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

Any attempt at being representative or, what is worse, comprehensive in a short essay on the UK little magazine scene is doomed to failure. The selection I have made is entirely subjective, but nonetheless tries to introduce readers to a wide variety of magazines, editorial policies and poetics.

   The 2002 flier of the UK Little Magazine Project, set up at Nottingham Trent University’s English and Media Studies Department in October 1998, starts 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.” 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 emerges writing on and for the computer or website and making use of the exciting potential of the Web.

   Although many magazines that I used to read and like ceased
publication around the turn of the millennium, while others are believed to be moribund, there are still plenty of them showing every sign of life. The current number of outlets varies between 385 (Light’s List 2003) and 235 magazines (Jim Bennett’s The Poetry Kit website). Compared to 425 magazines mentioned in Light’s List 2002, the number of journals for creative writing seems to be stagnant if not slightly in regress due to the difficult economic situation in most EU countries and the reluctance of readers to (re)subscribe to magazines. Some editors have also turned their printed magazines into online journals in an attempt to minimise costs.

   Magazines may also die with their editors as in the case of Douglas
Oliver and Gare du Nord in April 2000. But this does not have to be so. Ian Robinson of Oasis Magazine died on 20 April 2004, but his magazine seems likely to be continued by one or some of his friends. Agenda’s founding editor William Cookson died in early 2003. But Patricia McCarthy 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 three bumper special issues on Derek Walcott, on Cookson and on Irish poetry with a special focus on John Montague.

   The most remarkable changes UK magazines have undergone in
recent years are instanced in the cases of Poetry Review and London Magazine. These occurred as a result of new editors taking over. David Herd and Robert Potts, who succeeded Peter Forbes as editor of Poetry Review in 2002, felt that the poetry scene in Britain had become “hopelessly polarised” (David Herd). Consequently, they started out with the intention of “disregarding the categories, [instead] indicating the range of reading available to the British poetry audience.” Peter Middleton’s essay “Recognition” – in the Spring 2004 issue – sets out the fractious variety of contemporary poetries in Britain, charts a tribalised and sectarian landscape and expresses a mixture of sadness and awe: “sadness that so much energy has been wasted keeping poets and poems apart [.]; awe at the sheer range and volume of poetry produced over the past thirty years”. Richard Burns’s review-essay on
Andrew Duncan’s The Failure of Conservatism in Modern British Poetry also endorses the policy of breaking up boundaries. Other (long) essays (re)evaluate the work of poets – Thomas Lovell Beddoes, Robert Lowell, Charlotte Mew and George Oppen in the two most recent issues. The arts pages, ten percent of every issue, are curated by Fred Mann and introduce readers to contemporary artists. In addition, poets like Alison Brackenbury and Paul Farley are commissioned to review current exhibitions for the “Poet in the Gallery” section.

   In order to break up habitual reading practices the new editors
put poems together that would not normally be seen next to each other sometimes in order to surprise readers. As David Herd puts it, “we want readers [.] to come across poets they have not read before in an environment where those poets might be freshly appreciated.” Every issue consists of six main sections (Poems, Essays, Reviews, Poet in the Gallery, Letters to the Editors, Editorial) whose order seems to indicate the importance the editors attach to them: “We want to produce a magazine in which the reading of poems is clearly the most important thing. We want to let the elements of the magazine speak for themselves. I guess it is for this reason that, when we have run editorials, we have run them at the back of the magazine.” (David Herd) Almost without exception the poems are unsolicited. Another aspect of the editorial policy seems to be the intention to print, if possible, more than one poem per poet. In the Winter 2003/4 issue eight from among seventeen
poets are represented by more than one poem, among them John
Kinsella, Julian Stannard, and Keston Sutherland. In the current Spring 2004 issue readers are confronted with long poems and poem sequences by Estill Pollock, Deryn Rees-Jones and Jane Griffiths, something which could never have happened under Forbes’s editorship.

