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

WE ARE, DEAR READER, about to become involved in another period of bohemianism. Those of you who read a wide variety of little magazines will, I hope, excuse me for raising a topic I have admittedly touched on elsewhere. But it has different aspects to it and I’ll try not to cover ground I’ve already been over.

     Actually, my own personal opinion is that such a period may not be too bad a thing. There’s always a load of nonsense surrounding bohemianism, of course, and human nature is such that the genuine types get swamped by the phoneys and bandwagoners, but it does usually give a fillip to activity in and around the arts. Purists will probably suggest that it’s the kind of fillip the arts can well do without (and it is true that any dedicated artist carries on regardless of the distractions), but purists lack a sense of humour (and mortality) and can’t see bohemianism as a little part of - give me that fanfare of Hollywood trumpets - life’s rich panorama. “Hey, Toulouse, come over here for a minute. I want you to dab a bit of paint on this panorama. Just in the corner, where it looks dry.”

     The politicals, too, will condemn a resurgence of bohemia as “bourgeois opportunism or irrelevance.” Something like that. Shame on me, but I never was much good at trotting out those kind of cliches, despite being a veteran of political and union meetings and all that. In fact, I decided a sense of proportion was necessary years ago when, after an intense period in which “bourgeois” was the key hate word In my vocabulary, I submitted an article on the subject to a magazine only to be told (rightly) that (a) I obviously didn’t know what the word meant, and (b) I couldn’t spell it correctly. The trouble with a lot of politicals is that, like the literary purists, they lack a sense of humour, I mean, it is possible to be political and bohemian. There were lots of people in Greenwich Village and Chicago’s bohemia of the first quarter of this century who managed it pretty well. We haven’t had many books on the subject in recent years, but if you can find them around anywhere, try Allen Churchill’s The Improper Bohemians (Cassell, 1961) or Albert Parry’s Garrets and Pretenders (Dover, 1960), and you’ll see what I’m getting at.

     I could ramble on about bohemianism from a sociological point of view, and why I think it’s on the way back, but this is a literary column, so I’ll keep my comments in context. The last big bout of bohemianism (the Beat years) was exciting, and did, as far as I’m concerned, stimulate quite a few people into writing, publishing magazines, and all the reat. Oh yes, I can hear the purists again. Was it all worthwhile? Where are those poets now? Has their work survived? Are the now-defunct magazines of any interest to anyone apart from literary historians ? They’re fair questions, I agree, but they could just as well be asked about any literary endeavour, whether bohemia-inspired or not. I prefer to be positive, and the benefit side of it was that it helped worthwhile writers into print. And made space available to people who perhaps didn’t have a lot to say, but who did have something in them that deserved to be shown to others.

     I’ve never been a devotee of the argument that says volume or longevity denotes quality. A man may have only one book in him, but it could be worth the total output of a prolific writer. The good thing about bohemia is that it gives ephemera its chance. When I think back to the magazines, anthologies, and pamphlets of the Beat years, the names of several writers spring to mind, despite the fact that they produced little and then virtually disappeared from the scene. John Fles, Ray Bremser, Bill Wyatt; all three wrote a few interesting poems. There were others, too, and it’s doubtful if most of them would have appeared in print had it not been for the atmosphere of those days. And if you see this as a mark against them, then bear in mind that many political activists (especially of the grass-roots variety) would never be heard from were it not for the prevailing climate bringing them out. Is their contribution not a genuine response, and likewise that of the little-known or short-lived poets?

     So, look to your mimeograph machines, prepare your manifestos, put the posters on the walls, and let the painting of the bathroom wait a while and write a poem instead. Come to think of it, that could be just what the new bohemians will do. Earlier types often spent more time parading their eccentricities and taunting the bourgeoisie, but it’s hard to be outlandish these days. The streets of any provincial town are filled with girls who never wrote or read a poem in their lives, and yet they dress like only the bohemians would have done fifteen or so years ago. And marijuana (and other drugs) are not the preserve of a small clique anymore. Free love ? Well, getting it on a Friday night in the depths of industrial Lancashire still isn’t guaranteed but, generally speaking, pre -marital sex and broader views have taken the edge off the supposedly bohemian proclivity for bedding down with anyone and everyone. There was an old cartoon which showed an intense young man saying to a girl in a Greenwich Village cafe, “Did you know I am an anarchist and a free-lover?”, and she replies, “Oh really? I thought you were a Boy Scout.” Today, friends, he could very well be an anarchist, a free-lover, and a Boy Scout.

