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

POETRY NATION — six issues. Our record has been a good one: well over 700 pages of new poetry, reviews, essays, interviews, work by new and established writers, a large and growing list of subscribers, and a massive pile of submissions for each issue. Three years. But the editors experience frustration. The magazine’s objectives are thwarted by its infrequency. Twice a year, in a hardcover format, it is more an anthology than a responsive periodical. Each number begins from scratch, continuity has been only tentatively established, the themes that most concern us are raised but not debated.

     In rereading the issues we sense a sometimes blurred editorial line, an inconstancy in the standard of the work published. We have considered how best to remedy this situation, building on our existing achievements towards the same ends but with a different strategy. How to make the magazine more flexible, more current? How to convert our sizeable readership into a participating readership?

      This is the final issue of Poetry Nation under its current editorship. For the seventh issue, we will be joined by two new editors, both regular contributors to the magazine and both already, informally, performing editorial functions: Donald Davie and C.H. Sisson. The magazine, in a new paperback format, will double its frequency, becoming quarterly. The first issue will be published as PN Review in October 1976. The subscription rate per annum will, for the foreseeable future, remain unchanged.

     The new magazine will include: an unsigned editorial, a substantial selection from the work of half-a-dozen poets, two major essays, five or six shorter essays, a section of ‘Notes’ on various topics, book reviews and contributors’ notes. The thematic range of PN Review will be wider than that of Poetry Nation. Both in the reviews and in the articles we will make a point of bringing the poetic intelligence to bear upon matters of history, religion and politics, as well as contemporary literature. Our objectives in implementing these changes are to ensure continuity of discussion and debate and create a journal more responsible to its milieu: in short, a magazine for modern British poetry in its fullest sense.