The North – 68

“… You will notice we have skewed the normal ‘Poets I Go Back To’ feature. Forgive us, we’re only passing through! For this issue, we have opted for ‘Art I Go Back To’, and we feature four people who aren’t all poets. We find that influence is often spoken of too narrowly: we want to hear the cartoonists you find inspiring, the painters and graphic novelists, the musicians or comedians. What gives you that sense of aesthetic play, that sets your imagination roving? For us, this invites more generous ways of thinking about influence and tradition. We hear from Romalyn Ante, and what manga taught her about narrative, or Matthew Haigh on the pleasure and potential of “aimless” pastimes, video games, and how the immersive properties of music can tell us about what we should aim for in our poems. Our ‘Hidden Collaborations’ piece is a riff off the usual ‘Blind Criticism’, wherein partners Sean Borodale and sculptor Kathryn Maguire both responded to air pollution in their respective ways. Again, this is a way for us to move beyond ideas of the lone genius acting in the confines of their medium: our practices are porous, magpieish, greedy, contingent on our friends and lovers, those we care for and those, both here and gone, met and unmet, read and unread, who have cared for us …”  – Guest-editors Andrew McMillan and Stephanie Sy-Quia