Poetry Magazines - The best collection of poetry magazines online - Simon Armitage

I KNOW I SHOULDN’T have done it, but I made myself a cheese and onion sandwich the other night when I came in from a local poetry reading. Bitter experience ought to have warned me that it’s a shattering mixture as far as I’m concerned, but I ate the sandwich and flicked through a couple of magazines that had arrived in the morning mail, and then I went to bed. I suppose it was around two-thirty when I awoke sweating and terrified in the dark bedroom, and hastily groped for my Alca-Seltzer. I’d had this nightmare, you see, in which I’d watched myself hauled before a committee composed of eminent literary critics to answer charges of deviating from the norm. Worse still, I saw the end of the hearing when I was banished to the provinces forever, and the evidence against me - an article I’d written about the current literary scene - was ordered to be remembered only as a foot-note in a book being compiled by an academic. I saw the footnote, too, in my nightmare, and it said of my piece, “It was sharply criticised for clinging to underground concepts and failing to show the influence of the establishment, the works of Larkin, and the entire atmosphere of the reaction.”

     I’m joking, of course; the nightmare didn’t happen like that, and the footnote is actually a paraphrase of a note on the cover of an English translation of Viktor Shklovsky’s Mayakovsky and his Circle (Pluto Press), a highly-individual account of the Russian poet and his friends and fellow-writers. For the record, the comment on the cover states that Shklovsky was ‘sharply criticised for clinging to Formalist concepts and failing to show the Influence on Mayakovsky of the Bolshevik Party, the works of Lenin and the entire atmosphere of the Revolutlon.’

     Still, nightmare or no, it occasionally occurs to me that a reaction has set in, the establishment is closing ranks, and ‘Larkinism’ is being touted as the norm. A year or so ago Raymond Gardner, writing in The Guardian (‘Albion and After’, August 7th, 1974), decided that the underground was dead, and that the leading light in English poetry was Philip Larkin, ‘whose only eccentricity is the habit of being photographed in front of signposts marked England’, to quote from the survey. There have been other suggestions in the establishment press to the effect that ‘normality’ was thankfully returning to the land - I seem to recall a TLS reference to Anthony Thwaite wisely concentrating on the sensible middle -ground in a pamphlet coverage of the British scene that he’d written - and that the wild ones were in retreat.

     Now I’ve no wish to quarrel with Mr Gardner personally - it needs to be said that he has done a lot of excellent articles on poetry for The Guardian, many of them dealing with non-establishment poets, and in a fair and sensible manner - nor do I want to be seen as attacking Mr Larkin, whose poetry I enjoy reading, though I have to admit it doesn’t excite me a great deal. I suspect that he’s often used against his will as a kind of representative figure of the modest, well-drilled, emotionally controlled poetry that many people see as being typically British, What I do want to hit at, though, is the insular frame of mind that attempts to foist ‘Larkinism’ on us. It seems to assume that we’re all socially, politically, and temperamentally similar - or, perhaps, that we’re prepared to subjugate our differences in the interests of producing emotionally and stylistically similar poetry - and that to be interested in, and influenced by, writing from other countries, subject-matter outside the usual areas, and even the sound and rhythm of the language as spoken by people other than the literary establishment, is intrinsically wrong.

     It needs to be said, therefore, that the underground isn’t dead. And by ‘underground’ I mean the whole world of little magazines, small presses, poetry reading, and everything else outside the so-called magic circle of the literary establishment, and not just the social underground that journalists and the like explored in the Sixties. Of course, we know that the pop underground was largely phoney, and that a few one-time poets found the pickings a bit richer swimming in its sink. But there was (and still is) a serious, active underground of writers attempting something fresh and exciting outside the normal patterns. There are still plenty of magazines - bad ones amongst them, of course, but that was ever so - and if my mail is anything to go by, there are numerous small presses willing to take chances on the new, the unknown, the experimental, and the neglected. Having said that, a thought strikes me. Could it be that the ‘Larkinites’ just don’t see these publications? Possibly they sit at home waiting for the postman to bring their free review copies from the established publishers, or their signed copies from their associates on the same circuit. I’ve often suspected it might be that way - and a recent conversation with a Larkinite inclined me to think he doesn’t read much at all, never mind much new poetry - so perhaps we ought to be charitable and put it down to ignorance. Or is insularity a better word?

     Having got all that off my chest I’d like to mention a few books that I doubt will ever get reviewed here, but which seem to me worth buying. They’re not necessarily from small presses, nor are they necessarily by underground writers, but they are, I believe, the kind of publications we ought to know about. And if they’re not to your taste, then you can always send for a copy of Clive James’s Peregrine Prykke’s Pilgrimage through the London literary world: a tragedy in heroic couplets, and maybe that’ll turn you on.

     Way back in them old Beat days - and, believe it or not, someone recently asked me what it was like then, and said it with an air of regretful nostalgia for something wonderful he’ s never experienced Diane Di Prima published a small book, Dinners and Nightmares, distinguished for the accurate brevity of its prose, and its ironic view of life among New York’s bohemian fraternity. It has now been reissued by Corinth Books in an enlarged edition, and if you didn’t see the first then by all means get this one. True, there are some mediocre poems in it - they’re interesting as examples of minor Beat verse, but haven’t much else to recommend them - but the prose pieces still read well. I wish more writers would realise that you can often say it in ten lines instead of the same number of pages.

