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

December is as good a month as any for a progress report. This is the ninth issue since the new series began, and our sales, subscribers and advertising revenue graphs all show a steady rise. To our advertisers, particularly to those who take regular space, I want in the simplest way to say thank you; a review such as this, when costs in every department in the printing industry increase at an alarming rate, must depend to a great extent on advertising. Whether those who advertise with us at present do so out of good will, for prestige, or as strictly a commercial gesture, we do not think their money will be wasted. There is no capital in the world where this magazine is not sold and read. If we could get support from industry comparable to that which we enjoy from publishers, we could devote as much time to editing as to the pure economics of the business. Most literary reviews are backed by foundations, assisted by grants, but we must make our own way. We have no subsidy, we produce the magazine as well as we can afford, and we sell it more cheaply than we should. We have chosen, while adding to the range of contents, the number of illustrations and pages, to keep the price the same, because we have wished to deter, on grounds of price, no potential reader, however young or poor. We have recently acquired distributors in the United States, and are negotiating for them in France and Italy. Our readers and contributors should share the rewards of this with our advertisers.

     Needless to say, we must continue to work for two things: a still further increase in advertising and subscribers. It is round the latter that an accurate estimate of our print order can most helpfully be based. If half our casual readers were to subscribe, or half our existing subscribers were to give a year’s subscription, this Christmas, to a friend, the benefit to us would be crucial. Survival is the least of our ambitions: with more general support from the galleries we should be able to increase our coverage of the visual arts, especially in illustration. With the guarantee that only subscriptions give, we should be able to plan in a way that fluctuating bookstall sales make difficult. What tends to happen at present is that numerous bookstalls sell out on publication day and their managers, involved with 500 other commodities, fail to re-order, with a consequent loss in sales to us and the annoyance of potential readers. To those who write in saying they have been unable to get copies, there can, politely, be only one answer: subscribe. We simply have not enough staff to travel the country checking stocks at shops and stalls.

     Essentially, a review can do one of two things: it can stand for something specific, critically or politically, in relation to the arts, or it can take on a life of its own, independent of fixed moral attitudes, which reflects no more nor less than the often divergent tastes of its editor and contributors. There are moments when the first seems much the most important: it is certainly easier to accomplish, makes more initial impact and simplifies the whole process of editing. At wrong periods, when movements in literature or art seem not to be revolutionary in either their technical or political context, any imposed view of what ought to be the writer’s or painter’s attitude to his material, leads to inhibition or wilful idiocy. The simpleton builds his own cage, in which he may whistle happily or fume resentfully.

     The hazard of the alternative may seem to be that no prevailing critical attitude, supposing this to be desirable, is ever established. Poems, stories, critical articles based on a variety of premises, on widely different assumptions about the nature of art and the human situation, get in for the sole reason that we think them good. But good by what standards, by what terms of reference? It might appear that the answer to this should be doctrinal, or at least specific in its basic assumptions about the purposes of art in a free, or potentially free society. In practice, of course, even if one persisted in a Marxist view, such a question answers itself: good because it is well-written, because it increases our understanding of human motives, because it entertains, or makes us look again at the patterns of the past, the potentialities of the present; because it seems relevant, urgent, and to the point. This, in fact, as well as involving a whole new series of definitions, may say no more than that works of art create their own logic, which has no necessary or immediately obvious relation to existing opinion or to what has preceded them. They are suddenly seen to exist, with a kind of natural inevitability. One could, and would, refuse to print anything racially intolerant, anti-semitic or stultifyingly communist (despite the fact that many distinguished writers and painters have been, or are, manifestly one or more of these things) on the grounds that such views are anti-art, antihuman life, and serve only a destructive purpose.

     All this goes without saying; but much of the best writing and painting at any given moment is not concerned — at least on a politically analysable level — with the events of its time. One might wish more of it were, though no sooner does one write this, than the doubts and ambiguities crowd in. We propose nevertheless to carry out an inquiry among, in the first instance, poets, about the relationship of art to action in a society threatened as never before, and we shall print the results in February.

     We may make our phrases about judging art by its style, effectiveness, urgency or quality of protest, but if we stand for any one thing, above all, it must be for the belief that, now more than ever, art cannot afford to be concerned with triviality, that if he is not centrally situated in the life of his community, the artist will become the most peripheral and expendable human being of all. It is a matter of self-preservation, which has nothing to do with the demands of propaganda or journalism. Art (and within art, the various arts) and society develop separately, at a separate pace, and one cannot be forced to contribute to the other along arbitrarily laid-down lines. Abstract painting may seem an anomaly, or a perverse influence, in a Soviet society, but social realism, or anything else, as an imposition bears the seeds of its own death. The recent Paris Biennale made plain, once and for all, that abstract art, whether one likes it or not, has killed the mixed show; it requires a painter of dominating stature to defy the fashions of his time, and he can do this only on grounds of his own choosing. What lies beyond abstraction in its present form is another subject we propose to have discussed in a future issue.

     If our concern must be mainly for what is new and exciting, experimental in what we consider a fruitful rather than a futile sense, we shall continue in 1962 to re-examine the literature and painting of the past with contemporary eyes. The writers of long short stories and of the extended critical essay, have, in general, a thin time, and for that reason we shall all the more welcome them in these pages.

     Most literary prizes are decided by committees, obliged to compromise, or as a result of lobbying by vested interests. Value and prestige do not always go hand in hand. We hope each December to give two prizes, to the poet and to the prose writer who have given us the most personal pleasure, without, in our eyes, receiving their proper due. Since the editor’s taste alone will be involved, there need happily be no concessions. A magnum of champagne (which is worth, at current prices, more than the Prix Goncourt), therefore, to Bernard Spencer for his book of poems The Twist in the Plotting (University of Reading), with the hope that some professional publisher will now bring out this most sparing, personal and passionate of contemporary poets in a suitable edition; also to James Kennaway whose novel Household Ghosts (Longmans) was as elegant, stylish, difficult and humanly rewarding a book as anything since the early Henry Green. Compared to the puffed up, slipshod, facetious and over-praised novels of Miss X and Mr Y this seemed like the work of a dedicated and lonely master.