WELCOME TO ISSUE #2

WELCOME to issue 2 of Outcrop Poetry! I want to talk about newness. We have 16 new faces in this issue, a new interview with Ryan Van Winkle, and a brand spanking new review section at the back. Beyond the magazine we are facing another set of new developments, AI. The rise of language models like Chat GPT has some believing we may be close to the General Artificial Intelligence or AGI – near to human artificial consciousness.

Despite AI’s current grip on the cultural consciousness, it did not feature in a single submission for Outcrop’s second issue. Indeed, the entire poetry world has kept silent. In representing the future of humanity, AIs put artists in a difficult position. Deep learning image generation AIs like DALL∙E 2 have already received lash back from artists –so why are poets silent? Perhaps they have not yet felt the heat like their visual artist counterparts, maybe they are a bunch of barely technical fuddy duddies, or maybe they have a naïve belief in the enduring humanity of poetry. After all, an AI writing Wordsworth seems about as likely as a monkey typing Shakespeare. Unless this apparent silence is not what it seems?

Issue 2 of Outcrop is replete with human interactions. Medha Singh, our featured poet’s What Lives: Origin Story entwines the domestic and the political as she constructs an identity, lineage and history in the love and violence that shapes nationhood, personhood and family. Caroline Wiygul’s Sunday similarly explores communions and disconnections, how ‘kinship reduces my need for metaphor and increases my desire for it’. Anna Hall’s Love Spell I and II casts these connections and disconnections in natural rhythms and cultural paraphernalia, and Olivia Thomakos realises such communions in ‘Water’, ‘Raki’, ‘Cicadas’ and ‘Salt’. Quinn’s Monster connects the body to mythology exploring the passage from disconnection to rejuvenation in the construction of a new self. Will Staveley connects and disconnects with his family through memories and artifacts, notably the Guardian, Jacob Anthony Sullivan explores the importance of place, Lauren Galligan delves into the a very mundane communion, morning coffee, to mention but a few of the poets in this issue.

Considering the approach of inhuman forces, the insistence on communion, on connections and disconnections, on identities, lineages, relationships, objects, and things that make up human life might seem somewhat passive. Yet I believe there is something reactionary taking place. In the face of an overwhelmingly alienating modernity this recourse to the self and to each other acts to safeguard what matters – intimacy, connection and human being, in its most plural sense. Something AI will struggle to contend with.

Thank you for picking up a copy of Outcrop. It is an honour to put this second issue out into the world.

Thank you for once again,

Sincerely

Haig Lucas

Editor

Haig Lucas is a poet and editor working across London and Edinburgh. His work has appeared in WAX Poetry, and he was shortlisted for the Lewis Edwards Memorial prize in 2023. Having launched Outcrop in summer of 2022, he looks forward to expanding the magazine and writing about birds.