Читать книгу A Companion to Contemporary British and Irish Poetry, 1960 - 2015 - Группа авторов - Страница 42

Testing one's work out in magazines and journals can be disconcerting & painful, especially if the pieces sometimes don't come off. (And don't I know it!) But I think it, really, [is] the tough & only school.

(Causley 1984)

The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) defines a little magazine as “a periodical directed at a readership with serious literary, artistic, or other intellectual interests, usually having a small circulation and considered to appeal to a minority.” Richard Price, Head of Modern British Collections at the British Library, stresses their association with “ideas of marginality: political radicalism, support for one minority or another, support for the art form of poetry itself (conceived as a Cinderella art), and for various kinds of aesthetic extremes” and adds to that their noncommercial nature (Price 2013, 178). In his contribution to the Small Press Yearbook 1994, Geoffrey Soar highlights various aspects, but maintains with a saddening cogency that “[t]heir ‘littleness’ relates to their usually small print runs, their lack of financial profitability, and their tendency (by no means invariable) to exist rather briefly” (Soar 1993, 24).

In December 1964, the Library Committee at University College London (UCL), where Soar was responsible for the English library, took an important decision to subscribe to all little magazines published in the UK. However, as the UCL Library Committee soon realized that the small presses were inseparable from the small magazines, they began to buy their publications too and thus founded the Poetry Store Collection. Right from the start, Soar also began to organize exhibitions, which were accompanied by the publication of catalogs (UCL Library 1966, 1970–1971, 1977, 1982, 1992, 1994). To celebrate 25 years of the Little Magazines Collection, he launched, together with David Miller, an exhibition at the Royal Festival Hall in late 1990 entitled “Little Magazines and How They Got That Way.” In the following year, the exhibition moved to Durham University Library and the Flaxman Gallery, Staffordshire Polytechnic, at Stoke‐on‐Trent. Advised by Stuart Montgomery (Fulcrum Press), Bob Cobbing (And, Writers Forum), and Lee Harwood (Tzarad), Soar managed to collect “some 3000 magazine titles and 6000 small‐press publications” (Soar 1993, 25) by 1990. At present, the Little Magazines Collection subscribes to around 200 magazines and has a collection of 3500 titles, while the Poetry Store Collection contains over 7000 titles (UCL Website 2019).

Its American counterpart, on a more international and larger scale, is the Little Magazine Collection at the Department of Special Collections, Memorial Library, University of Wisconsin–Madison. It holds approximately 7000 English‐language literary magazines published in the United States, Great Britain, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, and maintains about 1200 subscriptions. The American definition agrees with Soar's as far as the “noncommercial” aspect of the publication is concerned. In addition, little magazines are seen as “avant‐garde in nature” and “often associated with significant literary, cultural, and artistic movements,” which is why they have been “especially influential in the historical development of modern and experimental poetry.” An important component of little magazines on both sides of the Atlantic is the publication of interviews with authors and artists, which provide “valuable insights into their creative processes and the context of their works.” Since 1975, the librarians at the Department of Special Collections have indexed the interviews in yearly files and published them as a section in Serials Review (Digital Collections, University of Wisconsin–Madison Libraries 2019).

Histories and bibliographies of British and Irish poetry magazines published between 1960 and 2019 have not been numerous. Remembering my commitment to modesty of scale, I shall refer interested readers to only the most important studies before I offer some insights into the current situation of print and online magazines. The first important publication is the Comprehensive Index to English‐Language Little Magazines, 1890–1970, eight volumes edited by Marion Sader and published in 1976, which indexed only 100 titles but “brought together British and American titles for the first time and listed reviews and illustrators along with the primary literature” (Reilly 1985, 5). Only very rarely are editors of British and Irish little magazines interested in compiling and publishing an index relating to the writers and work they have published. Glyn Pursglove, reviews editor of Acumen magazine, regularly compiles an author index of every 10 issues, which is published at the back of the tenth or eleventh issue. Andreas Schachermayr is the compiler of author indexes for Ore Magazine (1954–1995), The Poet's Voice (second series, 1994–2000), and, together with Tom Clyde, for Nos. 100–107 of HU, published as a 22‐page booklet in 1999 and posted free with issue 107. Already 4 years earlier, an author index to issues 1–99 had been issued as a separate paperback. Issues 1–21 of Poetry Ireland Review were indexed by Richard Hayes; the index was first published as a contribution to PIR 36 (1992) and as a booklet in 1993.

