Launched
at the turn of the new millennium, Fulcrum: an annual of poetry
and aesthetics is a one-of-a-kind international literary annual
that includes poetry, critical and philosophical essays on poetry,
debates and visual art in every issue. It aims to offer an evolving
map of what is most important and vibrant in the current poetic
process throughout the English-speaking world, with occasional detours
into other lands. Fulcrum publishes poetic and critical
work of the highest quality from all regions populated by the English
language and generates a global cross-talk on vital issues among
poets, critics, philosophers, artists, psychologists and other humanists.
The annual strives to act as the hub of the global social network that is poetry, and thereby to enrich the diversity, flexibility, and aesthetic and communicative capabilities of English. The idea of Fulcrum was born out of the realization that the hardest thing for literary artists is to keep on speaking terms with each other. Contemporary English-language poetry does not yet know itself well. Genuinely international, broadminded anthologies remain in short supply. Fulcrum welcomes poetry marked by all kinds of local accents, in a variety of forms, registers and dialects.
Much of the available plethora of
aesthetic discourse by poets today is resignedly tautologous, speaking
as it does to the converted and the like-minded. It typically originates
in what are known as “the poetry camps”—institutionalized
mutual admiration societies sharply circumscribed by their narrow
political and aesthetic agendas. Fulcrum’s goal,
by contrast, is to produce intelligent sparks through the twining
of differently charged wires. Poetry—the total poetic energy
of our language transmitted through its finest practitioners—will
benefit from a greater self-knowledge gained from genuine conversations
across geographical and aesthetic space.
|
