It is just over a year since I had to had to close down The Argotist Online, due to the increasing cost of running it, both financially and workload wise. It started out as a labour of love but became almost a duty.
To list all the celebrated poets, academics and songwriters who contributed articles and poetry, and who took part in interviews, would take too long, but my gratitude goes to all of them.
I hope that in a small way, the Argotist helped in forming poetic opinion in some poetic circles. It certainly publicised a lot of poets, some who later went on to greater things, such as Lena Dunham.
It also had features that caused much controversy. At one time, the Argotist was simultaneously hated by advocates of both “mainstream” and experimental poetry, which indicated to me that it was beyond partisan stances.
The ebooks it published under the name Argotist Ebooks, comprised of poetry collections, short fiction, novels, literary criticism and literary history.
Because there were so many ebooks published on the Argotist site, I felt it would be a shame to delete the catalogue once the site was closed down, so I decided to keep Argotist Ebooks going as a publishing venture, and have transferred the catalogue to a blog I created also called Argotist Ebooks, which continues to publish ebooks.
Finally, I must thank Nick Watson, who was the editor of the original print magazine called The Argotist, which was started by him in 1996, and which I deputy edited. We were students at Liverpool University at the time, and the university kindly donated some funds to get the magazine off the ground.