Other publication types to celebrate the history or longevity of a little magazine are festschrifts or “best‐of” anthologies or a compound publication that incorporates both genres. The University of Salzburg Press backlist contains various books celebrating little magazines. In 1989, James Hogg commissioned Fred Beake, founder‐editor of The Poet's Voice, to compile an anthology from the issues of his magazine, which was published as A Mingling of Streams. This valuable publication, including poems by regular contributors, extracts from Beake's editorials, and a checklist, inaugurated Hogg's attempt to save little magazines from being consigned to oblivion. The second volume in this series, published 4 years later, was devoted to a selection of poetry from Stride's 33 issues, entitled Ladder to the Next Floor, which also included essays and notes on the magazine as well as a checklist. Salute to “Outposts” (1994), celebrating the magazine's fiftieth anniversary, contains essays, an interview with editor Roland John, poetic appreciations, photographs, and an anthology of poems published in the magazine. The series was continued in 1997 with Veins of Gold: Ore, 1954–1995. This 250‐page volume offers 100 poems, five commissioned essays on the magazine's history, an interview with editor Eric Ratcliffe, many photographs, and the aforementioned bibliography.

Only a very small number of editors have taken the initiative to edit and publish volumes celebrating their magazine's history, either as a special issue or as a separate publication. PN Review 100, subtitled “A Calendar of Modern Poetry,” an adaptation of the title of Edgell Rickword's monthly of the 1920s (The Calendar of Modern Letters, March 1925–July 1927), is a fascinating example of the former category, because editor Michael Schmidt asked 80 poets, his regular contributors, to edit the issue, selecting a clutch of poems, or extracts from longer poems, to characterize their work. In addition, Schmidt opened up the doors of his archive of letters to the public, commissioning Mark Fisher to edit Letters to an Editor, which covers 20 years of Carcanet and PN Review's history from 1969 to 1989.

Valuable examples of the separate‐publication category are Poetry Wales 25 Years, edited by Cary Archard and published in 1990, and Agenda—An Anthology: The First Four Decades 1959–1993, published by Carcanet Press in 1994. While Archard tried—with hindsight—to chart a history of Poetry Wales by arranging the material chronologically, William Cookson's aim was “to gather a collection of good poems, and essays about poetry, that can be enjoyed as a book in its own right. I've prepared it as if I were editing a bumper issue of Agenda out of an unusually rich welter of submissions—not surprising after thirty‐five years!” (Cookson 1994, xiii).

What Richard Hayes said about his work of indexing Poetry Ireland Review can be transferred to the process of compiling such anthologies, in particular collections of material from defunct magazines, which permits one to re‐encounter the known magazine at a different level. One views and examines a certain number of issues of the magazine in question

holistically, [in order to receive] a macroscopic view of the magazine, permitting one to watch its development from above, a development invisible for the reader following the magazine from issue to issue, with an eye too close to the action. In a way, the process of compiling an index offers the possibility of a new way of reading a little magazine, an unnatural way of reading, at odds with the rhythm of the magazine's production and transferred from one social and cultural context to another.

(Hayes 1992, 53)

This review of the magazine works by way of a disruptive reading, which in turn can reveal processes by which the magazine developed as well as central questions and editorial concerns. An awareness of such possibilities clearly influenced editors Sasha Dugdale and David and Helen Constantine when they set out to arrange Centres of Cataclysm, an anthology, thematically arranged, celebrating 50 years of Modern Poetry in Translation.

