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

Founded in 1962, Ian Hamilton’s magazine ‘THE REVIEW’ ceased publication with its 30th number. Early in 1974 came the announcement that Hamilton was due to launch a new magazine under the title ‘The New Review’, which would incorporate its distinguished predecessor. Apart from the obvious fact that most of the old collaborators would find a welcome in the new publication, two points stood out from the promotional ballyhoo that accompanied the announcement the fact that TNR was to be that almost unheard of beast, a monthly, and the staggering price of 90p per issue, which undoubtedly put a lot of people off forking out £12 for a year’s subscription.

     The first issue appeared in May and was followed at more or less regular intervals by a further six numbers up to October 1974. Although from No 4 onwards the number of pages dropped (without editorial comment) from 96 to 80, the format has remained the same throughout a very expensive-looking A4-sized production on good paper, including two column prose, a few photographs, some quality advertising and an extremely unimaginative lay-out. The overall effect is hard to describe the thinking man’s ‘Nova’ might come close. But the contents are the thing.

     First of all, those who remembered ‘The Review’ and bought TNR for its poetry will have been taken for a ride. The first issue contained 10 pages of Lowell, 6 of Douglas Dunn, one poem by Alvarez - and nothing else. These are the poetry contents of the next six isuues in full : No 2 - John Fuller (11pp), James Fenton (3pp); No 3 - Seamus Heaney (2pp), Edwin Morgan (3pp), Clive James (5pp); No 4 - Hugo Williams (3pp), Roy Fuller (Spp); No 5 - Douglas Dunn, Cohn Faick and Alan Williamson (11 page each), Peter Porter (4pp), Chive James (12pp); No 6 - Douglas Dunn, Gavin Ewart and David Rokeah (1 page each), Peter Taylor (6pp), Richard Murphy (3pp); No 7 - John Fuller (3pp), John Mander (7pp), Michael Longley (3pp). E poi basta ! - out of a total of 608 pages.

     It makes meagre reading. 8ut it is not only this meagre quantity of poetry which must be deplored, nor even the monotonous repetition of a handful of names, but above all the weakness of most of this stuff. It is the poetry of the old ‘Review Group’, but now grown impotent, anaemic, ‘salon poetry’ par excellance. With a few notable exceptions (Heaney, Lowell, some of Mander), it is mostly competent, at times witty (though less often than it thinks), but mainly vapid and bloodless. Witness John Fuller’s long ‘The Most Difficult Position’ (No 2), which plods on heavily and pointlessly (but oh-so-efficiently), name-dropping its way to a tedious finale

“Ah, well. The deadly promptness of the spring
Becomes a kind of welcome remedy.
Its scenery is sufficient. It obeys
The rules. Those ducks, the ostentatious roses,
Even the diligent editor of Shakespeare,
All move in free compulsion to one end
Which though unknown is wholly necessary
And has some joys, I think. Or sometimes does.”

I think not ; rather a tide of well-educated tedium.

     Even worse is Clive James’ tiresome pastiche ‘To Pete Adkin’ in No 3, which starts out

“Trapped here in Paris, Pete, to shoot some scenes
Which end a film that’s tied me up for weeks,
I’ve lost track of what what I’m doing means.
The streets of the Etoile are filled like creeks...”

and crawls on for five pages through passages like

“We’re all aware of how the Continuity
Of Western Culture’s frazzled to a thread.
It doesn’t take a soothsayer’s acuity
To see the whole shebang might wind up dead.” -

trailing the limp rags of senescent wit. The assiduous diarists of the Sunday papers make more amusing reading and are less pretentious.

     Another nadir is reached in No 6 with Peter Taylor’s ‘The Instruction of a Mistress’, an exhaustive blank verse saga of an East Coast writer’s affaire which pretends ingenuity by presenting the differing interpretations of the man and the woman alternately in the first person. Here’s the man

Looking back, I feel she understood it all -
Almost at once. All too well. She was very quick.
But she enjoyed nothing. That, in the end,
Is what I had above all else to teach her.”

And the girl :

“Oh, God, if you only knew how dull he is
How bald he is, how active his bladder...”

And so on. Leaving aside the banality of the verse, we seem to have here a terminal case of that writer’s disease so characteristic of TNR and its contributors : self-absorption, or ‘Christ, how fascinating we writers are’ (notice how much of TNR’s subject matter is intellectuals nattering on about themselves), and the middle-class second-rater’s hankering after literary chic, the never-quite-to-be-grasped ideal of the world-weary sophisticate who entertains mistresses rather than girl-friends.

     So much for the poetry. What else does TNR offer the reader for his 90p? Well, there’s the fiction. But not too much of it, nor too exciting: No 1 brings us an Edna O’Brien short story and an extract from Dan Jacobson’s latest novel. No 2 includes a John McGahern extract and a good lightweight story by Patricia Highsmith, while No 3 brings Jean Rhys and Francis Wyndham. It goes on like that, pleasant middle-of-the-road stuff with no outlet problems.

