details on past issues of Angel Exhaust

These are some back issues of Angel Exhaust. Issues 15-23 still available from 165 Coppice Road, Nottingham, Notts NG5 7GX




flier for AE 20, 2009

Angel Exhaust 20 ‘You just rang Anne Widecombe?’– out now

material whose polished
surface becomes you
its character and interpretation
an exact technology
of tribal celebration
nut-brown warp thread
gold and indigo weave

you speak a tongue made
fluent by its origin
sensitised to the composition
of tectonic plates
(David Chaloner, from Void Heaven)

Awesome new poetry by John Kinsella, Kelvin Corcoran, Jeff Hilson, DS Marriott, John Goodby, David Chaloner, Jesse Glass, Rita Dahl, Jason Wilkinson, Michael Haslam, Charles Bainbridge, Chris Brownsword, Colin Simms, Out To Lunch, Carrie Etter. 144 pp.

PLUS the results of a survey where contemporary poets explain what’s wrong with the poetry scene. A fearless analytical exposé of the moral gutter where the sleaze flows night and day. We toss those bastards into the big wok of repentance. We rake the muck and rack the mopes. It’s twilight for the deep pigs.


Q So are you going to put an end to all this nonsense in poetry? To abstract ideas, subjectivity, experiment, modernity, complicated technique, radical politics, all those up in the air things which the ordinary housewife doesn’t understand?
A Essentially, no.

In an intense options auction conducted by satellite, Charles Bainbridge and Andrew Duncan won control of the “Charles Bainbridge” and “Andrew Duncan” contracts and so Angel Exhaust is still being run by the original editors applying the same artistic policy based on beauty and tranquillity. The only magazine which has used three five-year silences to improve the structure of the literary field. Buy Angel Exhaust and say goodbye to those sub-prime cultural investments.


Price: £7.00 including postage. Address: 21 Querneby Road, Nottingham, Notts NG3 5JA. Cheques payable to ‘Andrew Duncan’ please.

This issue is being published late as a tribute to Britney Spears. The missing years “are part of the magnitude of what I’ve become.”



details of past issues of Angel Exhaust

flier for Angel Exhaust 14, 1994: Hit the North - Poetry in the North of England



For the housewives, the workers, the peasants, and the intellectuals. For the squatters and the musicians in coloured clothing.
Poetry by John Hartley Williams, Chris Bendon, Simon Smith, Robert Sheppard, Richard Makin, Ricardo Lagares, Khaled Hakim, Maurice Scully, Blair Ewing, Eva Okwonga, David Bircumshaw, Robert Sheppard, John Goodby, Nicholas Johnson, Stephen Rodefer, David Barnett, David Greenslade, Kelvin Corcoran, and Karlien van den Beukel.
The early traditions of English poetry, whether courtly or bourgeois, were concentrated in the south because the north lacked equivalent social formations; mediaeval civilisation was sustained by the richer nobles, but land tenure and climatic rigour produced a different social structure in the north, less hierarchical, and less moneyed. What happened in the privileged core of Europe had little bearing on the militarized, autarkic, and marginal uplands. In the absence of written poetry the oral tradition proved much more tenacious in the north; where the arrival of a new industrial civilisation found no echo in the existing literary culture, oriented towards agrarian scenes or fashionable towns. Pride and revolt were animated by the suspicion that fine discriminations of culture have to do with a highly stratified society where individuals strive to signal tiny social attainments, as if verbal complexity served to display both deference and cultural assets. The explosion of northern poetry after 1960 came with new institutions and cultural centres, the geography of the country changed and became decentralised. The figures of John Riley, Colin Simms, John Seed, Barry MacSweeney, and Ian Duhig have been carefully chosen as waymarkers in the development of a culture, through industrial crisis, political gagging, and intellectual experiment. Objectivism reflects a distrust of the verbal code itself by dissolving its constituents away. The modern northern poet responds to a crisis of mediations by exploring the pre-verbal and the process by which artistic equivalents are found for the primary data in which we are immersed.



flier for AE 18

ANGEL EXHAUST 18: HEX INHAUSTION DUX
Available 4th June 2005

Contains 120 pages of poems by: Nigel Wheale Peter Philpott Kevin Nolan
David Bircumshaw Carolyn Ducker Paul Simmonds Michael Krebs
Jesse Glass Elisabeth Bletsoe David Barnett Karlien van den Beukel
John Seed Out To Lunch Niall Quinn Chris McCabe
Ralph Hawkins Simon Smith Charles Bainbridge Tim Atkins
David Chaloner Gig Ryan Wayne Clements Gavin Selerie


Thanks to the contributors, this is a landmark issue and exhibits the best of contemporary poetry in a setting which is sympathetic to it.

You can order it direct from the magazine for £7.50 including postage and packing. Edited by Charles Bainbridge and Andrew Duncan.

We follow the New Line of serenity and depolarisation freed from factional heats
after pulling out of the archaic siege works moving out towards the pristine
visiting the deposits of research and techniques cafe of sociability and good company
dissolve the bonds of loyalty and territoriality hear the long spans of beautiful sound
a partially stabilised column of air rich with l and z sounds


Prisoners at 9 on the flight-deck, Der Rosenkavalier
burning through mid-heaven unweaving Destiny
(Transit) and State (Navigation). You follow on
in wolf-toned sectors of the reflux. Escaping predators
don't get the drift (and when is drift not an Apology
for Heroic Poetry, anyway?) And what did they want,
besides, the Semnae, the Oneida, the Morlock, never
even blinking when we reappeared? The whole
is not a part, even flying apart, even flying over Kansas.
The satellites pale, tail-lights on the ship
wink steadily, so lucent in the dawn
The wings will burn, leak plasma, wax and
honey; the hostages will wave us past, and we
will rise.…

And it was later that week (sub rosa with the fuselage
bent) the Captain took me under her wing:
'Before you shoot the dog' she breathed 'make
sure you know its master'.

