Burkean writers have been attentively scanning TCD’s skyscape for the surreptitious sight of smoke emerging from the Student Union offices this week as the Icarus editorial team tried to cover their tracks after last week’s poetry prank.
Sufficient to say our efforts to promote marginalised Afro-queer voices and highlight the sensual qualities of Ebun Joseph went underappreciated and wasn’t taken too magnanamously by the literary duo running the magazine, not least SU President elect Gab Fullam whose jaw we hear can still be found on the floor of the GMB as of this morning.
Printed on the student dollar we scarcely could remove the grins off our faces at the predicament the Icarus crew were in with regards to what to do with the magazine’s extensive print run now tainted with the fruits of our endeavours.
Would they simply syndicate the print edition no questions asked and platform the prank poems and the dreaded far right incels behind them?
Would they physically remove the gag poems with scissors and carry on no questions asked just with a few pages torn out?
Could students expect Icarus editors Fullam and Mountfield to don Native American garb and ritualistically burn all Icarus copies in a public demonstration against racism on campus?
Everything and anything was on the table.
Whatever their choice they were certainly left with a good few already printed Icarus copies and limited financial means to order a reprint.
This conundrum kept us pondering the entire week and was made worse by the total radio silence from the magazine and their social media. No pictures or videos of their launch interrupted by The Burkean announcement were made bar mention of an ambiguous delay to distribution on Instagram.
Icarus launches are normally met with a certain degree of college fanfare but this year at least it was as if the event never occurred.
Our spies reported on an effort to keep the debacle hush hush, even extending to the campus press. Niche journals like Icarus matter more than one thinks in Trinity and a humiliation like this from the ‘far right’ no less may upset the wrong type of people with the right type of CVs in the university ecosystem.
Our questions were answered yesterday afternoon when to our amazement it would appear that the Icarus crew had hand by hand redacted all the offending poems including biographies with black marker.
The result as you see above was a comedically redacted iteration of Icarus whereby our poems in question had been physically inked out with black marker. Alongside this, editions normally scanned and uploaded have similarly been scrubbed of trace elements of Afro-Burkean literary excellence.
The result is quite a sight and on a certain level we respect the level of both schizo-like determination and commitment to deplatforming made, but the spectacle of Gab Fullam or Alex Mountfield frantically hacking away with black marker at each Icarus copy has given us a certain degree of relishment since our discovery.
While not the most major of stories it should be noted that this entire fiasco is occurring under the noses of the university papers avoiding any mention of the story.
The introduction to Icarus lauds an attitude of literary self expression and the challenging of old truths. In their own idiosyncratic way, by featuring the words of Dyport-a-me and erotic tribute to Dr Ebun, Icarus has broken ice on genuinely speaking truth to power more than any other art-hoe poetry journal the world over. Just not in the way they expected.
Normally left to rot away across campus, Icarus editions and their obnoxious redactions are available for free throughout Trinity arts block for those seeking a potentially lucrative collectors item.
Rest assured we are keeping a handful of autographed ones as war trophies safely within Burkean HQ.
oh my gosh they chose exactly the worst thing they cc ould have done. brilliant! my next question is were there any legitimate poems they blacked out, since clearly they have judgement?
they have no judgement, that is.