A Companion to Contemporary British and Irish Poetry, 1960 - 2015. Группа авторов
House, Iota Poetry, The London Magazine, Magma, Modern Poetry in Translation, Mslexia, New Welsh Review, The North, Obsessed with Pipework, Orbis, Oxford Poetry, Pennine Platform, PN Review, Poetry Ireland Review, Poetry London, Poetry Review, Poetry Salzburg Review, Poetry Scotland, Poetry Wales, The Rialto, Shearsman, Smoke, The Stinging Fly, Stand, Tears in the Fence, Under the Radar, and Wasafiri.
The 2002 flier of the UK Little Magazines Project, set up at Nottingham Trent University's English and Media Studies Department in October 1998, is, accordingly, justified in starting off with the following premise:
The enduring and continuing importance of little magazines is unquestionable. Apart from publishing many of the major literary figures of the twentieth century […] before they were acceptable to mainstream publishers, they have also been fundamental to the genesis, growth and dissemination of literary and artistic movements […]. Importantly, they have also provided a space for the work of many poets, writers and artists who have not been a part of any movement or group, and who remain resistant to categorization.
(Ellis/Lucas/Smith/Miller 2002)
This thesis still holds true at a time when hypertext and multimedia options on the Internet are expanding and an increasing number of computer‐literate poets have emerged writing on and for the computer or website, making use of the exciting potential of the web. All this activity acknowledged, Hamilton‐Emery's dystopia envisaging the extinction of print magazines—“Print magazines are finished”—has fortunately proved to be a vision too pessimistic. However, when he argued a decade ago—“Poetry magazines will move online. There will be more of them. They will increasingly network with each other” (Hamilton‐Emery 2010, 18)—he foresaw not a disaster but a development that editors avail themselves of in a great variety of ways. The High Window is an online quarterly review of poetry, launched in 2016 and coedited for the first 12 issues by David Cooke and Anthony Costello. Since 2018, Cooke has edited another 6 issues until summer 2020. A model issue contains a substantial selection of new poems from more than 30 poets, a featured American poet, a translation section with a national focus (Catalan, Polish, Franco‐Canadian, French, Italian, Japanese, Kazahk, Spanish, and classical Greek and Latin poetry), a featured UK poet, a resident artist, and detailed and in‐depth reviews. The website also contains a page with weekly posts that supplement the quarterly journal. Cooke also runs The High Window Press, which aims at publishing four volumes of poetry a year to coincide with the four quarterly issues of the magazine. Founded in 2015, it has published books by established poets such as Patricia McCarthy, Anthony Howell, and Wendy Klein as well as debut collections, for example, most recently, by Tim O'Leary (Cooke 2019).
A very different format is represented by Ink Sweat & Tears, a webzine based in the UK, which was founded by Charles Christian in 2007 as “a platform for new poetry and short prose, and experimental work in digital media.” Its current editor, the poet and visual artist Helen Ivory, “publishes and reviews poetry, prose, prose‐poetry, word & image pieces and everything in between. Our tastes are eclectic and magpie‐like and we aim to publish something new every day” (Ink Sweat & Tears 2019).
When Agenda's founding editor William Cookson died in early 2003, Patricia McCarthy, who had coedited the magazine with Cookson for 4 years, found it relatively easy—with a certain amount of very welcome financial support from public and private funding organizations—to continue the publication of the magazine, indeed, producing bumper special issues on—for example—Derek Walcott, Cookson, and on Irish poetry with a special focus on John Montague. Cookson had edited the magazine for 44 years “with a complete self‐confidence in his own judgement” (Gowrie 2003, 29). However, Gowrie deplored the fact that the Arts Council had ended its support after 27 years and that he had failed to make them reverse their decision. With the special memorial issue for Cookson, McCarthy launched Agenda Broadsheets for young poets, which were included free to subscribers in each issue of the magazine and are now available online from their website. Two years later McCarthy had once again acquired an Arts Council England grant. She continued Agenda's tradition of publishing special issues, either on poets long associated with the magazine (C. H. Sisson, Geoffrey Hill, and T. S. Eliot) or on themes (lauds, exiles, scentings, family histories, new generation poets, and the power of poetry). Two recent theme issues commemorate the Great War—Requiem: The Great War; 1918. They “seek to demonstrate how, deep in our psyches, that supposed ‘war to end all wars’ lives on today” (McCarthy 2018, 5). The demonstration is achieved through war poems by Michael Longley, Hilary Davies, Alison Brackenbury, and William Bedford; poems in translation by Anna Akhmatova, Guillaume Apollinaire, and Pierre Jean Jouve; and essays on David Jones, Ivor Gurney, as well as French, German, Italian, and Russian poetry of the Great War. The variety of nations, times, and genres ensures the reader “a universal overview […] of the poetic output […], and […] a balanced outlook” (McCarthy 2014, 7). McCarthy always publishes supplements to issues online as pdf files on the magazine's website—of poems and paintings, of essays and reviews, of translations. General interest essays, audio recordings, and the broadsheets for young poets and artists are also available online and free of charge.
The Manchester‐based PN Review, operating since autumn 1973 under the editorship of Michael Schmidt, is indispensable reading for poets, academics, or anyone interested in what is going on in the world of poetry. Many features make PNR remarkable, particularly its essays on poetics, its thought‐provoking editorials; some readers, however, might find challenging Schmidt's interest in the longer poem and poem sequences and its international outlook, which also includes certain American poets. Schmidt's approach differs from that of the previous editors in that PNR is both a print and an online magazine. A 1‐year individual subscription for £39.90 includes six issues of the print magazine and unlimited access to the archive, while a print and digital subscription for UK institutions costs £149.
Poetry Translation
The Translators Association (TA), set up in 1958 to provide literary translators with an effective means of protecting their interests and sharing their concerns, has suggested “a rate for poetry of £1.10 per line, with a minimum of £35 per poem” (Translators Association 2018), although they wisely add that “members are advised to take a case by case approach as rates for poetry vary,” which implies that poetry translators usually receive payment well below the suggested rates. Across the Atlantic, the 2017 Authors Guild Survey of Literary Translators' Working Conditions, which collected information from 205 translators on payment, royalties, copyright, and various other aspects of the literary translation profession, shows that 65% of literary translators earn less than $20,000 per year and only about 7% earn 100% of their income from translation work. The authors of the survey draw the straightforward conclusion that “a large number of US translators are being paid rates that make it difficult, if not impossible, to earn a living.” Even more worrying is that 41% of the translators report that “payment of their fee has sometimes depended on the publisher receiving a grant.” (The Authors Guild 2017) Whether similar figures also apply to the current situation of British and Irish translators is a subject about which one can only speculate.
For some translators, the prizes awarded for their work, though very few in number, offer at least the occasional possibility of supplementing a meager income. The Society of Authors lists on its website 10 translation prizes worth £15,000, which are awarded in mid‐February of the year following publication, the majority of them for “full length […] works of literary merit and general interest” translated from a given language into English. The prizes are awarded annually, biennially, or every 3 years, in recognition of outstanding translations from works in Arabic, Dutch, French, German, Italian, Spanish, and Swedish. One of them is the TA First Translation Prize, an annual £2,000 prize shared between the translator and his or her editor. It was established in 2017, endowed by Daniel Hahn, with support from the British Council, “for a debut literary translation into English published in the UK,” and like all British poetry prizes is administered within the terms of a closed‐shop policy (The Society of Authors, 2019), meaning that only books first