     Still on the Beat Scene, as they used to say, you can now get a complete facsimile edition (annotated and indexed) of The Floating Bear, a little magazine edited mainly by Miss Di Prima - Leroi Jones was also involved with the earlier numbers, but dropped out as he became more concerned with the Black Power movement - which ran from 1961 to 1969. It was a mimeographed publication, and published from wherever its editors happened to be at the time, but in its pages appeared most of the interesting American writers of the period - Corso, Kerouac, Creeley, Ginsberg, Lainantia and many more. I’m not sure if it’s generally available in this country, but If necessary, write direct to the publisher, Laurence McGilvery, P0 Box 852, La Jolla, California 92037.

     Those of you who read Ann Charters’ Kerouac when it was published here last year may have wondered why it was relatively light on facts about his childhood. I’d guess that one of the reasons was the reticence - even clannishness - of Kerouac’ a relations and hometown friends, and their possible reluctance to divulge private matters to a stranger. So, it’s good to have available Charles E. Jarvis’s Visions of Kerouac (Ithaca Press, P0 Box 853, Lowell, Massachusetts 01853) to fill in some of the gaps. Mr. Jarvis grew up with Kerouac, and he knows the background to his books, and the events that shaped the man and the writer, as well as anyone. When Kerouac returned to Lowell towards the end of his life, their friendship was renewed, and Visions of Kerouac is built up in a neat series of chapters which take different aspects of the Kerouac story, and then explore them from the point of view of Mr. Jarvis’s conversations with him, his researches via Kerouac’ s friends and fellow-writers, and the events described in the books. What I especially like are the warm evocations of Kerouac in full-flight when in his cups. And he brings out more than anyone, apart from John Clellon Holmes, the feeling for the films and music of the Thirties and Forties that Kerouac really had. It has always seemed to me that his work was riddled with references - sometimes obscure, I agree - to half-forgotten actors and songs, and that the rhythm of his writing was heavily influenced by the music in particular. Visions of Kerouac is a clearly-written and sensible account of Kerouac’ s life and art, and deserves to be read by anyone Interested in his work.

     There’s no denying that Kerouac’s final years were somewhat sad, and the same can be said of Robert McAlmon, one-time associate of Hemingway and Gertrude Stein during the golden expatriate years of the Twenties, drinking companion of James Joyce, friend of Pound and Carlos Williams, and publisher of Contact Books, which used work by most of those mentioned. Many of the people that McAlmon helped and published later repaid him with harsh words and neglect, and he faded into the background in the Thirties. His autobiography of the Paris years had one of the best-ever titles - Being Geniuses Together - and is a lively and accurate survey of characters and events now enshrined in literary history. It is only in recent years, however, that McAlmon has received the attention he deserves (he died in 1956, incidentally, a lonely and bitter man), and Sanford J. Smoller’s Adrift Among Geniuses: Robert McAlmon, Writer and Publisher of the Twenties (Pennsylvania State University Press) is the first proper biographical work to be built around this talented man. Besides being a publisher, and a member of the Expatriate crowd, McAlmon was a novelist, short-story writer and poet, and his work, although uneven, had vigour and variety. He was often linked with Hemingway, and although not as technically proficient he was - to my mind - a warmer, more understanding, and possibly deeper writer, despite a surface veneer of world-weariness and cynicism. I think McAlmon was more honest, too, and less inclined to create all his characters in his own light. Unfortunately, virtually all of McAlmon’s work is buried in old magazines and anthologies - a selection was published in 1962 under the title McAlmon and the Lost Generation: A Self-Portrait (University of Nebraska Press), but is now out of print, and you have to dig around to find it. It’s well worth the digging, though, and Mr. Smoller’s book Includes a useful bibliography which will be of assistance. Pennsylvania State University books are easily available in this country, and if you don’t want to shell out the money for it, get your library to order a copy.

     Going back even further than the Twenties there’s a selection of poetry and prose by Arthur Symons, edited by Roger Holdsworth, and published by the excellent Carcanet Press (266, Councillor Lane, Cheadle Hulme, Cheadle, Cheshire, 5K8 5PN). Symons is primarily associated with the poets of the Nineties, and many of his engaging lyrics are redolent of the faint air of decadence that pervaded that period. He was an important critic, too, and wrote the influential The Symbolist Movement in Literature which, as the introduction points out, ‘familiarised contemporary English readers with the European movement and fostered a spirit of Internationalism in literature which is still with us.’ (I wonder if anyone told the Larkinites about it?) I’ve personally always thought Symons one of the most pleasurable poets of his period, and this selection shows him at his best.

     Finally, you may like to note that books from the catalogue of Charles H. Kerr Publishing Company, one of the oldest American socialist publishers, are available here through The Industrial Unionist, 116, Chadderton Way, Qldham, Lancs.. Among them is The Autobiography of Mother Jones, a classic of its kind, and in this edition complete with explanatory introduction and bibliography. Not the sort of thing your fatherly establishment literary critic would approve of your reading, so buy it.