Is This a Poem?

Richard Price, Peter McCarey

• Publisher: Molecular Press
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9782970037668
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism in Poetry
• Index: Literature

This is a book which regards poetry as a meeting point
and creator of overlapping communities of writers,
readers, and audiences. While essays here look closely
at individual poets in the lyric tradition, including
Edward Thomas, Denise Riley, and Edwin Morgan,
the author also elucidates the networks of energy and
inspiration which poetry and the artist’s book catalyse.

Making

CAT-scanning the Little Magazine

The Beatles and a Brontosaurus

Computerized axial tomography, ‘CT-’ or ‘CAT-scanning’, is a procedure in which multiple X-ray photographs are taken from different positions along a single axis. A composite three-dimensional image is rendered from the results. In medicine it is a particularly powerful diagnostic tool because it allows radiologists to see soft tissues, normally beyond the scope of ordinary X-ray machines. Other branches of sciences use the invention, too: for example, it can be used in the non-destructive investigation of the fossilised embryos in dinosaur eggs.

The first CAT-scanning equipment was invented in the late 1960s when experiments by Godfrey Hounsfield at the EMI Central Research Laboratories in Hayes, Middlesex, enabled the development of a commercially available scanner. A working prototype was used in a hospital as early as October 1971. It is said that EMI were able to fund Hounsfield’s research on the back of The Beatles’ enormous commercial success. Fittingly, it would appear that this famously idealistic pop group, a product of a complex Fifties and Sixties counterculture of which poetry magazines were such a part, had inadvertently funded this remarkable instrument of public health, spreading the message of ‘Love, Love, Love,’ in the most practical of ways.

In tribute to that relationship, perhaps the metaphor of CAT-scanning might be applied to the study and appreciation of little magazines. This would certainly involve looking in multiple ways at a single magazine in order to render its complexity in a concentrated, composite form. It would allow readers to see more in retrospect than the basic bone structure represented by a magazine’s celebrity authors: all a magazine’s authors and all its other contributors, be it illustrator or correspondent on the letters page, all its advertisements, its graphic design, its economics and marketing; the CAT-scan would detect the soft tissue, the living organs, of the magazine.

More than this, in the same way that the data underlying individual CAT-scans can be aggregated to identify material patterns across the particular category under study — be it patients with a particular medical condition or the eggs of a particular species of dinosaur — so the CAT-scanning project would go further than commentary on individual magazines. The project would press on to look across many examples — in the reasonable expectation that this would identify common characteristics, building indeed to a kind of aesthetics, perhaps even demonstrating the little magazine, like the novel, like the artist’s book, to be an art form in its own right. Such a project would eschew anecdotal approaches to literary history, which so often perpetuate the folklore surrounding this or that author, this or that movement. Rather, it would take a data approach rooted in indexing, pattern recognition and number; it would observe and aggregate ‘behavioural traits’ rather than amplify myth.

The Fortnightly, that monthly

One behavioural trait any little magazine must have is what can be termed ‘periodicity’, the expectation that it will re-appear, that it is indeed a ‘periodical’. After all, a magazine is not a magazine if it not intended to go beyond the first issue (there are one or two interesting exceptions to this, but more about that later).

Periodicity is a key aesthetic cue — indeed for all serial literature not just little magazines. Importantly, little magazines as a population exhibit a particularly large range of responses to periodicity, sometimes slavishly observing rules of frequency, sometimes rebelliously flouting them. This is an indicator of the meta-magazine role that little magazines can have: they are not always simply conveyors of text but can be highly reflexive commentators on the otherwise unacknowledged set of signs that serial publications of all kinds emit.

Periodicity is also one of the aspects of a magazine that can be ‘flattened’ by traditional forms of literary study and by trends in re-publication. Following the work of a particular author through the paper trail of first publication, it is easy to isolate his or her texts from the environment of their publication. In the 1910s and 1920s misplaced devotion to a single author might miss that one ‘magazine’ was in fact a newspaper (The New Age for instance), another was a monthly (The English Review), another was issued only in term-time (many student magazines), and yet another was the erratic creation of an ad-hoc collective (the Vorticists’ Blast), yet in each of these cases the circumstances of publication, the expectation of audience as a function of publishing frequency, is likely to be different and to have a bearing on either the intention of the author and (more certainly) on the nature of that text’s reception. Context may not be entirely everything, but if audience behaviour counts for anything there is a difference between a poem published in a weekly and an annual, even if the poem is the same.

