A Companion to Contemporary British and Irish Poetry, 1960 - 2015. Группа авторов
one to watch its development from above, a development invisible for the reader following the magazine from issue to issue, with an eye too close to the action. In a way, the process of compiling an index offers the possibility of a new way of reading a little magazine, an unnatural way of reading, at odds with the rhythm of the magazine's production and transferred from one social and cultural context to another.
(Hayes 1992, 53)
This review of the magazine works by way of a disruptive reading, which in turn can reveal processes by which the magazine developed as well as central questions and editorial concerns. An awareness of such possibilities clearly influenced editors Sasha Dugdale and David and Helen Constantine when they set out to arrange Centres of Cataclysm, an anthology, thematically arranged, celebrating 50 years of Modern Poetry in Translation.
“Best‐of” approaches were applied by both Sean McMahon for Great Irish Writing: The Best from The Bell, edited more than 20 years after the publication of the last issue, and Gerald Dawe and Jonathan Williams for Krino, 1986–1996: An Anthology of Modern Irish Writing, which appeared the same year that the farewell issue had left the magazine's headquarters in Co. Galway. In addition, the Krino anthology offered an index as an appendix. Edited by Neil Pattison, Reitha Pattison, and Luke Roberts, Certain Prose of The English Intelligencer contains a selection, chronologically arranged, of prose from the poetry worksheet, which was privately circulated from January 1966 to April 1968. These publications may be categorized as rescue operations, saving the spirit, tone, and strength, and above all much of what their editors considered the most important material published in their respective magazines, because without them these texts would not be easily accessible for the reading public, stored away in archives and basements of a small number of specialist libraries.
On the occasion of the centenary of the Poetry Society and its magazine Poetry Review in 2009, Fiona Sampson, its editor at the time, put together a substantial best‐of anthology: A Century of Poetry Review. Sampson admits in her introduction that “this anthology represents not necessarily the most important British poetry of the last hundred years, but rather what has been seen as most important” (Sampson 2009, xv). Instead of dividing up the magazine's history into periods of editorial tenure, Sampson offers a conservative, rather uninspired decade‐by‐decade approach, implying that the history of poetry is shaped by decades rather than other criteria. The editorship best represented in the anthology is the one held by Peter Forbes (1987–2002), hailed by Sampson as the magazine's “greatest period of editorial transparency [and] perfectly reflect[ing] a zeitgeist” (Sampson 2009, xxi). One third of the anthology's pages reflect Forbes's aims, which he also outlined in 1987, in a private letter to me, as “to present the best of modern poetry in English in a context of poetry's relationship to the other arts and to the wider world of politics, science.” This aim was apparent in theme issues devoted to travel, the other arts, science, and politics. There was also a good deal of prose—interviews, essays, polemics, and reviews—and the poets featured belonged, as he said, “to no dominant clique [with] a good proportion [of] fairly new writers.” Poems by Primo Levi, Joseph Brodsky, John Ashbery, Aimé Césaire, C. K. Williams, Les Murray, among others, as well as essays by Derek Walcott on “The Poet in the Theatre” and Miroslav Holub on “Poetry Against Absurdity” testify to Forbes's international outlook.
At least twice in the magazine's history the editorship has been outspokenly pro‐avant‐garde; first under Eric Mottram (1971–1977) and then under the dual aegis of David Herd and Robert Potts (2002–2005). Although Mottram published work by more than 120 poets, only five poets (Ian Hamilton Finlay, Frances Horovitz, Basil Bunting, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, and Allen Ginsberg) gained admittance to the anthology. Sampson describes the editorial policy of Potts and Herd as “anti‐poetry‐lite, criticism‐led […] unafraid of seriousness and risk” (Sampson 2009, xxi–xxii), but only two poems of their editorship were admitted. One of the most impressive areas of this anthology is its prose, which includes extracts from interviews by writers such as W. S. Graham, Ian Hamilton, and Douglas Dunn. In addition, there are critical essays by Lascelles Abercrombie, Norman MacCaig, Derek Stanford, Tom Paulin, and, of course, Philip Larkin's notorious essay on Sylvia Plath entitled “Horror Poet.” Finally, there are the extracts from the manifestos of Marinetti, Pound, Don Paterson, and John Kinsella.
