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

QUENEAU - 55pp, paper, $1.95; GUILLEVIC - 56pp, paper, $1.95; EICH - 56pp, cloth, $1.95; APOLLINAIRE CALLIGRAMS - 48pp, paper, $1.95; Boris Pasternak, SEVEN POEMS, 16pp, paper, $2.00; Kenneth Rexroth, SKY SEA BIRDS TREES EARTH HOUSE BEASTS FLOWERS, 32pp, paper, illustrated, $2.00; Daniel Berrigan, PRISON POEMS, l24pp, cloth, $5.95; Jerome K Rothenberg, ESTHER K COMES TO ANERICA, 50pp, paper, S/3.00; UNICORN JOURNAL 1972, l09pp, illustrated, $2.00 -- all from Unicorn Press, P O Box 3307, Greensboro, NC 27402, USA.
FIREFLIES IN THE DARK, classical Arab poetry,& A MIRROR FOR AUTUMN, modern Arab poetry, both translated by Abdullah al-Udhari, 35p each.
Abdullah al-Udhari, VOICE WITHOUT PASSPORT, poems, 35p -- all from The Menard Press, 23 Fitzwarren Gardens, London N19 3TR.
Thomas A Clark, POINTING STILL, found poems, 20p.
Benjamin Peret, FOUR YEARS AFTER THE DOG, poems translated by Paul Brown & Peter Nijmeijer, 60p.
GLOUP & WOUP, concrete poetry edited by Bob Cobbing, -- all from Arc Publications, 3 & 4 Oldroyd, Todmorden, Lancashire.

The Unicorn Press is a group of 5 people who design, typeset and handprint their own books, all of which are devoted to contemporary US poetry and translations of 20th Century German and French poets. In the rust they’ve produced books by such writers as John Haines, Teo Savory, Philip Levene and James Tate. With foreign material they’ve ranged from Vietnamese poems by Nhat Hanh & Vo-Dinh to Horst Bienek’s ‘The Cell’ (recently published in the UK by Gollancz) and Ulli Baler’s ‘Words of Paradise’, poetry of Papua/New Guinea. Also due from Unicorn during 1974 were new poems by Robert Bly, Teo Savory, the Moroccan courtesan Mrida, Zen poems by Thich Nhat Hanh and Thomas Merton’s translations of poems by the Nicaraguan poet Pablo Antonio Cuadra.

     For such a small organisation this is a very impressive list and achievement. Just looking solely at the material to hand, I am amazed by the high standards they have reached in production alone. Each book has obviously been treated as a separate design problem (which makes a welcome change from graphic standardisation) and each problem has been brilliantly solved and printed. Such care and excellence is exceedingly rare and many UK small press operators could learn a lot from looking at Unicorn’s books - If they have the wit to learn that is.

     In particular, the Apollinaire is a startling typographic achievement, involving as it does so many of his shaped poems. Equally, it’s good to see a volume of Gunter Eich’s poems which have not, to my knowledge, been published before in English in book form. It’s equally a surprise to see some poems by Raymond Queneau, who is still, unfortunately, mainly known in this country as the author of Zazie Dans Le Metro (which is anyway not strictly speaking true). Even the tiny Guillevic book, with its 19 small poems,appeared before Penguin brought out their recent volume in the European Poets Series, and could still teach them a thing or too about presentation. I must also mention the ‘7 Poems’ by Boris Pasternak, which redeploys Eric Gill’s beautiful Joanna typeface very effectively, though I had a slight sensation of uneasiness about the sound of the translations.

     The biggest of the Unicorn books is Daniel Berrigan’s ‘Prison Poems’. The author is an intelligent, humane and acute man who writes sharply and clearly and with a bitter edge of humour. His is not a poetry of startling Images but It is hard, direct, simple and rooted very firmly In reality and his experiences in prison. For instance, ‘A Day’s Work In the Clinic’, which is short enough to quote here in toto

I stand at the dentist’s chair
hosing down
the havoc of his pincers
slow     slow
then a wider arc he draws
the newborn tooth     into light of day
Mother day
another bloody day
root     limb     blind as bone
stillborn as a tooth

     Kenneth Rexroth’s poems attempt to imitate the effects and even the structure of classic Japanese poetry, but not often with great success as can be seen from this sample, which is flat and too obvious : ‘Slowly the moon rises/ Over the quiet sea/ Slowly the face of my beloved/ Forms in my mind.’ The format of the book is, however, delightful, a brush drawing on the left-hand page and a poem on the right, the whole bound in traditional Japanese manner. Jerome K Rothenberg’s book, the final sequence of his ‘Poland’ poems, handset, handprinted and handbound again, alternates pictures of Jewish life in Poland with the Jewish exile’s confrontation with the brash and confusing New World (c.f. Section 5 of the poem, ‘The Murder Inc. Sutra’). I found the simple style of the poetry had an odd, incantatory effect on me which was quite moving. The photographs, looking as if they came from a stage performance, were an excellent complement to the text.

     Lastly, the Unicorn Journal, an annual, seems. to be a kind of foretaste for those who do not have any acquaintance with Unicorn books, a testing ground for the talents of a good.many of the people Unicorn have published in book form - it’s a pity the journal doesn’t appear more often.

