A Companion to Contemporary British and Irish Poetry, 1960 - 2015. Группа авторов
to the production of poetry in Britain and Ireland. What is perhaps important that I think I have introduced the reader to a landscape of poetry well worth knowing: pulsing with life, maintaining itself with resource amid the usual discouragements and high hopes, and characterized by an interesting variety of magazines, publishers, policies of publishing, as well as theories and trends in the practice of poetry.
The Little Magazines
Testing one's work out in magazines and journals can be disconcerting & painful, especially if the pieces sometimes don't come off. (And don't I know it!) But I think it, really, [is] the tough & only school.
(Causley 1984)
The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) defines a little magazine as “a periodical directed at a readership with serious literary, artistic, or other intellectual interests, usually having a small circulation and considered to appeal to a minority.” Richard Price, Head of Modern British Collections at the British Library, stresses their association with “ideas of marginality: political radicalism, support for one minority or another, support for the art form of poetry itself (conceived as a Cinderella art), and for various kinds of aesthetic extremes” and adds to that their noncommercial nature (Price 2013, 178). In his contribution to the Small Press Yearbook 1994, Geoffrey Soar highlights various aspects, but maintains with a saddening cogency that “[t]heir ‘littleness’ relates to their usually small print runs, their lack of financial profitability, and their tendency (by no means invariable) to exist rather briefly” (Soar 1993, 24).
In December 1964, the Library Committee at University College London (UCL), where Soar was responsible for the English library, took an important decision to subscribe to all little magazines published in the UK. However, as the UCL Library Committee soon realized that the small presses were inseparable from the small magazines, they began to buy their publications too and thus founded the Poetry Store Collection. Right from the start, Soar also began to organize exhibitions, which were accompanied by the publication of catalogs (UCL Library 1966, 1970–1971, 1977, 1982, 1992, 1994). To celebrate 25 years of the Little Magazines Collection, he launched, together with David Miller, an exhibition at the Royal Festival Hall in late 1990 entitled “Little Magazines and How They Got That Way.” In the following year, the exhibition moved to Durham University Library and the Flaxman Gallery, Staffordshire Polytechnic, at Stoke‐on‐Trent. Advised by Stuart Montgomery (Fulcrum Press), Bob Cobbing (And, Writers Forum), and Lee Harwood (Tzarad), Soar managed to collect “some 3000 magazine titles and 6000 small‐press publications” (Soar 1993, 25) by 1990. At present, the Little Magazines Collection subscribes to around 200 magazines and has a collection of 3500 titles, while the Poetry Store Collection contains over 7000 titles (UCL Website 2019).
Its American counterpart, on a more international and larger scale, is the Little Magazine Collection at the Department of Special Collections, Memorial Library, University of Wisconsin–Madison. It holds approximately 7000 English‐language literary magazines published in the United States, Great Britain, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, and maintains about 1200 subscriptions. The American definition agrees with Soar's as far as the “noncommercial” aspect of the publication is concerned. In addition, little magazines are seen as “avant‐garde in nature” and “often associated with significant literary, cultural, and artistic movements,” which is why they have been “especially influential in the historical development of modern and experimental poetry.” An important component of little magazines on both sides of the Atlantic is the publication of interviews with authors and artists, which provide “valuable insights into their creative processes and the context of their works.” Since 1975, the librarians at the Department of Special Collections have indexed the interviews in yearly files and published them as a section in Serials Review (Digital Collections, University of Wisconsin–Madison Libraries 2019).
Histories and bibliographies of British and Irish poetry magazines published between 1960 and 2019 have not been numerous. Remembering my commitment to modesty of scale, I shall refer interested readers to only the most important studies before I offer some insights into the current situation of print and online magazines. The first important publication is the Comprehensive Index to English‐Language Little Magazines, 1890–1970, eight volumes edited by Marion Sader and published in 1976, which indexed only 100 titles but “brought together British and American titles for the first time and listed reviews and illustrators along with the primary literature” (Reilly 1985, 5). Only very rarely are editors of British and Irish little magazines interested in compiling and publishing an index relating to the writers and work they have published. Glyn Pursglove, reviews editor of Acumen magazine, regularly compiles an author index of every 10 issues, which is published at the back of the tenth or eleventh issue. Andreas Schachermayr is the compiler of author indexes for Ore Magazine (1954–1995), The Poet's Voice (second series, 1994–2000), and, together with Tom Clyde, for Nos. 100–107 of HU, published as a 22‐page booklet in 1999 and posted free with issue 107. Already 4 years earlier, an author index to issues 1–99 had been issued as a separate paperback. Issues 1–21 of Poetry Ireland Review were indexed by Richard Hayes; the index was first published as a contribution to PIR 36 (1992) and as a booklet in 1993.
Other publication types to celebrate the history or longevity of a little magazine are festschrifts or “best‐of” anthologies or a compound publication that incorporates both genres. The University of Salzburg Press backlist contains various books celebrating little magazines. In 1989, James Hogg commissioned Fred Beake, founder‐editor of The Poet's Voice, to compile an anthology from the issues of his magazine, which was published as A Mingling of Streams. This valuable publication, including poems by regular contributors, extracts from Beake's editorials, and a checklist, inaugurated Hogg's attempt to save little magazines from being consigned to oblivion. The second volume in this series, published 4 years later, was devoted to a selection of poetry from Stride's 33 issues, entitled Ladder to the Next Floor, which also included essays and notes on the magazine as well as a checklist. Salute to “Outposts” (1994), celebrating the magazine's fiftieth anniversary, contains essays, an interview with editor Roland John, poetic appreciations, photographs, and an anthology of poems published in the magazine. The series was continued in 1997 with Veins of Gold: Ore, 1954–1995. This 250‐page volume offers 100 poems, five commissioned essays on the magazine's history, an interview with editor Eric Ratcliffe, many photographs, and the aforementioned bibliography.
Only a very small number of editors have taken the initiative to edit and publish volumes celebrating their magazine's history, either as a special issue or as a separate publication. PN Review 100, subtitled “A Calendar of Modern Poetry,” an adaptation of the title of Edgell Rickword's monthly of the 1920s (The Calendar of Modern Letters, March 1925–July 1927), is a fascinating example of the former category, because editor Michael Schmidt asked 80 poets, his regular contributors, to edit the issue, selecting a clutch of poems, or extracts from longer poems, to characterize their work. In addition, Schmidt opened up the doors of his archive of letters to the public, commissioning Mark Fisher to edit Letters to an Editor, which covers 20 years of Carcanet and PN Review's history from 1969 to 1989.
Valuable examples of the separate‐publication category are Poetry Wales 25 Years, edited by Cary Archard and published in 1990, and Agenda—An Anthology: The First Four Decades 1959–1993, published by Carcanet Press in 1994. While Archard tried—with hindsight—to chart a history of Poetry Wales by arranging the material chronologically, William Cookson's aim was “to gather a collection of good poems, and essays about poetry, that can be enjoyed as a book in its own right. I've prepared it as if I were editing a bumper issue of Agenda out of an unusually rich welter of submissions—not surprising after thirty‐five years!” (Cookson 1994, xiii).
What Richard Hayes said about his work of indexing Poetry Ireland Review can be transferred to the process of compiling such anthologies, in particular collections of material from defunct magazines, which permits one to re‐encounter the known magazine at a different level. One views and examines a certain number of issues of the magazine in question
holistically,