The Stinging Fly (Summer 2022): The Poetry Issue

The Summer 2022 issue of The Stinging Fly is dedicated entirely to poetry - a first for the long-standing magazine. The issue is edited by poetry editor Cal Doyle, and I'm pleased to have a specially commissioned essay in it.

The Stinging Fly is "a literary magazine, a book publisher, an education provider, and an online platform" operating from Dublin. The magazine is at the heart of the organisation; it was founded in 1997 by Aoife Kavanagh and Declan Meade, with the first issue appearing in March 1998. It continues to publish two issues every year, offering a mix of fiction, nonfiction and poetry. Declan Meade remains as the publisher and chief executive of The Stinging Fly, while its magazine editors have included Thomas Morris, Sally Rooney and Danny Denton.

The Poetry Issue (Issue 46 / Vol 2) is a 240-page volume containing poems in English and Irish, essays on poetry and poetics, discussion-based oral histories, and interviews, featuring the work of many excellent poets, writers and critics, established and new, from Ireland and elsewhere.

My essay is one of three commissioned on the subject of 'syntax': channelling ideas and writings, some quoted and some not, from John Cage, Marcel Duchamp, Veronica Forrest-Thomson and Daisy Hildyard among others, to interact with my working experiences, interests and motivations, my piece considers art and poetry's new operational landscape as fundamentally impacted by digital technology and climate change, which obliges a multidirectional compositional outlook - discussing among else the simultaneous presence of gaps and connections between elements of language and identity, the irreversible blurring of poet and reader, and subverting expectations of deriving authoritative meaning from a poem.

The other poets writing 'on syntax' are Rosamund Taylor and Susannah Dickey; also in the section on poetics, three poets each were commissioned to write on the subjects of 'lyric', 'lines', and 'music'.

Thanks to Cal Doyle for asking me to contribute. Full content details are available on the magazine's website, where the issue can be purchased in its principal print format and/or as a PDF.