Troubles Swapped for Something Fresh (Anthologies S.)

Troubles Swapped for Something Fresh is a eclectic and exciting gathering of poem and prose-poem manifestos and unmanifestos that try to understand what poetry is and who or what it might be for. It is also about what the authors might want or demand from poetry, in either a general or personal way. Manifestos are often declamatory and incendiary, but I have tried to defuse polemic and overtly dictatorial rhetoric by juxtaposition, and by selecting work from a wide range of critical and poetic positions, not least that of satire and wit.

I’ve previously – as any of my students will tell you – dismissed manifestos, but have more recently found them useful to react against, to incite comment and both critical and poetical reponse with. Rather than read them as a definitive and final statement, I have come to see them as an important part of poetics: a useful way to think about reasons for writing, about processes and techniques one might use to make poetry, and about existing or potential relationships with real or imaginary audiences.

The book is designed to encourage and incite readers to engage with what all too often is regarded as a trivial and occasional art form. I believe, as do many of the other contributors, that poetry is far more than self-expression and heartfelt truth, it is where language is actually rooted and initiallly located; it is where thought itself comes into being. Language is wonderful and intoxicating stuff, an engaging and pliable medium with endless potential for reinvention and recreation. If the reader can find enthusiasm, passion, laughter and deep thought in this book – and then argue and engage with it – I shall be a happy editor. These manifestos and unmanifestos do not add up to a whole, but in their communcal incoherence and difference they challenge and delight.

Rupert Loydell is Senior Lecturer in English with Creative Writing at University College Falmouth, and the editor of Stride and With magazines. He is the author of many books of poetry, including A Conference of Voices and the forthcoming Boombox!, as well as several collaborative works; he also paints small abstract paintings. He lives in a creekside village in Cornwall with his family and far too many books and CDs.

Andy Brown is Director of the Centre for Creative Writing at Exeter University. His recent books include Hunting the Kinnayas (Stride, 2004), From a Cliff (Arc, 2002) and Of Science (Worple, 2001, with David Morley). Andy Brown studied Ecology, a discipline that informs both his poetry and his criticism, which appears in The Salt Companion to the Works of Lee Harwood (Salt, 2006). He was previously a Centre Director for the Arvon Foundation’s creative writing courses, and has been a recording musician.

Alan Halsey was born in London. He ran The Poetry Bookshop in Hay-on-Wye from 1979-96 and moved to Sheffield in 1997, continuing to work as a specialist bookseller and as editor of West House Books. His major publications include Five Years Out (1989), The Text of Shelley’s Death (1995), A Robin Hood Book (1996) and Wittgenstein’s Devil (2000). He has written several short studies of Thomas Lovell Beddoes and re-edited his Death’s Jest-Book in 2003. Alan died in October 2022.

Luke Kennard is the author of four volumes of poetry and two pamphlets. He lectures in creative writing at the University of Birmingham.

Robert Sheppard is mainly a poet, whose selected poems, History or Sleep, appears from Shearsman Books, and who has poetry anthologised in Anthology of Twentieth Century British and Irish Poetry (OUP) and Reality Street Book of Sonnets, among others. His short fiction is published as The Only Life (Knives Forks and Spoons Press), and is found amidst his 2015 autobiographical work, Words Out of Time, and in several places in his 2016 publication Unfinish (Veer Publications). He is Professor of Poetry and Poetics at Edge Hill University, where in 2016 they celebrate ten years of the Edge Hill Prize.