What you (may have) missed on 3:AM recently:
Fiction: ‘Viagra talk is as florid as a baboon’s arse’ by Alan McCormick & Jonny Voss & ‘Receding shopping bags’ by Jessica Patient
Reviewed: Karl Whitney on Adam Braver’s Nov 22, 1963: A Novel & Sam Jordison on Daniel Kalder’s Strange Telescopes
Interviewed: Tom Bradley talks to Crossing Chaos Enigmatic Ink’s Wayne Groen & Sophie Erskine to Suhayl Saadi
Non-fiction: Darran Anderson on Arab Strap for ‘Friday I’m in Love’ & Travis Elborough spends ‘Saturday Night at the Movies’ with Summer Holiday
Poetry: Paul Stubbs on ‘The Mirage of Poetic Evolution in Britain since Eliot’:
The last hundred years of British poetry consist (in comparison to the major European movements, Modernism, Symbolism, Futurism, Expressionism) of very minor movements: Pre-War, Post-War, The Movement, Scottish Poets, Liverpool Poets, Belfast Poets; but what remains active is the populist and careerist atmosphere of these very old literary schools, the petty concerns of malevolent coteries, the mutual back-scratching; for language itself, of any country, can only ever be subjugated, enfeebled and made redundant, if the poet using it constructs his or her poems from an already existing tradition, those unable to throw it off the scent of stagnation and decay, or step free suddenly of the rubble-heaps of mediocrities that surround us. This brings us to what has always been the great problem for British poetry, influence, or the lack of it, reading of the great literatures of Europe, the assimilation of its poetries into our own; and ironically Eliot knew this.
