I know what I like...

A book review of A New Day Yesterday: UK Progressive Rock & the 1970s by Mike Barnes (Faber, £20

Everyday Music

A book review, considering the poetry books 21 pages + psalm, Robert Lax (91pp, One Island Books/Franciscan Institute Publishing) and Matrix I, Matrix II, David Miller (unpaginated, Guillemot)

The Disgruntled Life of a Poet

A satirical re-versioning of an Eileen Tabios poem, as part of the continuing online Zeitgeist Spam project

Just Ruffle Up Your Hair And Call It Fake News (Boris the Spider)

A satirical Jerry Cornelius short story, using Michael Moorcock's open-source character to critique current politics and institutional racism

Flotsam and Jetsam

A book review of M John Harrison's The Sunken Land Begins to Rise (Gollancz

Spitalfields Morning

A poem about an encounter with Gilbert & George, Spitalfields and gentrificatio

Street Life

A book review of Another Kind of Concrete, Koushik Banerjea (£8.99, Jacaranda

Hanging out Downtown

A book review of Gary Green's When Midnight Comes Around (Stanley/Barker

Counterclaims: Poets and Poetries, Talking Back

H. L. Hix invited many of the most influential voices in contemporary poetics to respond to two well- known statements about poetry: W. H. Auden’s “Poetry makes nothing happen,” composed at the beginning of World War 2, and Theodor Adorno’s “To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric,” written in the aftermath of the Holocaust. The poets were free to interpret the statements in whatever way they choose and then react to them. Counterclaims gathers together those responses: incisive, varied, but always interesting. They reveal as much about the aesthetics of the individual poets as they do about the nature and function of poetry in our times. * ". . . this project seeks not to take a position on, but to further an ongoing process of, poetics. It seeks not to assert a claim but to perform a heuristic, not to settle on one aesthetic or one institutional arrangement for poetry, but to fulfill a principle of continuing dialogue and distributed engagement." In Counterclaims, renowned poet H. L. Hix has amassed the responses of more than one hundred and fifty of his fellow writers, scholars, and artists to a singular problem, simultaneously a set of questions and a call-to-arms: whether the old truths inherent in 20th-century poetics can still be adhered to today, or whether new truths might take their place and what might they be? The answers collected in this volume from many of the greatest luminaries of their generation, writers young and old, from diverse backgrounds and cultures, form the basis of a new conversation; a step forward, not toward any one monolithic thesis or manifesto, but toward a new and ever adapting notion of poetry