   The London Magazine is another magazine that has seen
considerable changes under the editorship of Sebastian Barker, who
took from Alan Ross only the idea of featuring all the arts. Not even ten percent of an issue’s pages were given over to new poems under the old editorship so that readers got the impression that poems were only occasionally sneaked into an issue, because Ross wanted to fill in the space between short stories, essays and reviews. Barker’s predilection certainly is for poetry and he devotes between 25 to 30 percent of an issue to new poems. While the majority of poems are sent in by contributors, Barker also asks poets for some poems without committing himself in advance. In a poem Barker wants to see “evidence of craftsmanship, of skill, of the magical, of the inspired”. There may be significance in the fact that no poet publishing in Poetry Review is to be encountered in The London Magazine and vice versa. But while this may be a false impression resulting from my only having read two issues of each magazine, it is clear that the linguistically-innovative poets do not seem to be to Barker’s taste. In Barker’s two most recent issues readers will find poems by Lotte Kramer, Dannie Abse, Alan Brownjohn, Maggie Butt, Robert Nye, William Oxley, Peter Porter, and Derek Stanford. In contrast to Herd & Potts, Barker applies the one-poem-per-poet policy, two poems by one poet seem to be an exception to the rule. What they share, however, is an interest in the long poem, he features one long poem per issue: in the April/May issue John Hartley Williams’s “Fox to Earth” and in the June/July issue
Aidan Andrew Dun’s “Three Kings Passage”. Besides poetry, The London Magazine publishes three short stories per issue, essays reviewing exhibitions and focusing on such diverse subjects as “The Church & the Arts” and Graham Greene’s fascination with Paris as well as reproductions of artwork. The London Magazine only publishes longer, detailed and in-depth reviews.

   PNR, having reached its twenty-eighth year of publication, is
indispensable reading for poets, academics or anyone interested in what is going on in the world of poetry. Being published by Michael Schmidt from The Writing School of Manchester Metropolitan University, it has not undergone any considerable changes recently. Many features make PNR remarkable – its essays on poetics, its thought-provoking editorials; and the reader might find challenging Schmidt’s interest in the longer poem and poem sequences. In recent issues I was particularly interested in Marjorie Perloff ’s memoir-cum-cultural-meditation on her Viennese origins and emigration to the United States as a child of six and Neil Powell’s long essay on George Crabbe. Among the poetry published in 2004 issues, I especially liked the ones by the Austrian poet Raoul Schrott, Pier Paolo Pasolini as well as Christopher Middleton’s poem sequence “Tableaux”

   Martin Bax’s Ambit, which started in 1959 and was designed as
an arts magazine rather than a traditional poetry magazine, is
characterised by what H. P Tinker describes, in an interview with Bax for the online magazine 3 A.M., as “the ebb and flow of the quarterly Ambit, from poetry to photographs, from short stories to drawings.” The artwork of Ambit, which seems to be just as important as the texts, is meant as “an illustration for the words. Not a reproduction of the image these words suggest, but something purposeful [.]. A real relationship”, as its corresponding editor Ron Sandford points out. The 1960s feel of the magazine and its anti-establishment reputation are mainly sustained by its artwork. The magazine is “as reliable as a quartz clock without ever being boring”, as Nicholas Royle put it rather adequately in a review in Time Out, admiring the “wonderfully witty pictures, affecting poetry and linguistically agile and imaginative stories.”

   Peter Sansom and Janet Fisher’s The North, founded in 1986 and
published twice yearly by The Poetry Business from Huddersfield,
features poems ranging from vignettes to longer and more elaborate
pieces. In Nos. 33 (2003) and 34 (2004) the editors forward the claim that it is the poem not the poet that matters. The poems appear
anonymously, with numbers attached instead of names. This is an
interesting experiment, because it questions the nepotism of reputation and reveals our prejudices as editors and readers. Thankfully the editors too are content with the experiment, providing relief for those who want to test their poet-spotting skills or critical prejudices: an index of poets on the last page, where readers will find out whether the poem they may have liked was written by George Oppen, Moniza Alvi, Sean O’Brien or Andrew Motion. In addition, poets are asked to write a personal response to a poem without being given the author’s name in the section “Blind Criticism”. For the features “Poets I go back to .” and “The Collection” (which I find particularly appealing) Sansom & Fisher ask writers to talk about poems and poetry books that are important to them. The reviews in The North I find less interesting, because in most cases reviewers devote only one longer paragraph to a single collection.