     The bulk of the magazine is taken up by articles. Literary reminiscences, some mild academia (“Owen and Sassoon, The Craiglockhart Institute” - No 4), incestuous nostalgia in the form of Hamilton’s articles on small presses of the past, a decided flirtation with the New Journalism in its milder forms. Chatty ‘profiles’: Angus Wilson, Kingsley Amis, Nigel Balchin (!), Claude Chabrol, Anthony Powell, Eric Ambler (!!). Near-trendy stuff, instantly forgettable.

     As it happens, the two items which most precisely define TNR are both included in No 5. The first is Clive James’ “Peregrine Prykke’s Pilgrimage through the London Literary World, a tragedy in heroic couplets”, to give it its full title. This long ‘poem’ (for want of a better word) is a sort of schoolboy concoction full of in-jokes and nudges, which goes on for 12 pages, about 11 too long. It includes a list of characters representative of the ‘London Literary World’ : ‘Ian Hammerhead, poet, critic and editor; Marvin Grabb, a TV personality; Mitch L Adrian, a revolutionary poet; Creeping George McDeath’, etc., etc. - you get the idea.

     Some of the lines that follow are amusing, particularly the poetry reading:

The Muse, in Creeping George’s view, wears black
Stileto jackboots and a rubber mac.
Creeping George himself wears snakeskin ties
And doesn’t always wait till the snake dies.
C.G.M.: “The blood has soaked the bone which hides the stone
The rat excreted in the telephone.”

But not amusing stretched over 12 long pages - and to make matters even worse, this ‘thing’ has been published as a separate booklet by TNR. Perhaps the game is given away by that initial list of characters; I suspect TNR of harbouring the quaint illusion that there should after all be such a thing as ‘the London Literary Life’, and that they should all be aboard, rubbing elbows with E Jarvis Thribb and the martini generation, It’s self-congratulation run riot and a pitiful illusion to boot, but certainly it does no harm. However, the second item I have in mind from TNR No 5 is more poisonous.

     “The Nine Lives of Poetry International”, by one Alfred Lautner, while purporting to be an examination of the events in question, appears at first sight to be a smartly bitchy attack on Charles Osborne, Literature Director of the Arts Council of Great Britain and organiser (at first with Patrick Garland and later alone) of Poetry International. Osborne is attacked by the author for being Australian and liking Verdi. Apart from commenting on a number of Osborne’s quotes, Lautner drivels on venemously about ‘obscure Eastern European poets’ who have attended past Poetry Internationals (in this case, Vasco Popa and Tadeusz Rozewicz), as well as referring to the invited “blacks” (Edward Brathwaite).

     If this article is nothing more than a vicious bit of character assassination then it is puerile and unforgivable enough. But there could be more to it than that. In view of the fact that TNR’s continued survival is entirely dependent on more than £10,000 worth of public money in the form of an Arts Council grant authorised by Osborne, it seems a little unlikely that Hamilton would savage quite so light heartedly the hand which feeds him. In which case, and keeping in mind TNR’s incestuous habits, one might be forgiven the suspicion that Herr Lautner’s article was composed by an accredited member of the cabal and with Osborne’s approval, if not by Osborne himself as a sort of grotesque in-joke. It is perhaps significant that whereas a couple of correspondents in No 7 objected to the tone of the article, Mr Osborne’s own justified outrage is not evident.

     Few, if any, readers will be interested in this tedious little game and even less in the identity, if any, of A.Läutner; but whatever the case may be, the affair is symptomatic of the basic flaws in TNR. That adults should choose to waste their time in this type of occupation is one thing, but that the fruit of this tiresome onanism should be published at public expense is quite another matter; at a time when literature as a whole is dismissed by Mr Osborne and the Arts Council s Literature Panel with tuppence-ha’penny and a kick in the pants, there must be better uses for £10,000 (and no doubt twice that next year, if I’m any judge of TNR’s sales) than the financing of this kind of patronising tripe.

     But let us take a final look, this time at the review section of TNR. This, too, is illuminating. In 7 issues, only four poetry books are reviewed at any length: The Faber Book of Irish Verse, Douglas Dunn, Austin Clarke, Auden - a characteristic selection. A few fashionable novels are given a look in (Murdoch, Ballard, Vidal), but once again most of the space is given over to the flotsam and jetsam of creative work: ‘literary studies’, ephemera, memoirs and the like. And above all, biographies, for which TNR has a positively ghoulish appetite Ivy Compton-Burnett’s, Lillian Hellean’s, Keith Douglas’, Huxley’s. No sooner does a biography hit the Sundays than it resurfaces here.

     But that, after all, is what TNR seems to be a Sunday supplement’s literary supplement. A mild dose of heavily self-satisfied culture to skim through after the roast, courtesy of the Arts Council. Never mind that for the money disgorged for this largely remaindered monument to a few men’s vanity we might have had two dozen ‘Sheshetas’ and a proper poetry archive to boot - nobody asked you, it’s only your money.