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

Dear Mick,

I always meant to get in touch again and now it’s too late. Trying to remember the year we spent editing Poetry Review together in the 1980s is like entering another world, conjuring up another me, long ago. I had to sit in the British Library reading the five issues of the magazine that we co-produced¹ to recall us sitting in our tiny office in the Poetry Society building in Earls Court. There was barely room for the two of us and the sackfuls of submissions as we sat reading through poems and occasionally handing one back and forwards between us when we found something good. I never met your mum but she sent you in with a packed lunch for both of us each week.

We were paid for one day’s work a week which was almost nothing split between two people. We both applied for the post of Editor of Poetry Review after Andrew Motion left. Before the interviews we decided to apply together and hopefully decimate the other contenders. You had published your first collection of poems, The Zoologist’s Bath, with Sycamore Press the year before². We met in Oxford where you were doing some part-time teaching and I was studying for an MPhil in English. I was a fish out of water, a working class girl surrounded by posh-offs with bewildering and incomprehensible social rituals. I knew everything about Anglo-Saxon poetry, James Joyce and Thomas Hardy, and nothing about social survival skills in that world. You never said but you knew and you helped me to swim there.

At Poetry Review we were enfants terribles. We published the first use of the word ‘fuck’ in the magazine. We organised an issue on Alcohol and Poetry. We introduced a Letters Page most of which we wrote. We commissioned and published Philip Larkin’s last poem. We were sharp. I wore tiny scimitar earrings and a grey pinstripe miniskirt held together with six zips. You were always slightly retro in tight jeans and an open-neck shirt. You spent your other four days a week writing and teaching and I spent mine working on exhibitions at the Institute of Contemporary Arts. You had a vicious wit that, looking back, sat rather awkwardly in the pages of the magazine alongside my earnestness. We were each other’s sounding board, a tiny cutting edge poetry research centre of two.

We created a sense of a Poetry World in the pages of the magazine, with reports on festivals, readings and prizes. We invited Wendy Cope to set competitions. We included crosswords and poetry parodies. We were unforgivably unkind to a lot of deserving people. We published charts of poetry bestsellers and a survey on the best poetry books of our time. One of the current debates then centred around Blake Morrison and Andrew Motion’s anthology of Contemporary British Poetry³ and their proposition of two main poetry schools - the Martians (after Craig Raine and Chris Reid) and Narrative Poetry (after James Fenton and Andrew Motion). We published poems by Anne Stevenson, Paul Muldoon, John Fuller, Medbh McGuckian, Selima Hill and Neil Astley. We printed unpublished poems and drawings by Stevie Smith. We undertook the unlikely task of making Britain’s oldest poetry magazine racy, humorous and rather bitchy (and that was mostly you!). You turned Poetry Review into a thing that crackled. Its pages became a deliciously dangerous place to be.

We published poems by Ian McMillan, Gavin Ewart, U.A. Fanthorpe, Amy Clampitt, Miroslav Holub, Roy Fuller and Carol Rumens. We commissioned reviews and Childhood Memoirs by Fleur Adcock and Andrew Motion. Some of the best things I remember were Tom Paulin’s article on the creativity of a hangover, an interview with Tony Harrison and James Fenton’s ‘Manifesto Against Manifestos’.

After five issues I left to take up a full-time job working with Carmen Callil at Chatto and Windus and you continued as sole editor. Later I had a baby, was working in the Art World instead of the Poetry World, and we lost touch. For years I didn’t see you but thought of you often. I carried phrases from your poems around in my head—‘shy to be an act’—and was delighted when I could apply them to something I encountered or quote them in an article. You were brilliant and funny. I am missing you.

Tracey