Brando's Hat mag

Here's the press release for the new Brando's Hat:

Is there any chance you could run a news piece on your newsletter and/or homepage on the long awaited (well, by some) return of Brando’s Hat magazine. Brando’s ran from ‘99 to 2002 as a unique little mag in the poetry circuit, in the way that it offered a rare opportunity for poets to showcase their works in short sequences or batches, rather than in just one’s or two’s. The idea of the magazine was not just to showcase new poetry, but to carve out a space in which readers could listen to, and get to know the voice of a poet over several poems. It also encouraged longer
poems and poem-sequences.

After shutting up in 2002, we’re delighted to announce that it’s finally returning this October, under the editorship of Steve Waling and Fran Pridham (former co-editor Sean Body is standing down). The magazine will be quarterly, as before, and will be
published under the auspices of Manchester’s Comma Press.

If you could run a small piece about the mag’s return, or simply the call for
submissions below, that would be great.

The kinds of things we're looking for are poems that excite and interest us and move us; we're not looking for the merely clever or the kinds of things that anybody could say. I've more of a bias for the avant-garde than Fran, which will make the discussions interesting. Fran says she's looking for 'simplicity', but by that I don't think she means 'easy to understand': a good poem is as difficult or easy as it needs to be. I think she means that, at its heart, there's a kind of emotional truth in it that makes you sit up and take note, something that communicates from person to person. From the 'I' to the 'Thou', as Martin Buber might put it. 'Honesty' is my word for that; not that you have to be factual, but that it does reach in the heart. I recently read that a poem that doesn't somehow make you feel uncomfortable (which is not the same thing as making someone feel queasy, so no horror poetry!) isn't really working.

Send poems (with stamped-addressed envelope) to me (up to 8 pages because we take sequences and groups of poems rather than individual poems) to me at: Flat 1a 17 Mauldeth Road Withington Manchester M20 4NE. E-mail are not possible at the moment, as I don't want my personal inbox flooded, but we might set up a new account soon.