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

RECENTLY, AFTER FIFTEEN OR so years hunting through booksellers’ catalogues, I finally managed to obtain a copy of Clara Weatherwax’s Marching! Marching! , winner of the 1935 New Masses Prize Contest for a novel on an American Proletarian theme, and a book now generally viewed as a piece of left-wing curiosa. Some critics, in fact, say it’s so bad that it’s virtually impossible to read it.

     Now, you’re probably wondering why I bother to search for some thing like that, or why I flipped when I found a copy of Grace Lumpkin’s To Make My Bread in the l0p box on a local market stall, and what pushed me into paying £5 for Mary Heaton Vorse’s Strike (The fact that all the books mentioned are by women writers is a pure co-incidence).

     Well, it may be a kind of oddball nostalgia (I was born in the Thirties, but can’t remember anything about the period), or maybe I’m just a sucker for punishment. Personally, I prefer to think that it helps me maintain the historical record in my own mind. I mean, I’m listening to Teddy Hill’s Big Boy Blue as I type this, and it isn’t exactly a great piece of jazz (though it does have a nice muted trumpet solo), but on the other hand it’s interesting to hear what the bands were doing then. And how a lesser -known unit produced sounds that influenced more famous bands.

     But I’m digressing, and we were talking about 1930s left-wing writing. And the historical record. I’m reminded of something Kenneth Rexroth said in an interview (see The San Francisco Poets, edited by David Meltzer, Ballantine Books, New York, 1971) during which he referred to a conference he’d attended:

     “They were having this long discussion on the History of American Poetry, and I said, ‘You left out the whole populist period.’ And they said, ‘Who’s that?’ and I said, ‘William Vaughn Moody. Carl Sandburg, James Oppenheim, Lola Ridge, Vachel Lindsay.’ (Most of whom were socialists). With an expression of utmost contempt on his face, Lowell said, ‘Well, of course, in the West, Rexroth, you haven’t learned that those poor people aren’t poets at all.’

     “I don’t think they were very good, but it was a question of history.…it wasn’t a question of fashion.”

     And that’s why I read books by Clara Weatherwax and others. The question of history. (And let’s be fair, sometimes they’re good books, anyway, and ought not to be forgotten. There’s a paperback edition of Edward Anderson’s Thieves Like Us around at the moment, and It’s nice to see that available again).

     All of which brings me to a point that some of you might be wondering about. The books I’ve mentioned - and Rexroth’s quote refer to an American context, so what’s wrong with using examples from this country? The problem is that it’s almost impossible to find any handy guides to the corresponding literature In Great Britain. Books like Daniel Aaron’s Writers On The Left, Walter B. Rideout’s The Radical Novel In The United States: 1900-1954 and Harvey Swados’s The American Writer And The Great Depression discuss, list, and quote from the novels, or whatever, in this line, and the reader can use them as jumping-off points for further study or for tracking down elusive publications. But where do you start if you want to get at proletarian literature In the British Isles?

     The late-19th Century has been covered by P. J. Keating’s excellent The Working Classes In Victorian Fiction (and Keating also edited the useful Working Class Stories Of The 1890s), but the 20th Century seems to be singularly badly-documented. The only worthwhile item I’ve come across recently is a three-part survey in the Scottish Marxist (issues 6, 7 and 8, available from Gallacher House, 69 Albert Road, Glasgow - 30p per Issue) which deals with the Working Class Novel in Scotland in the period 1900-1939, and in which such writers as Lewis Grassic Gibbon, James Burke, James Welch and Patrick MacGill are dealt with.

     This survey apart, and occasional references to items like Robert Tressell’s The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists and Walter Greenwood’s Love On The Dole, how many other working class (or proletarian or radical) books do you see discussed? And I’m not just talking about novels. Has anyone recently read Julius Lipton’s Poems Of Strife? (For the record it was published by Lawrence & Wishart in 1936). What about the other poets active then - and I don’t mean Auden, Spender, etc. - and where can you find references to their work? All right, a lot of it may not have been very good, but the point is that it existed and the historical record ought to be put right.

     The problem is, of course, that we live in a far tighter society than the Americans, and the middle-class looks after its own. Subconsciously, perhaps, but It does, and even the supposed leftwingers in the academies choose to work out their Marxism on established classics rather than delve into the files to see how the other half lived.

     All of which makes me wonder how the surveys will read in forty more years, and whether the establishment will still be keeping the record tightly controlled. If you watch TV you may have seen an excellent example of how the record is rigged in the series of plays presented under the tide, The Glittering Prizes. I’m not saying the plays weren’t well-produced and superbly acted, or that Frederick Raphael’s scripts weren’t first class. Raphael did a marvellous job, in fact, but it’s the assumptions behind the plays that irritated me. They seemed to suggest that a small group of people moving around the Oxbridge/London circuit of the Fifties and Sixties represented British intellectual taste and endeavour at that time. Did anyone connected with the series ever stop to consider what the rest of us were doing? Maybe a friend of mine had It right when he watched The Glittering Prizes, and then said, “Thank God for jazz, movies, abstract expressionism, the Beats, and American culture generally.

