ISSUE NINE

Introduction

When asked if I would edit the ninth issue of Propel, I was excited, but also – not gonna lie – a little nervous. I’d been living for a while with an ambivalence toward contemporary poetry, my own and others’. What, in our increasingly precarious and divided world, was any of it actually for? This is not a productive place to inhabit, as a writer or a reader. It’s not an especially fair place to start as an editor. At the beginning of the process I was painfully aware of this. I badly wanted to reconnect to the practice of poetry as something purposeful, urgent and surprising, but I worried that I wouldn’t be able to meet the submissions on their own terms, to read them with the openness and generosity they so richly deserved.

Turns out, I needn’t have worried: reading those submissions would prove to be a uniquely galvanising experience. Going through each piece in turn I was struck in the best possible way by the breadth and potential of poetry, its ability to see around corners, to tell it slant, to open trapdoors in perception and experience. I found myself scribbling furiously, nodding along, punching air. Reading these submissions was not a passive or static activity for me; it was intensely kinetic, as if my readerly body needed to physically respond to the excess energy of the poems themselves. I’d forgotten that reading could feel like that.

Of the thousands of poems received from over three-hundred poets, I found myself most drawn to the large number of works that were variously haunted; that trafficked in supernatural agencies, magical transformations, off-kilter images, feral and spectral survivals. We live in a haunted world, amidst the global wreckage of colonialism: its legacies of injustice, its ecological bootprint, its psychic and material shrapnel. We are sorely in need of alchemy. The twenty poems I finally selected provide precisely that space of transformational possibility. They signal poetry’s ability to unmake old realities and imagine new ones. They hold our world – and our language – up to the light; they give us an otherwise.

As Seamus Heaney wrote in The Government of the Tongue (Faber, 1988), there is a paradox at the heart of poetry: ‘In one sense the efficacy of poetry is nil – no lyric has ever stopped a tank. In another sense it is unlimited. It is like the writing in the sand in the face of which accusers and accused are left speechless and renewed.’ At the end of the editing process, this is where I’m at too; in that much-needed space of concentrated listening and retuned ethical attention; surprised, provoked, tickled and chilled. Immensely grateful too.

— Fran Lock
January 2024

Fran Lock is a some-time itinerant dog whisperer, the author of numerous chapbooks and thirteen poetry collections, most recently Hyena! (Poetry Bus Press, 2023), shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize 2023, and ‘a disgusting lie’: further adventures through the neoliberal hell-mouth (Pamenar Press, 2023). White/ Other (The 87 Press, 2022), a collection of hybrid lyric riff, was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation. Fran was the Judith E. Wilson Poetry Fellow at Cambridge University (2022-23), researching feral subjectivity through the lens of the medieval bestiary. Fran’s other work includes the chapbook Forever Alive (Dare-Gale Press, 2022), and the critically acclaimed work of ‘queer mourning’ Hyena! Jackal! Dog! (Pamenar Press, 2021).

Fran is Commissioning Editor at the radical arts and culture cooperative Culture Matters, where she most recently edited the mammoth anthology The Cry of the Poor (2021). She is a member of the new Editorial Advisory Board for the Journal of British and Irish Innovative Poetry, and she edits the Soul Food column for Communist Review. Fran teaches online for Poetry School, and she is the co-host of the cross-cultural poetry podcast Social yet Distanced with her cousin Jack Varnell. Fran is a super proud pit bull parent. She lives in Kent.