this is a piece (circa 1997?) about poetry magazines
Why Don't You Do Me Right: Thoughts on approaching the magazine rack in the Arts Council Poetry Library
The rack has 80 different poetry magazines on it, driving home the excess of information and the unsatisfactory nature of any picture you can ever form by soaking up small samples of what is available. Absolute superfluity has something dreamlike and inciting to reverie about it, like seeing a river choked with spawning salmon or a road hidden by fallen fruit. In a medium which stretches out boundlessly in every direction, it is the characteristics of the observing self which structure the experience and impose limits on it. Almost all trains of appetite set off by glimpses in the magazines, are frustrated: one wants a whole lot at one time but the magazine only offers four pages of that person. Being attracted to individuals doesn't sound very socialist, and the magazine hopes to provide an overall ambience in which all voices fit as logical and complementary parts of each other. The problem, surrounded by so many stimuli, is of relaxing and not being frantic. Poetry has not only to induce a hyperassociative state but also to control the volleys of associations so that they do not become painful and frustrating. It is hard to design a magazine to be convergent and complete in itself; reading entire books by one person is a better experience.
The experience is structured by my decision to devote only two hours to the magazines before going off to do something else. My attention span is controlled, not only by the poetic attractions of the text, but also by the urgency of the rest of my life, temporarily sinking away to give me leisure to read in. The sound I keep hearing in my head is the crashing wall of noise of ATV playing Why Don't You Do Me Right. If you set out to buy a hamburger you will probably succeed, whereas if you set out to find a poetic experience you will very likely be frustrated. So why do they treat us like this? how did they get the nerve to print this slop? why are you ignoring my wishes?
The moments of rage which, whenever I have tried it, are my chief memory about the experience, are due less to heinous behaviour by the poets than to my own high expectations and sense of being trapped, flouted, and frustrated in my aesthetic appetites. Speaking as perhaps the most irascible critic of my generation, I can say that reading tracts of bad poetry gives me the feeling of sitting with my hands chained to the desk while someone, giggling, jabs sharpened pencils into my eyeballs hundreds of times. During such hours, my commitment to poetry evaporates, and I gloomily reflect on how many hours one has to spend reading bad poetry to get at the good stuff. Couldn't I have found a better hobby, when I was sixteen. Intelligent reviews could save one so much time, but nobody seems inclined to write them. Such feelings, of course, prompt one to start a poetry magazine. Another poetry magazine. Just what we need.
The absolute excess of data justifies pure arbitrariness in selecting objects of desire: one can only choose what one most wants, pursue what appeals most, give way to the trains of association which are most gratifying. This indeed was the basis for this entire book. The smart reader of magazines will be clever at avoiding things. Security can only be reached by self-indulgence, self-imitation, and sacrifice of other people.
Some of the factors making for a pleasurable reading experience: concentration, long spans of attention, the feeling of plenitude of material opening out in front of one, freedom from interruption or running out of material, anticipation, the sensation of competence and control, identification with the material, hyperassociation, convergence of signs upon a single satisfying object, -are independent of the text in front of one. The mixed experience of reading a magazine with many different poets is hard to analyse, although presumably magazine editors think it through every day of their lives.
Convergence is imposed on the material by personal and essentially irrational decision rules. Since I am writing a project on British poetry, I have an unconscious censor which tells me not to read American poetry; as part of a pious hope that one day the project will be complete. So I ignore a part of the visible spectrum; no doubt there are hundreds of other such rules in operation, as I try to avoid tedium and catch the wonderful poems. The more tedium I avoid, the less chance I have of finding something unexpected; the more rules of avoidance I have, the more prestructured my reading experience is. This convergence stands in some incalculable relation to the overflowing non-convergence of the kind of poetry I like most. Appropriateness is a self-fulfilling prophecy: the avant-garde reader, who claims to be terminally open-minded, may seem to the outside observer (me, for example) to be rigidly stuck in preset habits, so that they feel anxious and out of place as soon as they detect that a poem they are reading does not follow the rules laid down many years ago by Pound, Olson, Derrida, Suslov, or whoever else. This is a circular road; as you pursue your known tastes, you get back to where you started.