   Orbis, describing itself as “Quarterly International Literary Journal” and edited by Carole Baldock since No. 121 (Spring 2002), has always been strong on information and reader-involvement, aiming
“to encourage young writers and those who lack access to the Arts per se.” Every issue is orchestrated around the main sections “Lines on Lines” (excerpts from readers’ letters accompanied by the editor’s short comments), “Readers’ Award” (the author of the most popular poem in each issue receives £50), “Past Master” (an old poem is re-introduced by a critical paragraph), “Poetry Index” (reviews of magazines), and “Featured Writer” (the author is commissioned). Rupert Loydell, who edits the reviews section, tries to get as many collections reviewed as possible. In my opinion, reviewing four collections on a page and a half neither helps the poet nor the reviewer nor does it contribute to the magazine’s reputation. Baldock features work by more than 45 poets– “talented newcomers are as welcome as old hands” – in every issue. However, the poem exceeding one page seems to be a rare species in Orbis.

   Tony Frazer’s poetry-only quarterly Shearsman and his press
Shearsman Books I have always admired. Its elegant low-key appearance as stapled A5 magazine of 32-36 pages was designed to minimise postal costs. The general look and feel of it was lifted, “quite shamelessly”, as Frazer admits, from Oasis of the late Ian Robinson, with whom and Robert Vas Dias he used to edit Ninth Decade and Tenth Decade until 1991. More than half of each issue is either solicited or comes from Frazer’s regular pool of corresponding writers. His natural inclination is towards the more experimental end of the poetic spectrum, “in historic terms, the American Black Mountain poets, the Objectivists, Pound & Williams, the New York School. Of the British poets, I incline firmly
in the direction of David Jones, Basil Bunting, W. S. Graham, and then Roy Fisher, Gael Turnbull, Christopher Middleton, Christopher Logue, and those who might be termed the Grosseteste Review poets.”

   Modern Poetry in Translation, Ted Hughes’s brainchild, launched together with Daniel Weissbort in 1965, was intended as “a cumulative and accumulating index of contemporary writing” (Weissbort). No magazine has been more concerned with the theory and practice of translation or has been more devoted to introducing to English readers poets from many cultures who would not be known without translation. MTP 21 and 22 (both 2003), the last two issues under Weissbort’s editorship, highlight once again the magazine’s initial aim “to provide a platform for the poetry of the first post-War generation of Eastern European poets”. Weissbort’s penultimate issue is a potpourri of all the objectives the editors have pursued over the years, including features on two contributors of long standing – Michael Hamburger and James Kirkup – and a long section devoted to Hughes’s unpublished translations in an attempt “to draw attention to his importance as a translator himself of poetry and of poetic drama.” From No. 23 on the magazine will be taken over by David and Helen Constantine.

   The issues I have read (Stand 5.2 and 5.3) firmly bear the stamp
of Jon Glover, who edits and publishes Stand from the School of English of Leeds University. Although certain affinities with the editorial policy of its founding editor Jon Silkin can be traced, Glover has changed the critical section of the magazine, focusing on review-essays analysing between one and two collections. But it is still possible to find traces of Silkin’s approach when Glover stresses that he is “interested in the relationship between a political and cultural awareness of any one time and the creative process, particularly as it affects poets”. The traces are also apparent in the current Translation Special Issue when he highlights “Silkin’s deeply felt sense of poetry as an organic process of discovery in which translation is the nearest model for a poet’s use of his or her own fractured language.” By publishing essays by Tony Rudolf, Ian
Farley and Grevel Lindop, Glover carries on Stand’s tradition of
providing a platform for the discussion of problems of poetry translation. Since its inception in 1952, Stand has published many important translation issues, which is referred to by Glover when he hopes that long-term readers “might, we hope, be pleased to see translation again in such a prominent role.

   Especially at the more experimental end of the spectrum, magazines used to be the only way of getting to know what was being written. With the much expanded lists at Salt, Shearsman Books, Reality Street and West House, those days seem to have gone. In a publishing and bookselling world that has been transformed by electronic publishing, printing on demand and Internet selling, technology and funding embody the biggest question marks when it comes to better opportunities and threats to the little magazines and presses. Depending on economic situations readers are more or less willing to part with their money and to take out a subscription or to renew one they already have. Having said that, the Internet has made the promotion and distribution of magazines easier, also being supported by online reviews such as Gerald England’s New Hope International.