     By now you’re all probably heartily sick of my socio-political ramblings, so I’ll move on. Not too far, though, because the book I want to recommend does have a political background. But The Dead Are Many (Bodley Head) by the Australian novelist Frank Hardy is about the ups, downs and infights of the Communist Party down under, and may not seem the kind of thing to make for lively reading. But Hardy isn’t just dealing with the CP. He’s analysing the failure of a dream, and its effect In personal terms on some of the people involved In the action. If you want to know more about Hardy look up the interview with him in The Guardian, August 4th, 1975. And try his novel. It’s a damned sight more interesting than the meanderings of his English contemporaries (well, most of them).

     Ever heard of a Canadian poet by the name of Raymond Souster? He isn’t too well -known in this country, and apart from some of the old Migrant crowd (Gael Turnbull, etc.) no-one has pushed his work to any degree. He’s a good poet, though, with a steady stream of clearly-expressed ideas about everyday life. That may sound a little flat, but Souster isn’t like that at all. He’s witty and wise, and his work reads easily but still manages to dig below the surface. Like I said, he’s virtually unknown here - and I doubt whether our literary establishment would have much time for him - but if you can get his book Change-Up I’m sure you’ll like it. (It’s published by the Oberon Press, and Compendium did have it in stock). Some years ago poets like Souster could be found in a few British magazines, but we seem to have grown more insular recently. Which is a pity, because we’re probably missing some good stuff.

     The American poet David Jaffin does appear in local publications, so his work may not be unfamiliar to readers of the little magazines. His latest collection, In The Glass Of Winter (Abelard-Schuman Ltd) is one of the best books of poetry I’ve come across in a long time, and has naturally been ignored by the majority of British reviewers. A sparse, delicately-etched collection, it packs more into its thirty pages of poetry than most people get into three or four larger books.

     Jaffin uses words with restraint, and his lines are usually short and clearly spaced. There’s a deceptive simplicity, too, about his handling of language, with the statements seeming slight, even trivial, and yet triggering off reactions. Reading Jaffin is, to me, like my discovery of the early Creeley, and his work means some thing in my daily life. What a pity the book is priced so high. I know poetry publishing is an uneconomic business, but £2. 50 for a 39 page collection (and only 30 of the pages have poems) is a bit steep. Jaffin ought to be in pamphlets so his work can get the wider circulation it deserves.

     1976 ought to see the second of the Arts Council’s New Poetry anthologies, and if It’s as good as the first one then it’ll be worth buying. The series seems set to demonstrate that poetry in Britain is a lot livelier - and more varied - than elitists would have us believe. And if the elitists of either the avant-garde or the establishment get control of the anthology it’ll become little more than an “in” club.

     Incidentally, did you see the poem Anthony Thwaite wrote to commemorate the first New Poetry? (It was published in the T. L. S.). T.L.S.). He took up a lot of space to put across an idea we’ve all heard before, i.e. that there are too many people writing/publishing poetry. Apart from the arrogance of this - does Thwaite seriously count himself amongst the “too many” ? - it betrays a typically English attitude at work in that it suggests poetry is something for an elite, and essentially a form In which “educated” people make witty or deep or elusive comments. The idea of it as something you can use in your everyday life is dismissed as alien to our culture, or inspired by democratic idealism.

     I’m not suggesting we should abandon standards - a bad poem is a bad poem, regardless of whether it’s written by a bricklayer or a member of the English literary establishment - or that socio-political ideals should be used as excuses for half-baked writing. But to suggest that only certain people have a right to produce poetry is like saying that an elite are entitled to a different status under the law. And that’s dangerous nonsense.

     Finally, a good book that you may have missed, unless you’re a regular explorer of the paperback stands. The Supernatural Solution, edited by Michel Parry and published by Panther, is a collection of ghost stories which hang on the common thread of all having a detective as their central character. Ever heard of William Hope Hodgson’s Carnacki stories? Or Arthur Machen’s Dyson series? Great stuff from the classic days of horror and mystery stories. They’re a kind of weird parallel to the detective stories collected by Hugh Greene In three anthologies (Rivals of Sherlock Holmes, Further Rivals of Sherlock Holmes, and More Rivals of Sherlock Holmes, all published by Bodley Head) of early material.

     Good reading is where you find it, and perhaps if a few poets found it they’d write about something interesting for a change.