Poetry Magazine Review

http://www.poetrymagazines.org.uk/

Before going to see Maggi Hambling's exhibition, I spent an hour and a half in the Poetry Library in the Royal Festival Hall looking at the magazines. By no means enough time to read very many poems in them, you might say, but in all honesty, how long can one sit and read poems at a stretch. Not much more than an hour and a half, I'd say.

In the 1970's, there was a lively and flourishing 'little magazine' community of poets and editors that somehow bridged the gap between post-hippy and punk considerably more smoothly than pop music did. Productions values were not always high and magazines came and went, some with the life expectancy of a mayfly, but they came through the letterbox at our house at quite a rate and all of that glimpse of counter-culture, enthusiastic samizdat is still stored in drawers upstairs of this house now, thirty years or so later. There was Paul Lamprill's Sandwiches, Zack Samuel's Moth, Colin Webb's eventually very long-running Sepia. There were Bogg, Krax, Smoke, Slow Dancer and as many others as there were keen amateurs thinking they could make their mark. The best poet in them was the Isle of Man's finest, Michael Daugherty, but rarely did a magazine go by without a Steve Sneyd poem; blackie fortuna was a Rock Against Racism phenomenon of sorts and the late Tina Fulker and minor 60's icon, Tina Morris made sure it wasn't a boys only game. Fine times they seemed to be, somehow idealistic and devil may care. I read a review of something called Kestrel in the Suburbs by Kevin Osmond, which had won a prize, a poem I've still not seen, and wished I could win a prize.
Well, now I've won a few- very minor ones- and somehow it's thirty years later. Out of all the magazines so kindly made available in the Poetry Library, what's going on now. It's a few years since I let my subscriptions to Poetry Review and PNR lapse, so what am I missing.
Production values have gone to previously unthinkable perfect levels. It's no longer a late night on the roneo machine for editors knocking out 100 copies to their subscribers at two quid for three issues. Many of the titles are like books and priced accordingly but whereas you could spend your seven or eight pounds on a book by a poet you like, a magazine will often deliver only a small percentage of poems you want to read again and again. They are essentially samplers, they are Radio One playing singles, giving you a chance to decide which albums to buy. And although you might think that editors might give their magazines distinctive styles or attitudes, it isn't always so. It's the reviews that one more often finds interesting or informative and it comes as quite a find when one comes across a genuinely arresting poem.
Poetry London is good on reviews and must be really useful to Londoners with its listings of events but I didn't find a poem in it that looked like it was going to change my life. It didn't say it was going to, either, to be fair.
The Rialto was once advertised somewhere as being the place to be published but, no, not really. Same old, hanging in the air, musing sort of poems. Nothing tough or special or enterprising. Ordinary if you like that sort of thing.
South is almost determinedly domestic, safe and amateur and run and selected by committees and so although you get nice poems and a few good ones, it is beautifully produced but at another seven pounds simply unbuyable and presumably mainly subscribed to by the poets that are in it, and they try to include as many as they can so that they will. Although, to be fair, they do send out a contributor's copy.
Not all of the poems in Long Poem Magazine are all that long but Andy Brown's two-part poem, Home, took up nearly two pages and was satisfying.
It is good to see Tears in the Fence plodding dourly on after all these years but if you are going to spend the requisite amount then I'm afraid The Reader, coming from Liverpool University, with its crossword and quiz, provides much more entertainment. It's been through various stages of development from a worthy reading group magazine to its very professional status of now giving space to any celebrity writer you might have heard of, possibly at the expense of finding 'new voices'. But it's a well-produced magazine that probably deserves the wide readership it gets.
Poetry Review would, as ever, still seem to be the place to be seen if you want to be seen in the right places. It's best if you are somebody already, of course, but with the National Poetry Competition winners in it, including the latest darling, Ian Pindar, as well as octogenarian Anthony Thwaite reflecting that he no longer has time for genealogy, it's a classy enough effort and if one is going to subscribe to anything, it might be this establishment organ, or
Magma, to which I would like to award the prize for best magazine on the evidence available. Nice poems by good, old Dannie Abse and the apparently very industrious Martyn Crucefix who is still in every other magazine you pick up but also imaginative features, like asking poets for their favourite 'erotic' poems, in which we are reminded of Wyatt's They flee from me. It has concise, sensible reviews and the atmosphere of something that is good fun as well as serious.
That would do. It's impressive that so many magazines are continuing and that several of the titles are recognizable from a few decades ago. Under pressure from the challenge of internet publishing, one might have thought that magazines would be suffering but one can only imagine that the need for poets to see their poems in print is keeping this industry going. I've got to say that not all of them deserve to, although they are undoubtedly run with commitment, belief and dedication.
But it does look as if poetry has followed the rest of the world into corporate brands and safe options rather than a love of the game. Not just the magazines but the poets, too. The look of the thing, the style and presentation. There is no point in having nicely made books if there's not much in them.