(from “Owed to the Centaurs”, by Kevin Nolan)



flier for AE 19, 2006



ANGEL EXHAUST NINETEEN: INVEST IN YOUR ARCH-ENEMY
*pronounce: devastate your Aunt Jeremy

available now

poetry by:

Joseph Macleod Adrian Clarke Alison Croggon
Kevin Nolan Peter Philpott Peter Manson
Chris Brownsword Paul Holman Jesse Glass
Kelvin Corcoran Philip Jenkins Brian Hardie
David Chaloner Wayne Clements John Muckle
Giles Goodland Ralph Hawkins
Colin Simms Harry Gilonis
Andrew Duncan Marianne Morris Elizabeth James

Editors: Charles Bainbridge Andrew Duncan

Methan Beerlight, postmodern viral marketing consultant, talks to Manly Bannister, Angel Exhaust's Head of Ideology, about product conformance issues for AE 19.
Methan: So why is there no blurb?
Manly: We favour calm and serenity. Our contributors look on public image as like having a 13-year old version of yourself following you around talking egocentric nonsense.
Methan: Why did the last issue take 6 years to produce?
Manly: We had trouble finding a cafe to meet in.
Methan: Why is it called Invest in your arch-enemy?
Manly: We believe the unity of the poetry world is more important than quarrels about fine points of verse regulation. If you can't kill your neighbours, you have to intermarry with them.
Methan: Did you call for the government to withdraw grants from magazines which published reviews not totally favourable to the poets you publish?
Manly: No, that was someone else.
Methan: Why is it called Devastate your Aunt Jeremy?
Manly: It was a misunderstanding between the two editors.
Methan: Could we just describe the individual poets?
Manly: Let me go as far as I can. Corcoran is like Corcoran. Glass is like Glass. Holman is like Holman. Holman is more like Holman than like Morris. Poets like Philpott and Nolan are too overwhelming and intricate to be described in a few words.
Methan: I've never heard of them.
Manly: Maybe you should read Angel Exhaust.







jacket text for AE 17, Colonies of belief: Ireland's Modernists; edited by John Goodby and Maurice Scully (1999)

The problem of a British poetry which is critical rather than communalist, traditional, and sentimental are well known to anyone informed enough to reach this book jacket. Withdrawing from the cosy fug of inherited symbolic forms appears cold; gambling on unpredictability makes the reader sincere and anxious. Independence in Ireland removed the biggest antagonism from politics, but as a social and cultural revolution it led to the "carnival of reaction" Connolly foresaw on both sides of the Border. Rigid censorship and an 'Irish Ireland" ideology which blended ethnic purity with Victorian repressiveness put Irish art in the deep-freeze between 1930 and 1960; despite their support for independence and Catholicism, the heirs of Joyce in Éire were excluded by an imposed "tradition" of saccharine shamrock Georgianism. A fantasy of rural Gaelic purity underwrote the rhetoric of politicians and ideologues like Daniel Corkery in the years from the death of Collins to the stepping-down of De Valera in 1958 ("the devil’s era" of Finnegans Wake), country was turned against town, and the literary opposition took satirical and realist form. Experimentalism was forced abroad - Italy, Paris, the USA, England - until the belated and breakneck industrialisation of the 1960s. Since then, the pattern of long silences, lack of presses and journals, and general exclusion has been repeated, although things are changing now with a new press, journal, and critical recognition (centred on University College Cork) emerging. We are fortunate to have engineered a link with this growing energy and attention: although completeness is not on offer, there are essays making up an unprecedentedly full survey of Irish poetic modernism, from the WWI veteran Thomas MacGreevy, to the thirties generation of Brian Coffey, Denis Devlin, Sheila Wingfield, and Mary O'Neill, to Eugene Watters in the 1950s and early 1960s, the 1960s/70s New Writers' Press poets Trevor Joyce and Geoffrey Squires, and a poet from the latest generation, Randolph Healy. An anthology of poetry, selected by Maurice Scully, offers work by Healy and others of the most recent group. Everyone has been too polite to bring up their objections to traditionalist poetry, why cosy conviviality can so well dispense with poetry and stick to beer and chat, why some people are not overwhelmed with delight at poems which infallibly recall days in primary school and songs there committed to memory, why the constant re-enactment of the past leads to the atrophy of memory and of hope, why freedom and solidarity are not interchangeable. No one mentions the opportunities which a generous and convivial literary world offers to brutal managerial types propagating teleological myths and suppressing anything that doesn't fit into the breech of their cultural carbines.


£4 including postage. not sure any copies are still available.



OLDER ISSUES
Issue 8: The Blood-soaked Royston Perimeter; a confrontation of the London and Cambridge Schools
Issue Nine: anthology of new poets
Issue Ten: Screed Heid
Issue Eleven: Art-Politics, or, dream date with John Wieners
Documents of the Culture Dreamed of: Angel Exhaust Twelve AUTUMN, 1995: Special Issue on Cambridge Poetry
Issue Thirteen: Massive Transfers from Rich to Poor—Poetry and Socialism
Issue 15 Bizarre Crimes of the Future AVAILABLE
issue 16: From the Heroic Life of Bohemia AVAILABLE