would be like me walking into a classical music concert, knowing nothing about classical music, and saying, ‘Oh, it’s all just noise’… You have to live with it – Grayson Perry
For somebody to walk into a contemporary art gallery for the first time and expect to understand it straight away would be like me walking into a classical music concert, knowing nothing about classical music, and saying, ‘Oh, it’s all just noise’… You have to live with it – Grayson Perry
