Posted by Eleanor Careless on 2025-08-13
As editors of the Journal of British and Irish Innovative Poetry, we want first of all to state and then to amplify the gratitude that is owed to Scott Thurston for his work in co-founding and leading the journal over the course of 16 years. Scott’s editorship has established a unique and necessary site of lively, scholarly and thoughtful conversations regarding the making and reception of innovative poetry. The vision and imagination of the founding editors, and the contributions of all previous editors, are evident in the ways in which the conversation surrounding innovative poetry has so clearly expanded to make space for voices, styles, forms and approaches that were hitherto denied or marginalised. Likewise, the commitment to continually re-examine what constitutes innovation in poetry is evident from the range of poetries explored in the archives.
What’s more, Scott has always brought to his editorship a spirit of openness, generosity, inclusion and compassion that is all-too-rare, using the space of the journal to seed and cultivate new poetry critics, “reporting to a future that is difficult / To believe exists”, in the words of John Seed. His contribution to the journal and to innovative poetry in Britain, Ireland and beyond, is immensely significant, and we only hope we can continue to do that legacy justice. We wish Scott the very best as he continues his pursuits in both kinepoetic and therapeutic practice.
Our plans are to continue to nurture the critical conversation of innovative poetry, and in turn the poetry it supports and engenders. In the coming months, we will be issuing calls for Papers, Peer Reviewers and other contributions and we would be delighted to hear from anyone with an interest in contributing to the journal.
The Editorial Team
A Valediction
It has been an enormous pleasure to serve as an editor of the Journal of British and Irish Innovative Poetry for the last 16 years. I originally co-founded the journal with Robert Sheppard in 2009 with Stephen Mooney as our reviews editor. At that point the journal was published by Gylphi press, run by Anthony Levings. In 2015, when the changing infrastructure of academic publishing made a print version of the journal unsustainable, we made the move to the Open Library of the Humanities (OLH), at that point with Gareth Farmer and Vicky Sparrow stepping into the co-editor and reviews editor roles respectively. The move to an online Open Access (OA) platform was prescient – and we were the first journal at the OLH to make the transition from print to OA – and has seen our readership grow from a few hundred a year to around 11k monthly. To date we have published just over two hundred articles, reviews, conference reports and editorials.
The landscape of contemporary innovative poetry publishing and criticism has changed almost unrecognisably in the last sixteen years. I feel enormously proud that the journal has, in my view, helped to accomplished one of our founding goals – to encourage the academic study of the rich legacy of experimental writing in Britain and Ireland which was in danger, as it seemed at the time, of being eclipsed by related work being carried out in the US. More recently I feel that we’ve also begun to more effectively address much older legacies of neglect of the wider picture of innovative practice along the lines of gender, race, class and disability, although this work, as ever, is ongoing.
I am leaving the journal in the capable hands of a brilliant team, including two colleagues I’ve had the pleasure to work with as co-editors over the last few years – Wanda O’Connor and Eleanor Careless – alongside new recruits Colin Herd, Karenjit Sandhu and Rory Cook. These colleagues will continue to work alongside the Editorial Advisory Board of Joey Frances, Fran Lock, James Goodwin and Ghazal Mosadeq, set up in 2021. I wish them all the very best and hope that the journal may continue to evolve to take account of the intense developments of the field in the face of multifarious global challenges which poetry, as ever, is uniquely capable of witnessing and responding to, carrying out, in Allen Fisher’s memorable phrase, its necessary business.
Scott Thurston
5th June 2025