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The Argotist Online |
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Welcome to The Argotist Online, this is
the successor to The Argotist arts magazine, which came into being in
1996 and ran for four years. Nick Watson devised and edited The Argotist magazine
after he edited Liverpool University's English Society magazine Off-The-Cuff.
I was the deputy editor of both these publications. The Argotist was
funded by Liverpool University and Arts Council England, and had national
distribution through Blackwell's bookshops.
The
magazine sought to act as a bridge between what is perceived as “high-brow”
and “low-brow” in the arts. Consequently, we had an eclectic mix of
interviewees and contributors which included: Joseph Brodsky, Labi Siffre,
Adrian Henri, John Cooper Clarke, Benjamin Zephaniah, Rupert Loydell, Matt
Simpson, Adrian
Mitchell, Antony Gormley, David Gedge, Jasper Conran and Sophie Hannah. The Argotist Online differs from The Argotist magazine in that it is devoted entirely to poetry and poetics. It publishes non-mainstream poetry, and features essays and interviews related to it. By
non-mainstream, I mean poetry that is aware of the plasticity of language and
which places connotation and ambiguity over denotation and precision of meaning.
This sort of poetry invites interpretation and allows for plurality of meaning
as opposed to hermeneutic closure. I hope that this web site continues to do service to
The Argotist magazine, and takes it further intellectually. Jeffrey Side |