Background

Horizon Review takes its name and its inspiration from Horizon, the magazine Cyril Connolly ran from the outbreak of the War in 1939 until it closed in 1949. Horizon was very much a war effort: a sort of ark for culture, a reliquary to remind people what it was we were fighting for. I say we advisedly, because it was our culture our parents or grandparents were fighting for.

It is my observation that culture is under threat now, too, and from a different kind of war: it’s a war on the past. The world is changing so unprecendentedly fast that no one can possibly keep up with it. (In Enemies of Promise Connolly wrote that, so fast was the world moving then, Somerset Maugham had shrunk the idea of “posterity” to two generations; nowadays two years would probably cover it.) How we live with each other is unrecognizably different from in our grandparents’ days; our technology is unrecognizably different; our aspirations and underpinnings of belief are unrecognizably different. This all means our intellectual life is different, too.

Functional illiteracy is higher now than it was in 1912 — and among people tested in a study, confidence in their literacy ran in inverse proportion to actual ability to read. But reading — after all, a way of keeping track of words — informs thinking. Being able to process complex ideas protects us — as individuals and as a society — from crackpots, hucksters and dictators. Right now, when time itself is waging a war against us — when our beloved infrastructure is waging war against us and plunging us into the New Austerity — when we really can’t say what the world might look like in five years — now, I believe, is when we need to remember how to use our words.

We’ve reached a point where mere reportage, or journalism-lite, passes for fiction, so desperate are we to make some sense of what is all around us. There’s no time to grow another Tolstoy, or Thackeray, or Joyce: the conditions are too fast, we’re more like battery hens, all speeded up. We need our arts more than ever before, now, to help us record, explore, document our incomprehensible world — and I think the form those arts come to us in is now more than ever a part of the art itself.

In other words, I see curation as being an integral part of the presentation.

In other words, I want each issue of Horizon Review to be an experience, a message, a feast like a meal where all food groups are represented and the amino acids and vitamins all complement one another. I’d like Horizon Review almost to mimic the conditions of synaesthesia, so that the senses merge with one another and you don’t know if you tasted something, heard it, saw it or felt it down your spine.

As well as linear thought in complete sentences, “literature” now encompasses visual, concrete and sound poems, podcasts and videos, multimedia, photo essays, flash fiction, spam poems, prose and flarf poetry, things made for iPhones. Thought is no longer linear; we’re used to website navigation bars, postmodernism, hyperlinks, fast-forward, rewind, information overload. No one remembers how sentences were built. We think in pictures, like the cave people.

So, as with our old Bateau Ivre friends, who discovered "primitive" art and knew the time was right to strip back and start over, I propose to use Horizon Review to utilise all those contemporary forms and gizmos in a ruse to preserve something ancient, universal and necessary.

The very oldest civilisations we know about, the dimmest, faintest messages we receive about our ancestors as people, come from their art. We know nothing at all about their political systems, but we have things they mad — and, sometimes, things they said. Art is the first thing we know about ourselves. It’s the thing that makes us human, and it’s the thing that makes life worth living. With new changes coming every day, and an uncertain future looming down on us, this is the moment for the ghost of Cyril Connolly to come and give his blessing to this enterprise. We conceived it in his spirit.

Editor: Katy Evans-Bush

Katy Evans-Bush was born in New York City. At the age of nineteen she moved to London, where she now has three children and a no-pets clause. An editor in the not-for-profit sector, she writes essays and reviews as well as poetry, is a regular contributor to the Contemporary Poetry Review, and is the author of the literary blog Baroque in Hackney. Her first poetry collection is Me and the Dead (Salt Publishing, 2008).