“Best‐of” approaches were applied by both Sean McMahon for Great Irish Writing: The Best from The Bell, edited more than 20 years after the publication of the last issue, and Gerald Dawe and Jonathan Williams for Krino, 1986–1996: An Anthology of Modern Irish Writing, which appeared the same year that the farewell issue had left the magazine's headquarters in Co. Galway. In addition, the Krino anthology offered an index as an appendix. Edited by Neil Pattison, Reitha Pattison, and Luke Roberts, Certain Prose of The English Intelligencer contains a selection, chronologically arranged, of prose from the poetry worksheet, which was privately circulated from January 1966 to April 1968. These publications may be categorized as rescue operations, saving the spirit, tone, and strength, and above all much of what their editors considered the most important material published in their respective magazines, because without them these texts would not be easily accessible for the reading public, stored away in archives and basements of a small number of specialist libraries.

On the occasion of the centenary of the Poetry Society and its magazine Poetry Review in 2009, Fiona Sampson, its editor at the time, put together a substantial best‐of anthology: A Century of Poetry Review. Sampson admits in her introduction that “this anthology represents not necessarily the most important British poetry of the last hundred years, but rather what has been seen as most important” (Sampson 2009, xv). Instead of dividing up the magazine's history into periods of editorial tenure, Sampson offers a conservative, rather uninspired decade‐by‐decade approach, implying that the history of poetry is shaped by decades rather than other criteria. The editorship best represented in the anthology is the one held by Peter Forbes (1987–2002), hailed by Sampson as the magazine's “greatest period of editorial transparency [and] perfectly reflect[ing] a zeitgeist” (Sampson 2009, xxi). One third of the anthology's pages reflect Forbes's aims, which he also outlined in 1987, in a private letter to me, as “to present the best of modern poetry in English in a context of poetry's relationship to the other arts and to the wider world of politics, science.” This aim was apparent in theme issues devoted to travel, the other arts, science, and politics. There was also a good deal of prose—interviews, essays, polemics, and reviews—and the poets featured belonged, as he said, “to no dominant clique [with] a good proportion [of] fairly new writers.” Poems by Primo Levi, Joseph Brodsky, John Ashbery, Aimé Césaire, C. K. Williams, Les Murray, among others, as well as essays by Derek Walcott on “The Poet in the Theatre” and Miroslav Holub on “Poetry Against Absurdity” testify to Forbes's international outlook.

At least twice in the magazine's history the editorship has been outspokenly pro‐avant‐garde; first under Eric Mottram (1971–1977) and then under the dual aegis of David Herd and Robert Potts (2002–2005). Although Mottram published work by more than 120 poets, only five poets (Ian Hamilton Finlay, Frances Horovitz, Basil Bunting, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, and Allen Ginsberg) gained admittance to the anthology. Sampson describes the editorial policy of Potts and Herd as “anti‐poetry‐lite, criticism‐led […] unafraid of seriousness and risk” (Sampson 2009, xxi–xxii), but only two poems of their editorship were admitted. One of the most impressive areas of this anthology is its prose, which includes extracts from interviews by writers such as W. S. Graham, Ian Hamilton, and Douglas Dunn. In addition, there are critical essays by Lascelles Abercrombie, Norman MacCaig, Derek Stanford, Tom Paulin, and, of course, Philip Larkin's notorious essay on Sylvia Plath entitled “Horror Poet.” Finally, there are the extracts from the manifestos of Marinetti, Pound, Don Paterson, and John Kinsella.

One wonders why the Poetry Society did not consider a two‐volume publication, one devoted to poetry, the other to prose, as a more appropriate celebration of its house journal's century. Another option that might have resulted in a more satisfactory work would have been the commissioning of an editorial team, each editor being assigned a certain period of the magazine's history. This observation leads me to my last point of criticism: the desirability of a division into editorial periods that should have been introduced by policy statements extracted from editorials.¹

Critical studies of individual little magazines are very rare. Some examples stick out: in 2016, Gerry Cambridge published The Dark Horse: The Making of a Little Magazine, a fascinating analysis and retrospective account of the first two decades of Scotland's transatlantic poetry magazine (Cambridge 2016, 11), which published issue 41 in September 2019. The core of Bruce Wilkinson's Hidden Culture, Forgotten History is a critical study and contextualization of the little magazine Move, edited by Jim Burns from Preston between December 1964 and April 1968, and Poetmeat, a Blackburn‐based magazine run by David Cunliffe, Tina Morris, and Kirby Congdon from 1963 to 1967 (Wilkinson 2017). Anne Mulhall's important essay on Cyphers, established in 1975 by Leland Bardwell, Pearse Hutchinson, Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin, and Macdara Woods, is a model of its kind. Its author contextualizes Cyphers in relation to Poetry Ireland Review and argues that the magazine has offered “an alternative gloss on the interrelations of literature and the ‘home land’, mapping (or recovering) an unofficial geography of the place of that home spatially and historically” (Mulhall 2007, 206).

