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

13 Acumen

Facts

Current issue No 26 (September 1996)
Format 14 cm x 21cm
Cover glossy card
Illustrations one b/w half-page
Frequency 3 times a year
Proportion of poetry 43%
Price £3.50 (£10 per year)
Funding South West Arts
Editor Patricia Oxley
Address 6 The Mount, Higher Furzeham, Brixham, Devon TQ5 8QY

Comment

Acumen comes at or near the top of every list of poetry magazines, a position vied for in telephone directories by double glazing and minicab firms. In the less competitive world of poetry magazines, it is a reliable long-runner with an editorial policy which does indeed show acumen, if not inspiration. It is also unshamedly conservative. Reading it, I had a strong feeling that, if the traditional spirit of England - that mythical entity that lives mentally if not physically in the country, hates cities, distrusts modernity and never meets foreigners except on holiday - if that spirit expressed itself in a poetry magazine, Acumen would be it.

The poems all earn their place; there is not a slack line or misjudged image anywhere. Some are by poets of modest note Colin Falck, Edward Lowbury, Alexis Lykiard, Peter Abbs - and there are also extracts from longer works by James Harpur and Michael Wright (the latter, like the three Kirkup volumes reviewed in this issue, continuing the University of Salzburg’s long and, to me, mysterious commitment to publishing minor contemporary English poets in the original. Can one imagine a British university doing the same for German poets?)

Excluding the Harpur (which is a version of the Epic of Gilgamesh), there is a notable similarity of tone in the poems regretful, elegaic, depending on their effect for reminiscence and/or images from the natural world. Although good poetry does not date, it needs to be of its own time too. There is nothing experimental, nothing that seeks explicitly to chart the sensibility of the late twentieth century. Most magazines publish work that seeks to be timeless, but in Acumen this is a prerequisite. I found nothing that would have been out of place in the 1950s.

There are also four short assessments of contemporary poets Eavan Boland, Pauline Stainer, Sheenagh Pugh and Wendy Cope - the last three accompanied by an unpublished poem by the assessed. The assessments are sound and respectful, not penetrating or in any sense critical. I had a feeling that the assessors would not want to fall out with the assessed, whom they may meet subsequently at readings, on competition panels, etc. In any case, poets aren’t going to give you an unpublished poem if you savage them. (Magma evades this problem, of course, by interviewing the poets.)

Nearly a quarter of the magazine consists of reviews of recent poetry books and pamphlets. This is a high proportion and shows Acumen’s commitment to keeping discussion of poetic values alive, at a time when magazines are generally reducing or abandoning the review function. What is striking is the quiet, steady unanimity of view. These critics all agree what constitutes a good poem and say so. There is a strong sense of community, of a group of likeminded people who write for each other and likeminded readers. On the down side, only those whose views fit Acumen’s relatively narrow mindset are admitted.

There is also a moving essay by Anna Adams on Ivor Gurney, the second of what may become a sequence on ‘mad’ poets, and two pages of letters. However, possibly the most important, certainly the most indicative, part of the magazine is three short essays on the state of modern poetry. Richard Livermore restates Valery’s thesis that the essence of poetry is the marriage of content and form. One is tempted to mutter “Gosh!” There is a serious point here - Wallace Stevens, of whom Livermore seems unaware, devoted his life to it - but Livermore doesn’t begin to approach what it means for the late twentieth century.

William Oxley complains that “poetry is largely imprisoned in the narrow cage of the Zeitgeist...poetry has passed into the hands of journalists”; and Sebastian Barker sees the purpose of art as “overcoming the sense of depression inherent in any realistic view of life”. The sad thing about all these pieces is both their generality - none of them gets to grips with any particular work and their overall moping tone. They say little more than that things in the cultural/poetic world used to be better and are getting worse.