Attuning to this is made more difficult by the reprinting of excerpted materials without proper indication of the nature of their original publication, and even by the levelling of the library catalogue where all kinds of materials are gathered together, creating the distracting conditions in which frequency, which may be faithfully recorded, is not understood as the para-aesthetic data it in fact is.

Like the ‘punctum’ – Roland Barthes’ term for the moment encapsulated in a still photograph for the viewer, precisely when and how a magazine is received is a fundamental aspect of its meaning. Indeed the means of delivery — whether postal or bookshop, whether issued at readings, whether in galleries, pubs, bookshops, seminar rooms or more imaginative venues, all are part of the richer meaning of the magazine. A magazine is not a just a work but one that is issued in a particular way on a particular occasion and in the expectation of a particular sequence.

One example of this is detailed by Mark Morrisson in his discussion of Ford Madox Ford’s The English Review. As Morrisson explains, this magazine, launched in 1908, adopted a monthly publication frequency, which in so doing asserted genre similarity to the Mercure de France and to the confusingly titled The Fortnightly which was, apart from a short time at the beginning of its life, also a monthly. The monthly regularity of The English Review mirrored certain format considerations of Mercure de France and The Fortnightly, such as a monthly round-up feature, attuning itself to a particular audience that was not looking for breaking news. (Such structural deployment may actually help to create or at least maintain such an audience.) News it was felt, could be handled by daily and weekly serial publications of one kind or another, a principle which is essentially in force today even if ‘twenty-four hour’ news has increased the frequency – so The English Review could devote itself to longer pieces that reflected on broader issues. It also published more literary content, which might take a month to absorb in the round.

Sometimes the ‘event’ of a magazine is synchronised with an external event that is so important it becomes a time marker itself. The self-designation of Blast’s second issue, its last, the ‘War Number’, aligned the magazine to the First World War almost as if subject and time had coalesced. This gave the magazine an importance, perhaps a self-importance, that appeared to shadow the appalling rhythm of world events. As Mark Morrisson also demonstrates, the magazine was privately trying to cover the ineptitude of its irregular publication schedule and was arguably taking advantage of the War as a marketing opportunity.

This meeting between an external event and ‘magazine event’ is related more broadly to special issues — a translation issue, a green issue, etc. — which similarly assert a coherence and importance to their topic and, while appearing to try to move a particular subject up a news agenda, may as likely be attaching the magazine to a topic which has more marketing force than the magazine itself.

As the Blast instance shows, the reason for this may not be obvious. Since shareholders as much as actual consumers are the target of advertising (since advertising alone may bolster confidence in the brand), sometimes a funder of a magazine may be the most significant target for a themed issue, for example when a state-sponsored magazine demonstrates through a themed issue that it is publishing work of a kind fostered by that state. Perhaps such practice is gently mocked by Ian Hamilton Finlay in his special issue of the 1960s magazine Poor. Old. Tired. Horse. (i.e., P.O.T.H. or POTH) when for its twenty-third outing he ran a whole number devoted to the humble, lisping ‘Teapoth’.

The posthumous life of a magazine attracts journalistic interpretations of frequency, especially focussed on the ending of a magazine, the final note in the sequence of publication. Here the CAT-scanner needs the literary historian to compensate for distortion from the electromagnetic stimulations they may have brought into the lab with them: in the lab it’s best to switch the gossipy mobile phone off, or at least switch it to flight-safe mode.

Wyndham Lewis’s Blast, like Ford Madox Ford’s The English Review, may be an example where posthumous fame is built on rather Romantic ideas of the nobleness of failure and failure is another aspect of periodicity. How a magazine comes to grief can, of course, say a lot about its nature, including its lack of adaptability, but can easily become too significant a part of its history when read back by later commentators with an aggrieved accusation of the vulgar wider public not being ready for the art of the future. Peter Barry’s account of the wrestling for power of the Poetry Society during the 1970s, a conflict in which the editorial role of the Poetry Review was a key issue, demonstrates how different models of accessibility and innovation may well be issues at the heart of a magazine’s demise, or at least at the heart of radical editorial change. Such models are not straightforward: the simplistic Romantic narrative of positive anarchist collectivists pitted against, say, state control and middle-brow taste is inadequate to explain the complexity of the world of publishing.