For a history of the British and Irish little magazines up to the late 1990s, I refer interested readers to my own two monographs: Little Magazine Profiles (1993) and Contemporary Views on the Little Magazine Scene (2000), which among other things describe the scene and situation of little magazines, on the eve, as it were, of that phenomenon of decline at the turn of the millennium, when a number of magazines ceased publication. David Miller and Richard Price recorded only 18 new magazines in 1999 and 14 new titles for 2000, which led to “significant deficits in net new titles—when ‘deaths’ exceed ‘births’ (10 and 8, respectively)” (Miller/Price 2006, 228). Light's List 2003 mentions 425 titles that were still published in the previous year, 275 magazines were listed in Poetry Writers' Yearbook 2007, and 133 magazines had entries in The Writer's Handbook 2009, a figure that declined to 127 titles a year later; for 2011, 126 magazines were registered. The subject index of the very unreliable Writers' & Artists' Yearbook 2019 only refers to 61 magazines (Harris 2018). The National Poetry Library has 150 entries for print and online magazines, including Planet: The Welsh Internationalist and the TLS, which publish a maximum of half a dozen poems per issue, if that. The Scottish Poetry Library currently subscribes to 88 magazines (Scottish Poetry Library 2018).

There is perhaps consolation to be found in the knowledge that, despite these figures and the impression they give that, in comparison to previous decades, the number of little magazines is in sharp decline, the number of long‐lived poetry magazines has never been greater at any time since 1945. This may be regarded as more claim than fact and a wishful reading of the entrails. Statistics, too, are more than apt to lend themselves to congenial interpretations. Nevertheless, the figures are there, available for study and interpretation, and it is not too much to expect that a sound and disciplined scholarship is capable of approaching them without bias and drawing the right conclusions. The roll‐call, which follows, of the names of magazines, enjoying a degree of prestige, and which have also weathered the storms of at least two decades—and/or have published more than 50 issues—is certainly impressive. It comprises a number of names the reader will recognize and though by no means complete indicates a condition of considerable vitality: Acumen, Agenda, Ambit, Blithe Spirit, Cyphers, The Dark Horse, Dream Catcher, Envoi, The Frogmore Papers, The Interpreter's House, Iota Poetry, The London Magazine, Magma, Modern Poetry in Translation, Mslexia, New Welsh Review, The North, Obsessed with Pipework, Orbis, Oxford Poetry, Pennine Platform, PN Review, Poetry Ireland Review, Poetry London, Poetry Review, Poetry Salzburg Review, Poetry Scotland, Poetry Wales, The Rialto, Shearsman, Smoke, The Stinging Fly, Stand, Tears in the Fence, Under the Radar, and Wasafiri.

The 2002 flier of the UK Little Magazines Project, set up at Nottingham Trent University's English and Media Studies Department in October 1998, is, accordingly, justified in starting off with the following premise:

The enduring and continuing importance of little magazines is unquestionable. Apart from publishing many of the major literary figures of the twentieth century […] before they were acceptable to mainstream publishers, they have also been fundamental to the genesis, growth and dissemination of literary and artistic movements […]. Importantly, they have also provided a space for the work of many poets, writers and artists who have not been a part of any movement or group, and who remain resistant to categorization.

