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

The esteemed American magazine, The Beloit Poetry Journal, has been in existence for over fifty years and this fat anthology is a celebration of its activities during that period. I think it needs to be said that there are probably few publications on either side of the Atlantic which could produce such a strong body of work even if they have managed to survive for that length of time. Most magazines founder after a few issues, while others lapse into the mundane. Only a handful manage to maintain both quality and inventiveness.

     In an interesting introduction, Marion Stocking, who has been involved since the early days, tells how the magazine was started. Little magazines often have curious beginnings but The Beloit Poetry Journal grew out of a situation involving a murder and a suicide, not to mention the desire of an American college to add some intellectual lustre to a reputation which had previously rested on sports achievements. What seems obvious is that, from the start, the editors were determined not to become a house journal for any particular group, movement, or clique. Poets like Charles Bukowski and Gil Orlovitz, who were associated with the “underground’ of the late 1950s, appeared alongside more conventional writers like May Sarton and Richard Wilbur. It’s perhaps worth mentioning that, following an issue which spotlighted some avant-garde poets, attempts were made by conservative elements in the English Department to have the magazine closed down and the editors disciplined. Attitudes in the 1950s were still under the sway of McCarthyism and affected more than politics.

     If the magazine was open to experiments, with Charles Olson and Louis Zukofsky in its pages, it didn’t get swept up in the Beat mania of the 1960s, though some of the more interesting poets from that group were printed, Gary Snyder and Leroi Jones among them. And so on through the following decades, with new names coming in all the time and the marvellous flexibility of much American poetry always in evidence. I’ve mentioned a few poets likely to get a nod of recognition from British readers but one of the useful things about the anthology is that it offers a sampling of names probably not known here. There’s a poem by Jane Mead which questions what America has become and why the poet can’t fit into its framework:

I’ve been sitting in this parking lot
for a long time - thinking
about nothing. The bumper sticker
on the car next to mine reads
BORN TO SHOP, and makes me wonder
why I can’t laugh too - why I
can’t laugh with the best of us.

I’ve never read Jane Mead before but her poem makes me want to know more. And that’s what a good anthology, and a good magazine, ought to do; arouse the reader’s curiosity.