One wonders why the Poetry Society did not consider a two‐volume publication, one devoted to poetry, the other to prose, as a more appropriate celebration of its house journal's century. Another option that might have resulted in a more satisfactory work would have been the commissioning of an editorial team, each editor being assigned a certain period of the magazine's history. This observation leads me to my last point of criticism: the desirability of a division into editorial periods that should have been introduced by policy statements extracted from editorials.1
Critical studies of individual little magazines are very rare. Some examples stick out: in 2016, Gerry Cambridge published The Dark Horse: The Making of a Little Magazine, a fascinating analysis and retrospective account of the first two decades of Scotland's transatlantic poetry magazine (Cambridge 2016, 11), which published issue 41 in September 2019. The core of Bruce Wilkinson's Hidden Culture, Forgotten History is a critical study and contextualization of the little magazine Move, edited by Jim Burns from Preston between December 1964 and April 1968, and Poetmeat, a Blackburn‐based magazine run by David Cunliffe, Tina Morris, and Kirby Congdon from 1963 to 1967 (Wilkinson 2017). Anne Mulhall's important essay on Cyphers, established in 1975 by Leland Bardwell, Pearse Hutchinson, Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin, and Macdara Woods, is a model of its kind. Its author contextualizes Cyphers in relation to Poetry Ireland Review and argues that the magazine has offered “an alternative gloss on the interrelations of literature and the ‘home land’, mapping (or recovering) an unofficial geography of the place of that home spatially and historically” (Mulhall 2007, 206).
For a history of the British and Irish little magazines up to the late 1990s, I refer interested readers to my own two monographs: Little Magazine Profiles (1993) and Contemporary Views on the Little Magazine Scene (2000), which among other things describe the scene and situation of little magazines, on the eve, as it were, of that phenomenon of decline at the turn of the millennium, when a number of magazines ceased publication. David Miller and Richard Price recorded only 18 new magazines in 1999 and 14 new titles for 2000, which led to “significant deficits in net new titles—when ‘deaths’ exceed ‘births’ (10 and 8, respectively)” (Miller/Price 2006, 228). Light's List 2003 mentions 425 titles that were still published in the previous year, 275 magazines were listed in Poetry Writers' Yearbook 2007, and 133 magazines had entries in The Writer's Handbook 2009, a figure that declined to 127 titles a year later; for 2011, 126 magazines were registered. The subject index of the very unreliable Writers' & Artists' Yearbook 2019 only refers to 61 magazines (Harris 2018). The National Poetry Library has 150 entries for print and online magazines, including Planet: The Welsh Internationalist and the TLS, which publish a maximum of half a dozen poems per issue, if that. The Scottish Poetry Library currently subscribes to 88 magazines (Scottish Poetry Library 2018).
There is perhaps consolation to be found in the knowledge that, despite these figures and the impression they give that, in comparison to previous decades, the number of little magazines is in sharp decline, the number of long‐lived poetry magazines has never been greater at any time since 1945. This may be regarded as more claim than fact and a wishful reading of the entrails. Statistics, too, are more than apt to lend themselves to congenial interpretations. Nevertheless, the figures are there, available for study and interpretation, and it is not too much to expect that a sound and disciplined scholarship is capable of approaching them without bias and drawing the right conclusions. The roll‐call, which follows, of the names of magazines, enjoying a degree of prestige, and which have also weathered the storms of at least two decades—and/or have published more than 50 issues—is certainly impressive. It comprises a number of names the reader will recognize and though by no means complete indicates a condition of considerable vitality: Acumen, Agenda, Ambit, Blithe Spirit, Cyphers,