     Having seen The Menard Press’ earlier ‘Chapter 42 & The Goldfinch’ by Osip and Nadezhda Mandelshtam, I was looking forward to more of their books. However, I am not so impressed by the presentation of these three Arabic booklets. They’re an awkward shape for a start ( roughly 5 ½ in. tall by 8 ¼ in. wide) and this creates layout problems inside. Since the poems are all short, the designer (who?) has in general placed one poem top left and another bottom right on each page. The yellow paper cover with red lettering, printed askew, doesn’t look too prepossessing either. However, the contents often belie the appearance. There is obviously a great continuity of poetic tradition between the earliest poet (c. 8th Century) and the latest (b.1939) - the translator points out that the classic period of Arab poetry lasted from 450 AD to 1947 (what happened then ?) - and this traditon still continues apparently in both the most modern poems and in Abdullah al-Udhari’s own poems.

     Since I believe, along with Isaac Babel, that there is no iron that can enter the soul so effectively as a full stop placed In exactly the right place, and that brevity and compression are qualities a lot of our modern poets could well cultivate, I think that these three booklets should be compulsory reading for all practising poets. There is a haiku-like quality about some of these works : ‘The sun covered its face/with a cloud: / A bride wearing a veil.’ And, ‘The butterflies are on the wing/ Rose petals blown by the wind’ - the first from a poet who died in 1834, the second from a l0th-11th Century writer. Or take this :

They told me
Jumla was married.
I couldn’t sleep.

The branches were still.
And I trembled all night.

                            (-Al -Mezzah, d.1438)

My own favourite, especially as a motto for our own times, is this ‘This is the age of monkeys/ You might as well obey them’ (Abu Nuwas, d.ca.813 AD). Times and men have not changed too much, it seems.

     However, ‘Brasscityspikes highrelief of our fear travel into re moteregions of mansvision’ from Abdullah al-Udhari himself seems a very pretentious way of dressing up a very ordinary thought. But he’s not all like that, thank God. His best poems have the simplicity, directness and associative reverberation of the best Classical pieces.

     Of the items from Arc (whose great successes for me were their Wols volume and D M Thomas’ ‘The Shaft’, one of the best produced pamphlets of poetry ever printed), the least interesting is the Clark booklet, six ‘found’ items from the past about lost watches, the longest only 73 words and 10 lines, but a good piece of printing nevertheless. But in their Peret book and the folder of concrete poems, Arc can be seen as an English rival to Unicorn, at least as far as production goes. The 20 Peret poems (with French originals en face) come from the heart of Surrealism. Peret was one of its originals, an editor along with Pierre Naville of ‘La Revolution Surrealiste’ (1924-29), a friend of Breton’s and he lasted longer than most, remaining faithful to his pure Surrealist principles until he died in 1959. These poems are, as near as one can get to it, true automatic writing, image springing directly forth from image, phrase leading straight into phrase: ‘....if she would die/the first modesties of the shepherd/would fall upon the pond/ soiling it/ and the procession of the deaf and dumb/ corrode the last elements.’ (‘To an S-Bend’). Or take this one, called ‘Cloud’:

Fall gingerbread fall
the wounded are far
the plants are dead
and the sick are barely breathing.

though I can’t see the need for the second ‘fall’, which is absent in the French original. Anyway - the true Surrealist poem should be read with an open mind and heart, without any linguistic or rational preconceptions - a self-contained entity. It either works for you, or it doesn’t. Further comprehension won’t help if It doesn’t. If this sort of instant poem is what you like, then buy this volume, it’s handsomely produced and very cheap.

     ‘Gloup’ (GLOUcestershire grouP) ‘and Woup’ (Westminster grOUP) comes in buff card container which, when opened out, reveals a package of folded and single sheets on which are printed examples of the work of 5 major figures of the modern concrete poetry movement - Bob Cobbing, Kenel. Cox, Tom Edmonds, John Furnival and the ubiquitous Do, Sylvester Houedard. There is an introduction to the work of each poet, plus a general introduction to the ‘book’ as a who1e by Bob Cobbing, the editor. The examples are marvellously printed you can take them out and hang them on your wall. There is much that is pretentious rubbish passing under the label of ‘concrete poetry’ but none of it is here. These are all fascinating items, and the ‘book’ is a must for all enthusiasts of the genre. As long as books like these I’ve mentioned from Arc can still be produced with such obvious love and care, then there’s still hope for publishing in general in this country and the little press movement in particular.

     Finally, I must mention some new items from Penguin Books*. Their latest idea is to have well-known poets selecting their own classic favourites. In this case, we have Kathleen Raine and Shelley, Thom Gunn and Ben Jonson, Peter Levi and Pope. It sounds a good idea but the selections are quirky and better done elsewhere, and the introductions do little to provide that ‘intriguing insight into’ the poets ‘themselves and their own work’ (the modern ones, that is), as the blurb claims. Also from Penguin comes Solzhenitsyn’s hefty ‘August 1914’, a frightening picture of the collapse of the Imperial Russian war machine in East Prussia in the first days of the Great War, seen through the eyes of a Tolstoyan array of characters. But Tolstoy slightly updated : Mr S. resorts too often, for greater liveliness and immediacy, to what one might call ‘living newspaper’ sections, which smack a little obviously of Dos Passos. As a whole the book is readable, but sometimes the organizational hand falters and the movement of events and characters becomes a little difficult to follow. Mr S. is not another Tolstoy and I sometimes wonder, if he were not who he is arid had not suffered what he has, whether we should take as much note of him as a writer as we clearly do at present. Time will, of course, ultimately tell.