Censorship, too, is a much more complicated affair than at first may appear. When censorship brings a magazine to an untimely close, as with Klaxon in Ireland in 1923 (following a favourable review of Joyce’s Ulysses), libertarian impulses are naturally offended and ‘the State’ identified as the villain. But the State is far from a unitary body, and just because public taste is short-circuited and second-guessed by the usual forces involved — printer, police, funder and advertiser — it doesn’t mean that a majority of the public wouldn’t indeed have acted in the same way given the chance.

Looking across the whole life of a magazine, one tone encoded by erratic periodicity might be a bumbling amateurism hybridised with connoisseurship. For example, the sound and visual poetry magazine, And, edited by Bob Cobbing and others from 1954, achieved only eleven irregularly spaced issues in its first five decades of life. Was that a testament to do-it-yourself poetics outside commercial considerations, eschewing the building and maintaining of an audience by regular publication, or evidence of a high quality threshold, that Cobbing published only when the work was good enough?

Certainly Cobbing’s remarkable achievement with the small press Writers Forum, running parallel with And (if And could ever have been said to ‘run’), gives the lie to inactivity or bumble. Energy, openness, ‘driven-ness’, would be better nouns for a publishing programme of hundreds of books, amounting to one of the most significant artistic interventions in contemporary poetry in England in the last century. If the CAT-scanner’s variables are fixed in a certain way then the role of Writers Forum might be identified as para-periodical in operation so prolific was it and so responsive to topical events — and so keen, too, on periodical-like distribution methods (dating publications by month and tying publication into a regular public workshop schedule).

Across the twentieth century there are fascinating examples where periodicity is deliberately activated aesthetically. Under normal bibliographic conventions the books produced by the Imagists shouldn’t fall into the magazine category but after the first volume, Des Imagistes (1914) the next two asserted that they were ‘an annual anthology’ (the 1915 and 1916 volumes). This simple apparently utilitarian phrase suggested at least two things — that this was a winnowed collection taking the best from the last year, and there would now be a reasonable expectation for successive annual volumes (as indeed there were, for a short time): this was a discerning movement that was here for the long term. Additionally this attuned the reader to the Imagists as a group operating within a recently established market of serial publication: anthologies of modern poetry. The annual Georgian poetry volumes which, despite their mixed posthumous reputation for luke-warm innovation, demonstrably trailblazed for the Imagists in genre terms; unlikely as it may seem, they were in one sense the avant-garde’s avant-garde.

Activated periodicity could have charm. The last issue of William Nicholson and Robert Graves’s The Owl, vol. 2, no. 3 issued in November 1923, is marked by a knowing and elegiac change of title to The Winter Owl — the time of issue, and the knowledge that it is the last issue, has bubbled over and transformed the magazine’s actual name. This is followed through in artistic direction: gone are the warm soft blush-red colours Nicholson had adopted for previous issues and instead here is something bluer, greyer. Reference to the seasonal captures a traditionalist perhaps pastoral aesthetic. It is a dignified, bittersweet farewell.

One much later magazine provides a final example of self-consciousness in periodicity. Strictly speaking Tom Clark’s Once only had one issue. Once had the subtitle a one-shot magazine, and though it was probably issued in 1965 was undated. After all, why would you date what you knew would be a one-off magazine? But the magazine was in fact resurrected, with its next reincarnation called Twice, which only appeared once, and that set the pattern for succeeding issues, though various creative flourishes added some teasing permutations: Thrice, Thrice and a 1/2 , Frice, Vice, Spice, Slice, Ice, Nice, Dice and, finally, Lice.

Success!

Little magazines are traditionally associated with ideas of marginality: political radicalism, support for one mi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Foreword
• Modern Lyric
• Making
• Poets, Artists, Lyricists
• Afterword
• Index