This article is subjective, because magazines offer subjective ambiences, sucking the poem back into a social milieu like a bar full of people broadcasting distinctive social messages. Lacking the intensity and intimacy of books by single poets, they are welcoming, relaxing, disconnected, and cannot be rigorously described. I have not, in every case, read every page which these magazines published in the 1990s.
The wars of style, the innovations, the shifts of opinion, all happen in the magazines; but you wouldn't want to spend two days a week reading British poetry magazines. There is a great excess of poetry published which is just background noise. Reading bad poetry dulls all the senses until you are too drowsy to respond to good poetry. A protective numbness is the only answer to a tedious and insistent drone laying claim to power and truth. The poet Denise Riley suggested that the number of poetry magazines should be cut down to about six. She was frustrated at having to wade through so much rubbish to find the good stuff. (Light's List gives about 215 British poetry magazines, but the total of 300 has also been suggested.) Of course, this winnowing can never take place; if it was imposed from outside, we would be left with the titles that appeal to art-bureaucrats, and the high-intensity small-circulation magazines would vanish. Control from below is what already takes place; access to layout and printing facilities is allowed to all citizens, and the result is a very long baseline range of poetry magazines in which a small amount of wonderful material is perplexingly encrypted beyond anyone's power to find. No-one believes we don't have enough poetry magazines.
A search programme for good poetry would logically include poems of unknown design and intention as well as the various categories of the tried and true wonderful. Extra attention has been given, below, to magazines which accept the poetically unexpected; experience shows that reading them is enlivening and full of hope even if the poetry turns out, in the upshot, to be no good.
Poetry Review: Don't be Difficult, Dear
The pages roll by in a game-show atmosphere of factitious excitement, magnifying the poets' most optimistic image of themselves; it asks them to develop a public image, publicity ploys, biographical myths, etc. The magazine now represents the decline of the system put in place by the right-wing coups of the seventies, the loss of self-assurance and the searching for new forms; current attempts to claim modernity and challenge and unconventionality are comic. It is anti-intellectual; helpful for teachers with bored 15 year olds; anti-modern. It has a broad intake. It reviews as many as 40 books a year, but never reviews small press publications. It is very well edited for speed and optimism. Antimodern resentment not allowed space now; I was amazed by their modernist issue inspired by Conductors of Chaos, a courageous move although undercut by their decision not to publish any non-mainstream poems to back up their prose exposing the existence of a poetics that was not Pop or Movement. It does not publish any good poetry so far as I can see. The presentation is brilliant, although its wholehearted embrace of the stylistic values of publicity is accompanied by weakness in theory and debate. The evangelical gladness doesn't encourage introspection or experiment or defamiliarisation. They have a difficult relation with the early modernists; if you read them with the help of textbooks, you are not ready to deal with Difficult work by poets who aren't on the syllabus and for whom no textbooks exist. They have a sociological bent, i.e. replacing stylistic analysis with glowing profiles of the poets; and a youth cult, a generous if boring talent-spotting: the boxed set The Motown Story includes in the spoken commentary a line "from the streets of Detroit came more hot young talent!", and Poetry Review talks like that. They are not biased towards the middle-aged. The special issues approach means the magazine is not repetitive but the lack of real research into the labyrinths grown since the poetry explosion of the sixties limits their usefulness.
Poetry Review is a centrist organ panicked by the idea of anything not dead centre. Stuck on the poet's Person, they can give very little attention to the work itself. Their reviews are useless to me because what they praise is not at all to my taste and what is my taste doesn't rate a review but the length (about 1000 words) is good, quick yet not forced to be superficial; few magazines take reviewing this seriously. The magazine is not dominated by secondary literature about poets whose creative peaks were half a century, or five centuries, ago, not academic, better than the stand-up comic circuit. As a record of nineties poetry these reviews are virtually useless. Their interest is in a younger age-group than the avant garde magazines.
