THE BLACK HERALD 2 – EDITORIAL (EXCERPT)
by Paul Stubbs
(first published in The Black Herald, issue 2, September 2011)
“What will be required to make this happen is, among others, an end to the ‘creative classroom’ (this Anglo-Saxon invention—while a rarity in the major cities of Europe—was a trend started in the USA that then moved on to become a profitable plague that has completely saturated the universities and schools in Britain), or the ‘pedagogical trough’ as Rimbaud once so eloquently put it. The ‘poetry’ workshop must first, like a disused church, be boarded-up, closed down, and its ‘teachers’ forced once again to endure their own imaginative ‘slave-labour’, to pick up and use the pen (again?) as something akin to a pneumatic drill to smash and break up the rocks and gravel of those languages still trapped within the sediment of our ‘ancient’ brains. What is clear though is that these ‘facilitators’ are only capable of providing artificial respiration for ‘pupils’ unable yet to understand the imaginative measure of their own breathing.
It is only when writers have learnt to free themselves of the ‘necessity of success’ (George Oppen) and its self-satisfying burdens that they begin to attain the necessary animalistic courage to endure whatever-next-arrives and to abdicate responsibility for what they write before writing. What, at the beginning of the 21st century, we require, is some kind of a new neural and/or glossolalic linguistics, one in which all foreign languages are assimilated into their word-streams, a syntactically insinuated pseudo-grammar on which all spheres of the modern mind might, at the same time, interact. “
To read the editorial (et pour lire sa version française)
