However, the Irish connection, where it exists, is simply a touchstone arising out of the editor’s particular literary history. It is ultimately incidental. The writers collected here cannot really be said to have much of an overarching ‘stylistic’ or philosophic similarity. History is arbitrary, and so are an editor’s tastes. Remember that, when a disappointing rejection comes in the post or email inbox. No matter how impartial, important, or cool any given publication might seem, it all comes down to one individual’s subjective tastes (or perhaps to a small group of individuals on an editorial committee), and no matter how good your poem may be, there’s no accounting for taste (as they say).

So the writers included here reflect a combination of my own literary taste and the fact that I had their contact information immediately to hand. I wish I could turn that into some kind of manifesto. However, not only does the nature of such an editorial strategy prohibit it, but manifestoes themselves are usually artificial at worst, and, at best, really only a snapshot of a moment in time. There is no unity here, no burgeoning movement or Poundian admonition.

That said, I do like Pound’s manifestoes, and Louis Zukofsky’s “An Objective,” André Breton’s Surrealist manifestoes, Kerouac’s “Belief & Technique for Modern Prose,” and other documents of the sort. Maybe that will give the reader further insight into my editorial standpoint and process for creating this issue of The Fifteen Project. But manifestoes, while often allowing for difference, all seem to seek out or prescribe either an ideological or poetic commonality; whereas, the commonalities among the writers here have, as I’ve said, more to do with arbitrary connections and subjective literary interests, which aren’t necessarily enough to base a movement on.

On top of all that, a movement in literature can usually be boiled down to a group of like-minded friends in a particular place (though the internet may be changing this a bit) and time. While some of the contributors to this issue do know each other, others have no one in common aside from the editor. Of course, in the wider context (I mean beyond this particular collection) there are movements out there, with names or not, different currents of poetry which may be in competition with each other, or may simply coexist in their differences. The most obvious general trend today is probably still the divide between the ‘experimental’ and the ‘mainstream.’ All I will say about that is: some people allow their natural subjective biases to become restrictions, and therefore end up missing out on a lot of good writing.

My own biases are more or less clear at this point, but I hope that they are not restrictive. I think that most of the writers collected here would probably eschew labels like ‘experimental’ and ‘mainstream,’ though the reader will observe aspects of both these poles (and much in between) within this collection. To say it again, in selecting these contributions I was not motivated by any desire for hegemony. Instead, let this issue of The Fifteen Project celebrate a glorious disunity.

Michael S. Begnal
September 7, 2008