The Crunch discussion

The Crunch Issue 2, November 2015
w/ Nia Davies



Editorial
W. H. Auden said that "a poet is, before anything else, a person who is passionately in love with language." Our guest for The Crunch Issue 2 – the poet, editor and literary curator Nia Davies – certainly fits that description. In Nia’s forthcoming publication, Çekoslovakyalılaştıramadıklarımızdanmısınız or Long Words (Boiled String, 2015), the poems take their titles from the English translations of long words in other languages. For Nia, the awkward and strange decoding of these words from languages such as Turkish, Hebrew and Tagalog is akin to poetry itself, mirroring its translation of oddness and the way it can explore the weird spaces that exist between words.

Nia's role as editor of Poetry Wales also gave us an opportunity, on the Issue 2 podcast, to discuss the future of literary magazines, and ask whether a traditional, printed poetry magazine can hope to exist without embracing the digital age we find ourselves in. Nia gave an intriguing insight into the responsibility of editing such a significant publication, and spoke about how it was important to encourage a continuation of the poetic dialogue started and maintained by her predecessors.

Encouraging the discussion of poetry is something that we're very interested in here at The Crunch, so don’t forget that you can add your voice via our Facebook and Twitter pages. We’d love to hear from you.

Click here to see the full issue on crunchpoetry.com