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This site is best viewed using Internet Explorer. Some
readers have pointed out that the text on the site is difficult to read. To
remedy this, there is a freeware program called Readability that lets you change
various aspects of a site's presentation and layout for easier reading. It is
available here. Welcome to The Argotist Online,
which 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,
and I was its deputy editor. 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, Adrian
Mitchell, Antony Gormley, David Gedge, Jasper Conran and Sophie Hannah. The
Argotist Online
(established in 2005) 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. Jeffrey
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