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

Poetry Library Southbank Centre - The Poetry Library housing the Arts Council Collection at Southbank Centre


About Private Tutor

Private Tutor was the invention of Simon Cutts and Stuart Mills and ran from 1967 to 1970. Many of these one-sheet issues took the form of instructions and exercises, adopting the tone of the first issue which declared: “Assuming from the onset that the reader has little or no grounding in literature we will commence and continue in a very direct manner.” This was matched by the design of the masthead which featured a red L sign for Learner. The intention seems to have been to encourage poets to read more poetry and to read more critically. By issue four, the lessons on Hopkins and Logue etc...had been replaced by a sole photograph of some rocks; issue five was a poem by Edwin Morgan about “Making a Poem”; later numbers had texts by Stephan Bann, Ian Hamilton Finlay, Simon Cutts, and Stuart Mills. The issues were edited anonymously, from the Trent Book Shop.