Introduction

Welcome to the long-delayed second issue of Salt Magazine online. I guess I am still working to the old print schedule. Actually, to tell the truth, though I think the access the web gives people to poetry and other creative works is an obvious positive, I do lament the ecological damage that computers, and the production of energy to drive them, engender. And I might say the same about standard paper-based book production as well — even recycling damages, if less so.

What I am looking to at the moment is paper made from plant fibres and a more local sense of ‘publishing’. But that’s a slow journey, and in the immediate term, here we are and here’s a tranche of exciting work. Readers will notice a tendency to the ‘feature’ in this issue — poems accompanied by a prefatory note or introduction by someone other than the poet, and in the case of Timothy Mathews and Delphine Grass’s translations of Michel Houellebecq’s astonishing poems, accompanying collages by Sarah Wiame utilising Houellebecq’s poems. Jo Milne, one of this editor’s favourite artists anywhere, anytime, is here with new works and a brief artistic statement which I managed to glean from her. The mini-feature on the unique notational ‘nature’ poetry of John Anderson, which works hand-in-hand with Ned Johnson’s generous memoir, is, I hope, a trigger for readers to pursue the work of this wonderful poet.

There are many people I need to thank for helping make this issue possible; in this light I would thank all with a special mention of Harry Aveling who has helped me realise a long-term wish to publish Indonesian poets’ work. Music is inseparable from poetry, and we have Cultural Amnesia in all its post-punk irony here, and a piece by Lee Ranaldo, one of the most significant avant-gardists of the last few decades. His work with Sonic Youth is the weft to his warp, or vice versa — artist, poet, musician, and innovator across genres, Ranaldo is constantly testing the edges.

One of the drives behind this issue, as indeed all the editing work I have done, is to suggest that creativity is an ongoing state of flux, and that formal ‘restraints’ might be as innovative and generative as the most overt departures from orthodoxy. I find the work of translators always invigorating in the context of unstable representations — that is, who, when, and why a text is being brought into another language and how it talks through or with the original. In some ways, Rosemarie Waldrop’s characteristically excellent translation of an extract from Jean Daive’s memoir of Celan is a case in point, in that a knowledge of reception of Celan’s breakdowns and fragmentations of language is implicit not only in the act of memoiring but in the act of interpreting this. It’s a case of degrees of connection and separation of subject, of the language used to present a relationship with that subject (and between subjects of memoirist, poet, and even translator).

Finally, in the mix of genres and artforms that is this issue, a special word for the experimental writings of Davis Schneiderman … I selected this extract from his massive novel to show not the range of his experiments, but a taste of a few trails through his scatology of text. I very much hope the entire novel will come to light sooner rather than later (in fact, I’ve literally just been told that it will appear from Northwestern University Press in 2010!). And we have Megan Milks to help us negotiate the ‘dizzying’ prospects, oh, and Davis in another guise … himself. Hope the issue yields something to you all.

John Kinsella, April 2008