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

To judge from most of the books and pamphlets that have appeared In the last year (in this connection see Ian Robinson’s article in OASIS No 14), it would seem that standards in small press publishing are on the increase. Not only is the content of most books and pamphlets becoming more interested and varied - more good work is being published - but technical standards are also reaching new levels of excellence. Gone are the days of the badly duplicated mags of the 60s (valuable and experimental though their content often was). Merely looking at the books I’m going to mention here ‘would seem to confirm this opinion.

     First of all, we must record the birth of another new press, the Galloping Dog Press, which opens its career with two collections, Jim Burns’ Playing it Cool, 40p, and David Tipton’ s A Graph of Love, 50p (both from Peter Hodgkiss, 104 Bryn Road, Swansea, West Glamorgan, Wales). Both are simply but clearly printed in neat pamphlet form, with good covers. For those who know his work, there is nothing new in Burns’ book. His poems, as always, are clear, readable, assured, colloquial and straight-
forward, exemplifying his obvious belief that poetry should communicate its message directly, even perhaps to those who have never read any.

     David Tipton’s collection is, as is also usual with him, autobiographical (see Yann Lovelock’s article in OASIS No 15). There is some powerfully written material here, but sometimes I do wish Tipton would stop telling us - often with rather sly hints - about his sex life. Personally, I don’t really want to know how many times, as well as how, he makes love. There are other subjects and, by now and at his age, he should have been able to find at least one. This is very much the Tipton mixture as before and adds nothing new to our knowledge of him as a poet.

     The latest volumes from Anvil Press Poetry (69 King George Street, London SE10 8PX) are two very ample collections from two highly individual poets. Harry Guest’s A House Against The Night presents in 112 pages and for £2.25 the poems he has written between 1969 and 1973. These are quietly impressive pieces, carefully and thoughtfully written, their language exact yet moving and suggestive, dealing often with intimate personal themes and events. Often ‘too, these poems work allusively by juxtaposing sequences of observations - e. g. “The quiet stirs. Inside/ the night-time water is / perpetually at work. / The hawk is roosting. / All the infrequent cars have ceased.” Many of the poems are pure description but referentially evocative. Guest has been writing for some time now and this volume should do much to establish further his reputation as a skillful, talented, important poet.

     Peter Levi has done a very brave thing. His Collected Poems 1955-75 is literally all his poems collected together and printed in the order of their publishing, the divisions of the book being the titles of all his earlier books and pamphlets. He has resisted the temptation to tamper with his poems, to revise them, to leave them out. Consequently, it is possible to see in this honest book the whole of Levi’s development. And seeing this it can be said that his later work is far more gripping than his early performances. And perhaps this is as it should be. There is a certain academic woodenness in the early material that he has obviously now left behind him. He now seems more prepared to leave written on the page a poem that, because It is less formally constructed, less carefully sculpted, has a greater degree of openness and immediacy than is contained in his early poems. For this reason, I found the last 32 pages of this big book (256pp) - a section entitled ‘Uncollected Poems 1970-75’ - by far the most exciting. Peter Levi still has surprises in store for us,

     Arc Publications (3 & 4 Oldroyd, Todmorden, Lancashire) still maintain their high production standards, though I am not so sure about the standards brought to bear on the contents. of their latest two books. Adrian Henri lovers will welcome One Year, a neat little pamphlet of 16 pages with three illustrations and a cover drawing by the author. It is really a very brief (138 lines) collage of impressions and memories of, I presume, one year in America. I found the language undistinguished and the sentiments expressed rather trite, all neatly echoed by the slightly fey drawings, which are really vestigial glimmers of Hockney. The only linking element throughout the piece is the reiterated statement that “home is anywhere inside you” - surely an overworked and sentimentalized idea?

     David H W Grubb has written some very fine poems. At his best he is one of the most important young poets in this country. He has also com posed some pretty tired, second-rate poems. Unfortunately, in Falconer he is in the latter mood. Mr Grubb has written sequences like this before; I seem to remember a group of poems about Crab; and when he is doing this the inevitable comparison is with Ted Hughes’ Crow. Whatever one thinks of that work, it has been done, and there doesn’t seem to be much point in doing it again, even if the subject is changed to ‘Falconer’ and especially if the laguage and thought of the poems is merely a watery echo of Hughes. When writing at his quirky, slightly surreal best, Mr Grubb is second to none. When one sees a work like Falconer one does wonder what madness induced him to forget himself to such a degree. It is certainly not worth the 50p being asked for it.

