Letter from the Editor
Written by
Joseph Hamilton
Editor in Chief
Dear reader,
I want to get you up to speed. Three years into Boundby, innumerable joys and concerns have arisen as to what it means to operate and curate an online poetry magazine.
When we (the editorial team) were still in our second year of undergraduate study at the University of Warwick, the idea of a magazine was put to us. Lacking the attention we so desperately needed and felt our poems deserved, we began to run with the premise of “making space”; for ourselves, for other young poets (lower case p), and for poetry itself even (which every poet seems to feel some precious, coddling way about).
The magazine would be spurred on by the tried-and-tested, and surely inexhaustible, motivation of all artists: the desire to be seen. It so happened our hunger was up against an equally determined non-appetite from the angsty-poem-saturated market: that is, the ignorance faced by poets.
“Making space” or “being a platform” was an insufficient mission statement, considering space, attention, and language are all intensely politicised and depoliticised. What is true of protest is therefore also true of poetry, that the integrity of the demand to be seen is built on a real relationship between indistinct form and indistinct content, the how and the if being contingent parts of the what and the why. It was not good enough for the poems we published to just posture; they had to dance.
Having graduated, dispersed, and all moved on to various poetic things, it has become untenable that we would continue the magazine with an editorial directive that was so reliant on both the institutional and physical space of the University. With that departure comes a similar distancing from the poetry-as-taking-up-space ethos which had unknowingly been the north star of the project. Specifically, this distancing involves shrugging the notion that making or occupying space was inherently productive.
“What is true of protest is therefore also true of poetry, that the integrity of the demand to be seen is built on a real relationship between indistinct form and indistinct content, the how and the if being contingent parts of the what and the why. It was not good enough for the poems we published to just posture; they had to dance.”
We have seen how a similar line of strictly generative and intentionally reductive thinking enables fascist rhetoric to spread by way of Musk’s “free speech absolutism”, or how rampant landlordism is upheld by the capitalist tenant of profit-generation: there is a sprawling ideological wave that taking up space, regardless of the outcome and despite the repercussions for the most vulnerable, services development.
If there was space, surely we were to generate the poetry to fill it? And if there was no space, was it not our duty to let the enjambement spill and the metaphor extend, to force our way into the conversation? In the excitement of space-making, we had never seriously outlined what it was our magazine was to say, exactly what would be done with our space (which, in being online, was never in short supply).
What is apparent is that it is easier to make space for our writers than it is to signal to them (and you) what we as a publication have set out to do. Unhelpfully, but perhaps typically, we are most interested in what has not or cannot be prescribed, in poems that strangely seem to write themselves, however unnatural and painstaking that process of re/creation might be.
By negating the concept of the poet-savant –– the one whose shopping list reads as verse and for whom keyboard keys are jerry-rigged extensions to their most natural, most emotional, most real psychophysical state of being –– we instead reassign the poet’s divine demand (for ears, time, and space) to the demand of the poem. We arrive, though still in transit, at an editorial direction which puts the work and workings of the poem over any lyric which is desperate to dislocate itself from other art, from politics and public life; to siphon off a space unique from the texts and contexts which willed it into existence. The web of intertextual and extratextual relation which poems contribute toward wants to co-inhabit our consciousness as we read.
Going forward, Boundby is interested in the possibilities of poems in action, poems which engage their own brain and run away from the poet into the space they have been afforded. We want to publish Works that work, that enact drama with the stage they occupy and position themselves as practice, as thinking texts in the slurry of other thinking texts, not as placeholders for empty space.
The poems that make up this hiatus-ending first edition are concerned by the world –– the tactile, elemental, earthy world – but situate themselves not as onlookers but as sensations of it.
–– Joseph, June 2025