No negative voice is allowed: this is the reverse of Close Reading: the house style is not academics but bookshop managers. The enthusiasm does help people try new things out, generating visible pressure to please an audience: poet asked to collaborate in the writing of publicity releases by writing poetry that bears them out. The magazine rolls out a frightful tacky pleased bounciness, like a number of the Clothes Show where everything is aimed to show off the eager young amateurs and to lull the audience into buying.
Wearing my Adorno T-shirt: Parataxis
Parataxis, ferociously reducing poetry to politics and politics to philosophy, is filled with pusillanimous and grandiose prose. Over seven issues since 1991, they have published hundreds of pages on J.H. Prynne, while the reviewing of new books of British poetry is minimal. Parataxis is aiming at the stars while ignoring the ground at its feet. This is a profoundly convergent approach: poetry is either like Prynne, and based on Adorno, or else it is not worth attention. Parataxis is perilously close to a special interest organ, i.e. a Prynne fanzine. This seems daring to the editors, but since Prynne published his Hauptwerk in 1969 it can also be seen as conservative. The contributors do not understand Prynne or how to write about him. John Wilkinson appears as the most important living poet after Prynne, because his poetic clothes smell of the master's rooms. Prynne apparently holds the keys to the kingdom, and the claim to the Prynne succession is based on a kind of monotheism, a distaste for pluralism. It resembles cultural snobbery; an awareness of one's own position in which all English poetry except the master, and for example Hughes, Redgrove, Haslam, Allen Fisher, Roy Fisher, etc., is "folk art" and "impossible" and "can't be taken seriously". At odds with the explicit prose line, they have published a great deal of important poetry.
If someone sets out with the theory that people in a commodity capitalist society carry commodity capitalist structures as the rules of their behaviour and consciousness, and also rejects this system, then they occupy a vanishing point, an airless and contentless space. One thinks of Vanity Fair: "And as they wondered at their apparel, so they did likewise at their speech; for few could understand what they said (...) these pilgrims set very light by all their wares; they cared not so much as to look upon them; and if they called upon them to buy, they would put their fingers in their ears, and cry 'Turn away mine eyes from beholding vanity', and look upwards signifying that their trade and traffic was in heaven."
This void, so carefully engineered, does permit speculation. If one rejects practical reason, one no longer wishes to answer the questions which it does; about economics, love, information, and art, for example. The extent of the inexplicable and open questions is adequate. Total scepticism can translate into power politics, if only through vaulting claims to natural or inherited authority. But the void is carefully preserved from contamination by anything real, i.e. compromised; only Adorno and Prynne are allowed to constitute evidence unpolluted enough to be thought about, and they are pure only because of the thoroughness of their negation. Negating all the structures of everyday life might reveal the rules by which this is being constructed, although of course you would have to look at some real experience in order to do that. To argue with someone, you have to internalise their position, if only to construct a refutation of it; if you decide that the minds of people living under capitalism are false consciousness intrinsically, there is no dialogue, hence no philosophising, and no political thinking. Parataxis is a centre for bad prose, as Glasgow is a centre for bad food and Mancester for bad weather. I can't imagine someone of real intelligence taking pleasure from so many tons of soot suspended in the air, through which a spark of light struck from pre-war marxists glows fitfully. Parataxis is dull, inconclusive, academic, low-risk but all may be justified by something compulsively brilliant like Reeve and Kerridge on The Oval Window. The adornoite spleen has burnt and razed ground where some new seed may yet grow, once the hauteur negates itself.