     Manchester Square (Permanent Press, 52 Cascade Avenue, London N10, 70p) by Edward Dorn and Jennifer Dunbar is an impressive little collection of 11 poems about places in London’s West End - defining both the places themselves and the authors’ attitudes towards them, as well as to themselves. The whole work is a collaboration but, luckily, one is never forced to say, ‘Ah, here it’s different, this must be the other one speaking.’ The poems have a unity which binds both the places and the people together, a topographic accumulation of mood and fact, simple and speaking directly.

     I have also before me seven extremely impressive volumes from the Elizabeth Press of New York (103 Van Etten Boulevard, New Rochelle, New York 10804, USA, $8.00 each, paper): Light and Dark & Silence and Metaphor by William Bronk, Ländler by Theodore Enslin, Once and For All by Cid Corman, As One by David Jaffin, Notes Towards A Family by John Perlman and Both Hands Screaming by Simon Perchik. Another from this same press is reviewed at length earlier in this issue so I shall not say much about these except that individually each one is handsomely designed with clear and exact typography and very well bound. En masse, since the lay-out is exactly the same in each case, they do look rather dull. But the contents are of a very high standard indeed, and very varied. There is some fine poetry here, of several different styles, but all worth reading.

     Lastly, I must mention three very different magazines - or perhaps only one hybrid and two others. The possible hybrid is SPANNER, a series devoted to avant-garde work and usually featuring the work of one person per issue, rather in the manner of the Black Sparrow Press’s SPARROW. No 5 of SPANNER contains ‘Wasichi’, a set of poems by Ken Smith which I found to be a very impressive piece of writing, astringent and reverberative, No 6 contains an essay, ‘Frazier Ali’ and an outline for a comedy, ‘Licence to Dream’ by Bill Sherman, both closely related to each other and highly entertaining and exciting work. SPANNER ought to be widely read ; the programme mapped out for its future looks very promising indeed. The magazine costs £2.00 for 10 issues and is available from 18 Hayes Court, New Park Road, London SW2 4EX.

     TANGENT No 1, the first issue of a new magazine coming from Vivienne Finch’s newly formed Tangent Books, is what one might call ‘middle of the road’ compared with SPANNER. There is an impressive list of poetry contributors ranging from Taner Baybars and James Kirkup to Paul Brown and Chris Torrance (& Jim Burns, of course, reviewing a book about Robert McAlmon). There are two good articles, one by Yann Lovelock (Japanese literature) and one by John Gillet (on Kurosawa’s ‘Derzu Uzala’) and Ian Robinson contributes the only short story, a really excellent piece of work.

     The only criticism I have of the magazine (and perhaps this applies, in fact, to most magazines) is that I have the odd feeling that the whole thing lacked any kind of a coherent centre, a pivot on which it turned, even perhaps a hidden, central ‘idea’ / compulsion from which all the contents spread out their tentacles. In other words, it was just a collection, without any obvious reason for any of it being there, good though most of the pieces in it individually were. The contents were almost so inclusive as to cancel each other out. But I don’t want to seem as if I didn’t appreciate it. For a first issue (always a difficult to animate beast) it is quite impressive.

     Lastly, we come to Jeremy Adler’s ‘A’ magazine, which really appears only once a year and of which the third issue has been out since last December. ‘ABC’, as it is called, is a fat envelope containing approximately 50 sheets of ‘visual poetry’. I put this term in inverted commas since I would rather call a lot of the contents ‘graphics’. But this - perhaps false? - distiction doesn’t really matter. The whole package is well-produced and vastly entertaining. The great advantage of the separate sheets is that one can take out what one likes particularly and pin it up on one’s wall. There are many talented pieces of work in this third envelope, which deserve to be so singled out, and one can’t really say better than that. The whole magazine is a very worthy effort which deserves to be more widely noticed than I believe it has been. But perhaps there still remain too many entrenched prejudices against this kind of material. The magazine is obtainable from The National Poetry Centre, 21 Earls Court Square, London SW5.