In the end, these three writers make explicit what is wrong with Acumen. For all its dedication to maintaining traditional standards in poetry, It comes across as the work of a group of elderly people who have known happier times and cannot escape the feeling that the world is passing them by. Perhaps this is behind the fact that, almost alone among established poetry magazines, Acumen gives no information about its contributors. Perhaps most of the contributors know each other so well, and appear so frequently, that the editor feels no need to tell the reader anything about them.

To end on a positive note: Acumen has two significant pluses. It does not run competitions - that ruthless modern way of raising funds by playing on hopes that, in most cases, are bound to be dashed - and it doesn’t have anything by Sophie Hannah, almost the only poetry magazine, according to my informal survey, of which this is currently true.

14 10th Muse

Facts

Current issue 7 (undated, apparently Summer 1996)
Format A5
Cover crimson matt card
Illustrations 4 pages b/w
Frequency unstated
Proportion of poetry 36%
Price £2.50 (£8 for 4 issues)
Funding Southern Arts and Hampshire County Council
Editor Andrew Jordan
Address 33 Hartington Road, Southampton S014 QEW

Comment

The cover shows a bomb about to explode. It’s a good image, making one wonder who the tenth, non-Parnassian muse might be: Rhyme-rage? Form-fury?

This issue opens with an essay, unsigned but doubtless by the editor, titled Nonism as Gestalt, Marketing and a Fragment of Code and beginning “Speaking as the non-leader of a nonmovement (which is called nonism) that does not seek to dissect poetry...” One’s heart warms to see so many current fads knocked on the head In such short space, but unfortunately the essay doesn’t live up to its start. The writing is livelier than anything in Acumen, but turns out to be a cross, rather aimless ramble delivering a smack at the idea of poetic regionalism as it goes. This is so vigorous that I suspect someone is being answered, but we’re not told who. The piece is wholly general, not engaging with any particular writing.

This said, 10th Muse is worth anyone’s money for the range and vigour of its reviews. There are perceptive reviews of poetry collections by Steve Sneyd and Emma Hooper, but the high point is the editor’s seven pages of reviews of other magazines, titled Monsters from the Id. Reviews begin

“The best thing about The Arcadian is that if you spill your tea on it it dissolves”

and

“Moonstone 55 contains 21 pages of brightly asserted paganism”

and (my favourite)

“Ambit is one of those magazines that never replies to yr mail, regardless of SAEs. After sending them poems that were never returned, and letters that were never replied to, I was surprised to receive a free copy of the mag with a begging letter.”

There is also a ferocious attack on the magazine Tears in the Fence and its editor, David Caddy, in which one senses scores being settled. To invective of this calibre, Urban Fox would take off his hat if he wore one. But the reviews are also perceptive and fair when the magazines deserve it: The Frogmore Papers “might exist to show how good a low cost poetry mag can be” ; Headlock 4 “is simply stuffed with good poems”; “The mission of Krax might be to crack a smile on the phiz of even the most humourless of reactionaries”. If one wants to know about the current state of poetry magazines, I know no better guide.

The poetry is slender in quantity but varied in range: from two moving pieces by Sue Saunders (featured also in Magma 8), through some classy sub-Geoffery Hill meditations by Norman Jope and four fierce telegraphic poems by Dee Rimbaud with matching graphics, to a fine mordant poem about the Samaritans (Edmund Harwood).

In the end, though, I found myself wondering about a poetry magazine that devotes nearly two-thirds of its space to prose. Andrew Jordan is evidently more interested in polemic than poetry, and this might explain the dull and slipshod way in which the poetry is set out, with jarring page-breaks, title and author both in the same capitals and no use of bold type anywhere (does Jordan feel that bold, is undemocratic because it gives prominence to certain words?)

The whole magazine is in much smaller type than you’re reading now, which gives it a pinched appearance. No doubt Jordan would reply that he gets in as much as his resources allow, in which case Southern Arts and Hampshire County Council should up his funding. I don’t recall much of poetic interest coming out of Hampshire recently. They should cherish this bright, if explosive, talent.