Knowledge after sociology: Fragmente (seven issues since 1990)
The editors, Lawson and Mellors, were Oxford students doing doctoral theses on aspects of contemporary modernist British poetry. Fragmente has a Left critical attitude taking Marxist poetry of the seventies as the significant cultural landscape
worthy of attention and also of intelligent criticism. It was not, at the outset, so different from Parataxis in its assumptions. Issue two was about the LANGUAGE poetry group in the USA; issue three was an attack on the avantgarde pastoralism of A Various Art. Issues have been held up by the problems of the editors getting jobs since they had not chosen conventional doctorate topics. Research is only safe if you repeat the research hundreds of other people have already done. Nobody wants to read new facts. If they'd specialised in some pop poets who can be read at a glance, teaching posts would have been much easier. Fragmente is an example of the new radical magazine with high quality DTP production and long reflective reviews, so different from the practice of the seventies. Prose has got much better since those days, now expectations of being self-explanatory have gone. Literary life is more conscious, less natural. The magazine has had no interest in Oxford poetry (up till some poems by Robert Smith in issue Six), as Oxford has until recently produced no serious modern poet. A historical repli to begin a new era of the formally and politically radical looked also to Cambridge. Fragmente's tone is modernist, radical, critical, intellectual, leading edge, academic, theoretical, anti-capitalist, conscious, 1970s, competitive, fearless, and high-energy.
Poetry Wales (quarterly)
This is a large magazine, mainly Anglo-Welsh, covering other topics besides poetry and occasionally reviewing books from outside Wales. They review some Welsh-language publications. They have a strong interest in politics, and within a Left and pro-Welsh stance are critical and concerned about the quality of discussion. English regions lack such magazines, such a fund of information to fuel discussion, and consequently such self-awareness and sense of group identity. The concept "nation" reduced to a phantom by exact historians, has this concrete meaning for the poetic economies of Wales, Northern Ireland, and Scotland. PW represents a continuing conversation in which Welsh literati are likely to join. What most struck me about it, going through the back files in 1994, was the number and quality of interviews, and how well they illustrate and complement the poetry of the country. English interviews generally handle poets I don't want to read. In the absence of a national government the Welsh poets adopt political positions with great care and attention to nuances.
See also the Anglo-Welsh Review, Planet, and the New Welsh Review.
Upfront, groovy, and no hang-ups: Ambit (quarterly; only partly poetry)
Ambit has fabulous graphics and its prose is edited by JG Ballard, the most distinguished novelist of his generation. It is notable for the stinking smallmindedness of Vernon Scannell's poetry reviews; he is furious at what he can't understand and makes no attempt to educate himself.
It is frozen in the 1960s; the poetry of tipsy loose talk. an idea of linguistic liberty incompatible with ideas and reflection. It reflects an affluent era: sensory opulence, everything on offer. It has a distinctive atmosphere of a big drinks party chocabloc with oversexed people drinking and talking far too much. Its poets are shacked up with poetry; free of the Anglican ethos which was still dominant in the 1950s. a revolt. Ambit is all tarted up and high, pro-science fiction, smart and full of bounce, fatally post Louis MacNeice, pro-Pop culture, hedonist, Chelsea boutique, paisley kipper ties and underwired cleavages. Ambit is friendly and offers a lack of inhibitions and of programmes. Complacent and sociable, it does have a vision of how to get what you want and be happy. This open-eyed aproach hasn't worked in poetry. Their typical poet is Gavin Ewart, a left-wing advertising executive who began publishing in the 1930s; they have failed to break new poets. Ambit is the high end of Pop, strong on front and hospitality to reader, with a barmaid level of intellectuality.The poets appeal through lifestyle, manipulating the Image; a photograph shows up too much, distracts the poet towards issues of clothes and hairstyle and away from the black art of words. A split is datable to the late sixties, in the Left, between the hedonistic and those who wanted to guarantee pleasure by changing society, which meant effort and concentration in the short term. The shared proposal was after all to be happy and to achieve this by exchanging energy with other people at the maximum rate. Ambit's high level of up to date naughtiness, the soundtrack for an office romance, does provide the ancestry of a great deal of recent poetry; in fact, the conventional contemporary tone. Problems society-wide about talking about sex have also damaged Ambit's psychological cohesion and level of finish. Poetry has a hesitant relation to contemporary standards of conversation about intimate things. Speech has to do with courtship rituals and self-presentation, and because poetry is heightened speech it has to offer expertise in these fields. Poetry has amongst other things to compete with pop psychologists, confessional interviews, and agony columns, is expected to go further and tell more truth. The absence of a new lyric for new sexual mores, or to exploit the new frankness in print, is sad for poetry. The subject area of pop songs seems not to exist in poetry. Poetry does little credit to the Ambit project: they were kind to poetry to keep it on but there was not enough energy to do it successfully.
