Foreword
Blackmail Press began on-line publication in the era of 'dial-up', with all the cumbersome delays, the fervent anticipation, and the uncertain utopian hopes that term brings to mind. To have a poetry magazine still going strong, after twenty-five years of publishing on a shoestring budget, is an epic achievement – more so, a poetry magazine published only on the internet, that notoriously ephemeral and unstable medium whose technology is constantly changing. Main man, publisher and editor, Doug Poole has kept the show on the road despite the odds.
Blackmail Press has survived and Doug Poole has persevered because Blackmail Press is a literary e-journal with a mission: it is dedicated to resistance narratives of all kinds, but especially those of indigenous writers and outsiders. Doug Poole has ever been a staunch promoter of marginalised poets and a passionate activist for poetic diversity. In accordance with the kaupapa of Blackmail Press, he simply asks the question: who are you writing for? Using serendipity and optimism as much as any five-year plan, Doug Poole threw a challenge down in the early 2000s and poets have been picking it up ever since. He is the kaitiaki, the guardian, of the Blackmail Press Movement, whose mantra might very well be: to inspire the community, to allow participation, and to reconcile different poetic viewpoints and perspectives.
I remember being involved with publication in Blackmail Press very early on, and to me it's always had an element of the Russian beatnik school of the samizdat: the illicit typewritten poetry zines of the back-in-the-USSR era. And so, to scroll through previous issues now is to experience a sensation of live poems stuck in the glowing amber of only-just-by-gone days, like bees that magically continue to buzz or miniature flowers in bloom. Yet, inevitably, we have become distrustful of the contemporary digital realm, with its wilful impulse towards entropy and chaos.
We are promised by the internet's self-appointed overlords that literature is self-evidently available everywhere, and all at once, in the form of data-sets retrievable with the click of a mouse or fingertip, while what we actually have is constant transformation, the future on fast-forward, and a permanent sense of discombobulation and alienation: the death of another bookshop, the implosion of another literary website, poets' blogs not found as if they never existed. It's as if the medium is the message, leaving you within an endless loop of fizzled-out connections.
Our own poems, then, are forced to seethe and sparkle and have their being within a digital ocean, like backflipping dolphins and iridescent flying fish composed of pixels: here today and gone tomorrow. Bucking the trend, Blackmail Press brings a contrarian and uplifting energy. Polyphonic and pluralistic. Blackmail Press is a collective – with many guest editors – that celebrates non-alienated labour, honest piece-work, and artisanal craft, where poems are authentic (human-made) and rewarding to encounter in their aspirations and intentionality. Blackmail Press, like the underground press of old, is not officially 'recognised', but it is flax-roots, speaking for the common people in a melange of bardic voices. Poetry, as Blackmail Press showcases, allows us to tell our personal stories and to express a communality. In an increasingly fractitious and divided world, post-globalisation, poetry – for now – remains free. In poetry, liberty.
David Eggleton
08 August 2026