     Well, if you hate bohemians (and will they be called that, or is some new term likely to be dreamed up?) you had better head for the hills. Take care, though, because I suspect some of the old bohemians may be up there, waiting for a chance to re-appear. To be honest, I’m personally looking forward to being dug out of retirement to be asked about the golden days of the Beat Generation. I’ll have to be a little vague, because the romance of being on the road between Leyland and Preston after missing the last bus is a bit difficult to put across seriously, and I’ll somehow have to skate around the fact that I was married and raising kids and working in a factory, as well as writing poems, in 1960. But I did hitch to Paris and heard Bill Burroughs read live. And once I saw Gregory Corso plain.

     If you can stand to be with the subject a little while longer there’s a lively new book which deals with the Parisian bohemia of 1827-1837. Linda Kelly’s The Young Romantics (Bodley Head, £3.75) re-tells an old story (the one about Hugo, Dumas, de Musset, Gautier, George Sand, de Vigny, etc., and their various arguments and affairs), but does it with an ease and brevity that is attractive. This was the period just prior to Murger’s bohemia, but it had many of the same characteristics, though Linda Kelly is obviously concerned primarily with later-famous writers, rather than the penniless and often ill -fated types focussed on in Scènes De La Vie De Bohème. Anyway, her book is well worth reading, and has a nice mixture of anecdotes, gossip, and facts. If you want to dig further into 19th Century French bohemia see if you can find any of the following: Robert Baldick’s The First Bohemian: The Life of Henry Murger (Hamish Hamilton Ltd, 1961); Malcolm Easton’s Artists and Writers in Paris: The Bohemian Idea, 1803-1867 (Edward Arnold Ltd., 1964); Joanna Richardson’s The Bohemians: La Vie De Bohème in Paris, 1830-1914 (Macmillan & Co., 1969).

     In my first column in this series I mentioned a re-print of Diane Di Prima’s Dinners and Nightmares. Now we have available her Selected Poems (North Atlantic Books, $5.00, available from Coin pendlum in London), a fairly substantial collection of her work from the 1956-1975 period. I don’t think Miss Di Prima was ever one of the leading lights of the New American Poetry of the post-1955 era, and a quick dip into her book will show that she has a tendency to write too much, and consequently set down trivialities, but at her best she is very readable and knows how to catch the fleeting impressions and moods that typify personal relationships and encounters. She has impeccable references in the Beat world, of course, and several of her poems mention Jack, Allen, Gregory, and the gang, and maybe this appearance of her selected poems is yet another sign of a bohemian revival.

     John Wieners is another poet with a place in the history of the Beat scene, and his latest book, Behind the State Capitol or Cincinnati Pike (The Good Gay Poets, $4.95, available from Compendium), is typically idiosyncratic, but entertaining. After all, any poet who mentions Lana Turner, Billie Holiday, and Raymond Chandler, must be worth reading Seriously, though, Wieners has a highly personal way of looking at the world, a way that is coloured by his interests and involvements, and his writing isn’t always easy to relate to. But It’s worth persevering with it, and even doing some research into the people and places he mentions, because after a time his poems do begin to have a strange sort of meaning and relevance. I’m lucky, I guess, because I’m old enough to know who Yvonne de Carlo was. I wouldn’t say that the best Wieners is in this book - dig out the Selected Poems that Cape published a few years back to see what he can really do - but there is sufficient material of interest to make it worth worth buying.

     Still with American writers, Frank O’Hara’s Standing Still and Walking in New York (Grey Fox Press, $4.50, Compendium again) is a collection of articles and reviews ranging over his connections with poetry, the New York art world, and other subjects. There’s also a transcript of a long Interview with O’Hara by Edward Lucie-Smith. Possibly because of his Interest in other art forms, O’Hara’s poetry always seemed to me to have a variety and openness that was missing from so much of the work produced by others of the “New York School.” If you like his poems this batch of prose pieces will intrigue and entertain you.

     You may recall that last time I mentioned a few anthologies of early detective stories. There’s a new one available, and as such things seem to have to be built around a gimmick, it’s centred on female sleuths. Crime on her Mind (Michael Joseph, £4.25) is edited by Michele B Slung, and includes stories from the Victorian era to the 1940s. Try Arthur B Reeve’s The Dope Fiends for an idea of the flavour. (“So!” sneered Drummond, catching sight of her in the dim light of the hallway. “You are mixed up in these violations of the new drug law, too!”)

     Finally, having spent most of my time talking about bohemians and bohemianism, it occurs to me to ask how we define them and it. Any offers? I’ll give a prize of the sweat and beer-stained shirt I wore in Paris in 1961 to anyone coming up with the best 200-word answer.