The poetry magazine should among other things impersonate a cafe of eligible singles, and in this sense Ambit is successful.
There are other physical/data/excitation rhythms than those of philosophical exchanges, but love is also subject to epistemological problems and causes one to philosophize. Ambit gets turned on quickly but has a short attention span. Mastering the gloss and minimal compass of advertisements was hard work, but poetry now needs de-minimizing. Instancy is better for photos than for poems.
Stand (quarterly; since 1952; about 84 pages with 25 of poetry and 17 of reviews of poetry)
"Poetry of the committed individual"
The Stand experience involves teachers, social workers, clergy, and librarians; worthiness, decency, woolly jumpers, youth clubs, The Guardian. The programme phrase committed individual seems to refer to a phase of guilt-ridden theology in the 1950s when the Church wanted to be free of the accusation of being unworldly and remote from everyday problems. It does not refer to political commitment or to protest poetry. It is merely a painful inflammation of the conscience; it is hostile to politics and legislative solutions. Problems are to be solved by common decency. It's not clear what Stand is standing up for except not being committed to anything; I presume this is a fifties mood in which it seemed terribly courageous not to be attached to any ideology, and continues the personalism common among Christians in the 1940s, which evolved into or merged with Christian existentialism. The notion of the individual is radical compared to the faith in a national church and its doctrine, but a few centuries out of date in the ambit of secular life. Stand is against radicals, against gratification; against abstract ideas, and experiment in verse. Every poem has to be 'accountable' and so realist, empirical, domestic, anecdotal, unambiguous, bare in style. The built-in moral proves the poet is moral and so desirable. Stand is writing for the professions of social control. It is little changed since the early 1950s. Eagerness to reach a wide market restrains artistic exploration and encourages compromise at every level. It features boring reviews within a short compass, and never reviews small press books. Togetherness, agape, but no individualism. Stand is anti-authority inasmuch as the latter by remaining on stage threatens not to leave enough time for the Stand writer to say everything they urgently want to and so prove to everyone how sensitive and encompassing their conscience is. Speculation is forbidden as incompatible with the staging of moral dramas; self-assertion is experienced as a threat. The aim of moral education is blanking-out of desires and arguments.
Stand is non-academic but also non-Pop, with traces of (northern) regionalism. It is for the liberal-Christian (or, Jewish) rivals to the New Left, and cannot give countenance to the latter; rejects idea of social interest influencing the life of the intellect as this puts into question the veracity of the liberal conscience. The claim to speak for the individual has a blind spot for the institutions inside which most contributors function; social control is to be a living witness, not merely a function designated by the government which also supplies a salary. The status of the individual thus newly constituted by the fractioning of the parish or ecclesia is itself unstable. weak on the sense of evil. We have an insistence on realism but the absence of sociological ideas; the discourse is a modified theological one in which social institutions, cognitive norms, etc. are excluded from view or from criticism; this view of the suffering individual ignores the existence of capitalism. A phobia about ideas leads to unnatural numbers of Things held to embody virtue, a kind of gift shop at the folk museum poetry. Poems on artists' biographies, usually expressing detached benevolence, are popular; empathy as supervisory control. There is a fear of identifying too much. The founding repression is theology, never mentioned but suggesting everything. political ideas are held to be Obvious and so become invisible. slide into objects. Ideas are not allowed to be in doubt because they are cherished possessions and evidence of class status as a professional and caring person. This evidencing leaves a product with a lack of incentives to read. The total run may now exceed 10,000 pages, some of which can be read with profit. Stand has published some poems by Geoffrey Hill, Ken Smith, and George MacBeth.