(Ellis/Lucas/Smith/Miller 2002)

This thesis still holds true at a time when hypertext and multimedia options on the Internet are expanding and an increasing number of computer‐literate poets have emerged writing on and for the computer or website, making use of the exciting potential of the web. All this activity acknowledged, Hamilton‐Emery's dystopia envisaging the extinction of print magazines—“Print magazines are finished”—has fortunately proved to be a vision too pessimistic. However, when he argued a decade ago—“Poetry magazines will move online. There will be more of them. They will increasingly network with each other” (Hamilton‐Emery 2010, 18)—he foresaw not a disaster but a development that editors avail themselves of in a great variety of ways. The High Window is an online quarterly review of poetry, launched in 2016 and coedited for the first 12 issues by David Cooke and Anthony Costello. Since 2018, Cooke has edited another 6 issues until summer 2020. A model issue contains a substantial selection of new poems from more than 30 poets, a featured American poet, a translation section with a national focus (Catalan, Polish, Franco‐Canadian, French, Italian, Japanese, Kazahk, Spanish, and classical Greek and Latin poetry), a featured UK poet, a resident artist, and detailed and in‐depth reviews. The website also contains a page with weekly posts that supplement the quarterly journal. Cooke also runs The High Window Press, which aims at publishing four volumes of poetry a year to coincide with the four quarterly issues of the magazine. Founded in 2015, it has published books by established poets such as Patricia McCarthy, Anthony Howell, and Wendy Klein as well as debut collections, for example, most recently, by Tim O'Leary (Cooke 2019).

A very different format is represented by Ink Sweat & Tears, a webzine based in the UK, which was founded by Charles Christian in 2007 as “a platform for new poetry and short prose, and experimental work in digital media.” Its current editor, the poet and visual artist Helen Ivory, “publishes and reviews poetry, prose, prose‐poetry, word & image pieces and everything in between. Our tastes are eclectic and magpie‐like and we aim to publish something new every day” (Ink Sweat & Tears 2019).

When Agenda's founding editor William Cookson died in early 2003, Patricia McCarthy, who had coedited the magazine with Cookson for 4 years, found it relatively easy—with a certain amount of very welcome financial support from public and private funding organizations—to continue the publication of the magazine, indeed, producing bumper special issues on—for example—Derek Walcott, Cookson, and on Irish poetry with a special focus on John Montague. Cookson had edited the magazine for 44 years “with a complete self‐confidence in his own judgement” (Gowrie 2003, 29). However, Gowrie deplored the fact that the Arts Council had ended its support after 27 years and that he had failed to make them reverse their decision. With the special memorial issue for Cookson, McCarthy launched Agenda Broadsheets for young poets, which were included free to subscribers in each issue of the magazine and are now available online from their website. Two years later McCarthy had once again acquired an Arts Council England grant. She continued Agenda's tradition of publishing special issues, either on poets long associated with the magazine (C. H. Sisson, Geoffrey Hill, and T. S. Eliot) or on themes (lauds, exiles, scentings, family histories, new generation poets, and the power of poetry). Two recent theme issues commemorate the Great War—Requiem: The Great War; 1918. They “seek to demonstrate how, deep in our psyches, that supposed ‘war to end all wars’ lives on today” (McCarthy 2018, 5). The demonstration is achieved through war poems by Michael Longley, Hilary Davies, Alison Brackenbury, and William Bedford; poems in translation by Anna Akhmatova, Guillaume Apollinaire, and Pierre Jean Jouve; and essays on David Jones, Ivor Gurney, as well as French, German, Italian, and Russian poetry of the Great War. The variety of nations, times, and genres ensures the reader “a universal overview […] of the poetic output […], and […] a balanced outlook” (McCarthy 2014, 7). McCarthy always publishes supplements to issues online as pdf files on the magazine's website—of poems and paintings, of essays and reviews, of translations. General interest essays, audio recordings, and the broadsheets for young poets and artists are also available online and free of charge.

The Manchester‐based PN Review, operating since autumn 1973 under the editorship of Michael Schmidt, is indispensable reading for poets, academics, or anyone interested in what is going on in the world of poetry. Many features make PNR remarkable, particularly its essays on poetics, its thought‐provoking editorials; some readers, however, might find challenging Schmidt's interest in the longer poem and poem sequences and its international outlook, which also includes certain American poets. Schmidt's approach differs from that of the previous editors in that PNR is both a print and an online magazine. A 1‐year individual subscription for £39.90 includes six issues of the print magazine and unlimited access to the archive, while a print and digital subscription for UK institutions costs £149.