The exhibition is up for the month of October can be viewed when attending other events.
An exhibition of Smokestack book-covers, to mark the closure of Smokestack Books (2004-24). Shown in Middlesbrough, Darlington, Eaglescliffe, Skipton, Northallerton, Whitby, Stokesley, Ripon and Stockton, the exhibition is a visual history of the press over 20 years and 237 titles.
The aim of Smokestack Books was to keep open a space for what is left of the radical poetic tradition in the twenty-first century. Smokestack championed unfashionable, socialist and left-field poets working a long way from the metropolitan centres of cultural authority. Smokestack was interested in the World as well as the Word; believed that poetry is a part of and not apart from society; argued that if poetry does not belong to everyone it is not poetry.
Smokestack was also a protest at the terminal dullness of so much of the contemporary UK poetry scene, its self-importance, excitability, lack of seriousness and self-imposed isolation from the rest of society.