With so much concerned, churchgoing, selfcontrolled, middle-class, supervisory fatherliness on stage you have to look away to realise that everyone else has been forced off stage. Society is ill represented in the ban-absence of self-interest and disagreement. Class is a forbidden topic but solidarity is much on show. There is a lack of apertura to ideas which are new since 1959.
It takes a great effort to attack something so sleepy, sheepish, and mild. It is no good for bright kids, but would suit a teacher who is afraid of ideas he is unfamiliar with (and of bright kids); anyone else keeps bumping up against its arbitrary limits. A lack of information means only individual expression can be described; low gratification means everything has to move fast.
Strong in the arm and thick in the head: Iron
anti-intellectual but critical of powers that be. regional. a downmarket Stand. working-class, northern. heavy industry. Old Left solutions. fear of neglect by South (and by southern writers). poems are subjected to loyalty tests, scoured for evidence of Belonging. sense of inferiority; refusal to update intellectual positions; fear of ideas as part of general fear of being cheated. traces of Nonconformist conscience. aggression. distrust of culture. need to belong. alienated from corporations and government but not from the neighbourhood and the pub. guilt about being individuals. solidarity with past. absence of ideas new since 1960. pedagogic care about setting words; egalitarianism. lack of fine words. low expectations. directness. preoccupation with objects. claim to regional identity goes along with lack of effort to find stylistic individuality.
The quality weeklies as poetry magazines: Times Literary Supplement, London Review of Books, New Statesman
Poetry has here a larger audience than anywhere else, and the industry needs a flagship. Not everyone wants to fight their way through the little magazines. If you took just the poems from the TLS and the LRB over a year, and read them, and the books by those poets, you would do very well. Both magazines review contemporary poetry several times a year. It is clear that biographies of dead poets appeal more to the readership, and get more attention and square inches; a pressure or taste which leads to the poem of literary biography, or in fact poems derived from prose about poets. The poems abbreviate, and so end up with the anecdote; a curse of contemporary poetry. I could suggest that reading literary biographies is a secure and comfortable pursuit which is also boring and leaves you feeling overstuffed and unable to think. A poet has other aims than becoming a literary biography. We have to ask why prose is more consumable; and how the information in prose differs from that in poetry.
The biggest threat to the poems in these magazines is being overwhelmed by the rhythms of the prose all around them, and in fact they tend towards prose plainness and accountability. The volume of information in the TLS or THES is bewildering, information and lines of argument exploding all over the place, and the attempt to annex this density and capture it within the poem is a radical alternative to retreating into the skinny poem which excludes ideas and the complexity of the world to be a kind of My Diary column, irresponsible but personal, rehashing the news with a personal angle. This is perhaps an attempt to salvage and salve the ego, impacted in on itself by the sight of so much information it does not possess, and the invalidation of its internalised information by the pressure of new research; where knowledge is the key to your economic status, the sight of the scale and excellence of new publications is the moment of emotionally experiencing the expansion of the middle class and the weakening or erosion of individuals within it, a moment of fear and crisis as well as curiosity and self-knowledge. If I knew something about Anglo-Saxon history ten years ago, and was pleased about it, the news that my knowledge is now outdate and unsaleable and falsified is unpleasant. The poem which puts its faith in the personal and ejects knowledge structures is a response to this crisis, of knowledge destroying itself as it ramifies, but is fatally weakened by its failure to handle what, we have just said, is vital to economics, status, and self-image. The poet can take the poem anywhere a camera can go as an alternative to becoming a personable juvenile, with the innocent fond appeal of a puppy, unserious and relaxed. Even this boyishness (or girlishness) is more saleable as prose.
Amid corporate struggles, between men and women, between groups of different class origins, or different ethnic groups, we can observe more fragmented struggles between individuals: if I fail to get this book published (!), or to get a job, it is likely that my successful rivals strongly resemble me. If I am unemployed, from being too low on the shortlist, it is indifferent to me that my successful rivals have the same accent as me. This doesn't put food on the table. We have said something essential about poetry by observing that the uselessness of the knowledge it offers also detaches it from the status-struggles over the possession of knowledge. But much modern poetry is precisely about the invalidation of knowledge.
These magazines have a narrow reviewing policy, excluding small press publications; so they wait until after the big publishers, i.e. they are conservative, late, low risk, uninfluential. The onus is on the small magazines to make new things happen. We are now seeing a backlash against the Martian school of poetry, a mistake of the late seventies or early eighties which can be blamed on pushing by editors and reviewers in the London weeklies. These people need to appear to be up to date (although in fact they are conservative and late in the day), so that they need to pretend that there is a significant poetry of any period, and that they know what it is, so that soon the reader does too. Finding out what the best poetry of a period within less than thirty years is a thorny problem to which I am by this communication offering some solutions. The Martians were an especially horrible and phony episode now being enthusiastically used by ambitious regionalist interests to claim that all people in London (not just two or three editors 15 years ago) and all poets (not just half a dozen mainstream oafs) are dishonest and talentless. This was certainly a promotional campaign which went over the top, but at the same time it was a positive intervention in the cultural process which is more high-risk than passivity, and fashion-making is generally admired in other arts.
It seems rational to defunctionalise poetry to the ultimate degree. after all prose is very highly developed and cheap to produce. Error: this should not happenexemplify defunctional poem.
The big magazines aren't subsidised. There is a lack of recognition that there is an avant-garde playing a research role for the industry. The place of the poets themselves has been filled by poststructuralism and literary theory or by poets of "different" class origins, following the myth that our future lurks occluded in the realm of... people who know nothing about poetry. The contest with theorists is a catwalk or boxing ring for poets, driven by an elemental need to compete, forced to try on a big front and pull it off. There is an essential gap between "theory" and the game rules of modern poetry, they are at most two species in the same genus. We actually need a meta-theory to explain what kind of thing theory is. Within the small press world, a pervasive fear about the future has been soothed by a recent apparent move of Doug Oliver, Iain Sinclair, Denise Riley, Andrew Crozier, and Michael Haslam into the commercial big time.
The London experimental scene: Garuda, Pages, AND, Talus, First Offence
The formidable London experimental scene has been expressed variously in these magazines. Garuda, edited by Ulli Freer, observing the traditional A4 stapled format, with the new refinement of directly reproducing authors' camera-ready copy in diverse typefaces, directly revealed the poetry but seems to have stopped after issue 2. Pages, edited by Robert Sheppard, also A4 stapled, without even a card cover, is available by post only; its current incarnation is as documentation of poets (again, from the London experimental scene, largely those in Floating Capital) with new work, a bibliography, and an essay which is substantial even if it has not solved the outstanding problems of writing about this kind of work, shows the generational problem of treating only poets who were at work in the seventies; admittedly, there would be no point in a retrospect of someone with no back catalogue. Talus, produced by various editors influenced by Eric Mottram, associated with King's College, London, has an international bias but has included English poetry of the kind Mottram favoured. It is a handsomely produced magazine. First Offence, edited by Tim Fletcher, a thick A4 stapled object, is hardly distributed at all, but is one of the key publications in the English poetry field; such a remorseless density and amplitude of avant-garde work is rare to find, and the archive represented by the eleven issues (since 1986) could serve as an introduction to this most suggestive, subversive, and maligned of areas. AND, which has produced about three issues in the nineties, and is edited by Bob Cobbing and Adrian Clarke, also exhibits the staples of the London scene, with more of a bias towards concrete, processual, and aleatory poetry. It also favours the A4 stapled format, with the direct-photocopying so that the typeface is different on every page. The sense of avant-garde legitimacy is crushing. The decentring and dispersion of the thinking and, above all, feeling subject, means that the works seem describe episodes in the life of art-selves, of a finger or a vertebra, even though the authorizing project was to make an exit from a whole way of life and to transform the whole individual, not just provide amusement. This writing at arms' length boots the whole project into the area of the didactic, of academic specialisation and pre-planning; although the idea of throwing out ordinary ways of speaking was to incite the reader to experiment and to demonstrate freedom-a new way of walking.
The south-west: Memes, Odyssey, Terrible Work, 10th Muse
These magazines, all from the south-west, represent a younger and less marxist-philosophical version of the experimental. They are the most likely place to find good new poets, given that fragmente and Parataxis are handicapped by fixations on the poets their editors did doctoral theses on. What you lose in philosophical ambition and quality control, you gain in diversity and open-mindedness.
Scotland: Chapman, Lines Review, Cencrastus
I am unable to detect editorial differences between these. All are Scottish magazines, and the loyalty of their readership may demand too much of Scottishness and too little of the artist's personality. None specialises in poetry, and the general national mandate demands that they give a great deal of attention to writers from the first half of the century, and cover all parts of the literary spectrum, so that the element of contemporary poetry is diluted. Scots are very critical of their native artists and thinkers (if I am too it doesn't mean I am failing a loyalty test), the critics subject the chosen writers to the same ferocious standards they subject themselves to. The idealisation of the nationalist sensibility is applied to a notion of Scotland which includes great artists, and which in fact puts really existing artists in a chilling shade. However, the pervasive sense of being silenced and flouted by a hostile South incites critics to great thoroughness of documentation. Someone interested in the recent past of poetry can find out a great deal by digging through back issues of Chapman, or the deceased Akros. The phenomenon of bandwidth compression: everything is packed into the same magazine, and so subjected to the same structures of reading and reasoning. Working in specifically Scottish periodicals, as an alternative to putting Scottish work in national periodicals, produces this compression; the paying literary market in Scotland is just too small.
The Scottish avant-garde:Gairfish, Object Permanence
I must admit I can't understand or get into most of what appears in Object Permanence; the absence of discursive and signifying structures is presumably a gesture of defiance and liberation, it is about the presence of the absence of shared cognitive norms, or something. However, the intermittent appearance of something brilliant from inside this razed zone means that it retains its interest and importance. The editor I made enquiries of, Peter Manson, seemed despairing of the possibilities of an avant-garde in Scotland; there is for example no bookshop in Scotland which stocks avant-garde poetry, so that the reviews section of OP only, sadly, mentions bookshops in England which run mail-order lists. The problem has partly to do with the mandatory socialist-nationalist orientation, one part of which (the nationalist part) is shared by virtually all Scottish art bureaucrats, so that experimental work is unlikely to be funded; and partly to do with the grabbing of the labels of advanced, experimental, modernist, etc., by writers and managers who then deny the existence of anything further out on the spectrum than they are. If the centre promotes itself as being the avant-garde, the avant garde is not going to get a look in; part of the Scottish scene is that very conservative people act like revolutionaries, because of their opposition to the present constitution. Modernism is seen as an asset to be seized and nationalised like any other; but to become visibly Scottish it has to become realist, social, traditional in ornament, and morally concerned. The enthusiasm to reach a local market means that editors are terrified of difficult work; a public version of Scottish poetry is being set up which erases most of the formal spectrum in order to have a saleable product and be part of the Scottish literary renaissance. Object Permanence does not predominantly publish Scottish writers, but is probably somewhere where a new local avant garde could congregate and form itself.
omissions: Critical Quarterly, Stride, Active in Airtime, the London Magazine. for Ramraid Extraordinaire see another chapter.
It was tactful of you not to mention that I edit a poetry magazine (Angel Exhaust) to which, of course, none of the above strictures apply.