What is a poetry magazine for?

Or rather, for whom? A review of "The Poetry Review"

I was wondering this week why I almost never see reviews of literary magazines and poetry journals themselves. On the face of it, such reviews would be helpful, since magazines are the main venue in which poets publish new work for the first time, and there’s a bafflingly enormous number of them, both in print and (increasingly) online, each with their particular flavour. It’s also true that the smaller ones often only last for a few years, and the newest venues can be particularly energetic and original, so up-to-date information is especially useful.¹ So you’d think any enthusiastic reader of poetry — or, perhaps, school and university teachers looking to get a sense of what’s going on — would welcome both some sort of survey of what’s out there and periodic reviews of particular magazines. In practice, though, when I do occasionally see reviews or summaries of “lit mags”, they are almost always aimed at writers — i.e., those who might consider submitting their work — rather than potential readers: people who (dare I say it) might actually buy the thing.

Although recently I have started occasionally publishing poetry myself, for many years I was that apparently rare bird, the committed reader who had no intention of submitting anything, and I still subscribe to and read many literary magazines (both in French and English) to which I will certainly never contribute. Over the years I have subscribed for shorter or longer periods to a dozen or so, and bought regularly or occasionally (but without subscribing) perhaps another ten.²

So this week I thought I’d try out reviewing a poetry magazine, starting — because the most recent issue just reached me — with the biggest of the bunch for UK readers, The Poetry Review, published by the UK Poetry Society since 1912. All full members of the society receive the magazine as part of their subscription, though you can also buy it separately — and the Society itself confirms in its latest annual financial statement that The Poetry Review is the UK poetry magazine with the widest circulation.³

The Poetry Review publishes poems (obviously), plus a few reviews — typically five or six short review essays at the back of the issue, each looking at two or three collections one after another — and generally one or two related features, such as interviews or articles. The most recent issue, and the one I’m discussing here, is Volume 114, issue 1, Spring 2024. (You can see a list of the contents here.)

Like most readers, I’m sure, I don’t usually read magazines like this straight through with concerted attention, but this time, for fairness’ sake, I did. I enjoyed some of the pieces in this issue, but my strongest feeling — even as someone who is pretty up-to-date with Anglophone poetry — was of being somewhat shut out or talked across, with a hint of hectoring. I did not feel like the target audience, and sometimes felt actively excluded, even though I actually do belong to the Poetry Society, and have done for ages. Since the society states as its aim to ‘champion all types of poetry for audiences of all ages’ I thought this response was worth a bit of analysis. If I feel “talked over” by The Poetry Review, how would someone new to poetry feel?

Let’s start with the poems. The first three pieces in this issue are both in prose: that is, they are ‘prose poems’, not verse, a form which has a long history in French, but has remained more marginal in Anglophone poetry until fairly recently. Richard Siken’s two (‘Albondigas’ and ‘Mercy’), which open the issue, are fairly conventional prose poems in the modern English use of the term: presented as single paragraph suggestive anecdotes or recollections. They are both noticeably well-written and in both cases I found them more memorable than average. But let’s be clear: this is stylish short prose. A less experienced reader might be puzzled to find them in a poetry magazine at all.

The second contributor is Emily Berry, with an extract from My Mother-in-law’s Tongue, and other stories. Now it was my turn — rather than that of my imaginary “new” reader — to be puzzled. This seems to be just an extract from a straightforward work of fiction, or memoir, or something in between. I couldn’t work out what it was doing in Poetry Review. Similarly, the final poem included in this issue (before the section of reviews) is Rebecca Tamás’s Soul Curds (After Anne Carson). This is complete, rather than being an extract, but like the Berry piece it is a fairly long (four pages) and formally conventional piece of prose, combining what appears to be memoir with some thoughts on Simone Weil. It is well written, but I don’t think it’s particularly conservative of me to point that it’s not obviously a poem.⁴

These four pieces of prose, taken together, are by some margin the most accessible poems in this issue. In fact, I think a new reader would be forgiven for concluding that if you want to write a straightforward poem, which uses language in a fairly conventional way, or has any significant narrative content, then you do so in prose. Almost all the rest of the poems are more or less ‘difficult’: in almost all cases, either the form is very disruptive for the reader, or the meaning of the text is obscure, or (often) both. I enjoy a lot of difficult poetry and poetry which requires a great deal of explication (hello Pindar!) and that’s not to say there is not good writing here, but the majority of these poems are challenging to the reader in quite similar ways, so I also found the experience a bit “same-y”. Here are a few examples. The start of the second of Joelle Taylor’s dust kings. tough kids: a queer crown of sonnets:

we had nothing. & we shared it

a neat division of air, awoke spinning

on bar stools, or crawling from hedgerows

naked. we took these skins from shop windows

Or the start of Azad Ashim Sharma’s ‘Everyday Life Poem’:

Here, pain is a rich tapestry of historical subjectification

& more lines will flow as dysregulated animal sensoria

Or one of a sequence of poems by Sylvia Legris entitled ‘In the Wake of’, beginning

The post-sleep bowstroke fog

hammering midrange,

a surfaceless acoustic

postnasal turf,

the inward rummaging eyes.

‘Postnasal turf’ is a strikingly unpleasant expression, but forgive me for asking the naive question: what does it mean?

There are a few exceptions: Francisca Fernandez Arce’s ‘Roast’ — about a roast chicken, I assume, although chickens are not known for their song — is more simply written than most, and I found it quite arresting, though tonally hard to pin down (is it meant to be funny?) and a bit over-declarative with some slightly fuzzy metaphors. I thought it would be better if it was half as long. Here are its opening lines:

Listen. The bird dies in the ear.

Its song dies, lies still, in the mouth

like roots on winter soil. The bird

died when everyone else has gone,

when roast fills her nostrils,

when all hearths but one stand cold.

There’s a strong section in the middle of the issue, with two poems by D. A. Powell, two by Heather Christle and three by Imtiaz Dharker all of which I quite liked. (Dharker of course is a well-established poet, who certainly knows what she’s doing.) I think my favourite poem in the whole issue is this little epigram of hers, ‘The Weaver Makes a Pitch’:

This is the work of many hands.

It contains all of Paradise,

eaten by moths in one small corner.

For you, special price.

Several of the poems — and also two of the review essays — included in this issue confront directly the slaughter in Gaza, the theme around which the editor, Wayne Holloway-Smith, structures his brief and fragmentary editorial. This makes for a serious attempt to think about how art might confront atrocity, though it also makes it difficult, perhaps, to offer aesthetic judgements about the success of those poems themselves (is it OK to say that a poem about dead or suffering children is not a great poem?), and perhaps risks leaving the pieces which don’t touch upon this topic looking superficial by comparison. (Though, in fact, I thought that none of the best pieces in this particular issue were the most obviously topical.)

Towards the back of the issue are six review essays, each offering brief comments on two or three full collections (or, in the final essay, five pamphlets). The style and terms of these essays give a good overview of the preoccupations of the magazine: the framework in which the poetry is discussed is insistently morally, socially and politically serious, even moralising, with a particular focus on the expression of personal identity and experience. A diligent new reader of Poetry Review might conclude that these are the proper subjects for poetry, and the proper terms for its assessment. (Assessment meaning praise: there is almost no criticism here.) It also implies strongly that poetry is a serious matter, to be treated solemnly. (Though at this point I remember Dharker’s weaver: “For you, special price.”)

Sometimes the determination to be earnest seems to get in the way. In a review of Amy Acre’s Mothersong, Jennifer Wong says it is ‘impossible not to feel moved by this urgent plea of the woman’s voice’, which as a critical statement is a bit of a hostage to fortune. I didn’t find the passage quoted at this point moving at all, I found it (intentionally) vulgar, somewhat funny, certainly cringeworthy. These are quite powerful responses in a reader, but they relate to disgust, embarrassment and laughter rather than the more tender emotions usually implied by being ‘moved’. Here I felt a bit hectored, as if I were being told how to respond. (Though I also felt sympathy for the reviewers themselves — these very brief reviews of multiple volumes, often only vestigially related, are fearfully difficult to write, and Wong notes elsewhere that Acre’s book is ‘defiant’, ‘complex’ and even ‘shocking’, which, judging from the extract, seem like fair and useful terms.)

The reverence for authorial identity apparently does not extend to linguistic identity, however: three of the poems printed in this issue are translated into English from other languages, but nowhere are we told the languages they are translated from. This is peculiarly enraging, and plenty of other magazines — including PBLJ, Poetry London and PNReview as well of course as Modern Poetry in Translation — handle translations much better. It looks really silly to make a song and dance about anti-colonialism and cultural appropriation and then not tell readers what non-English language poems were actually written in. I hope Poetry Review sort this out.

The other response I mentioned at the start of this piece was feeling shut out: as if Poetry Review weren’t really addressing me, even though I’m a long-time subscriber and I read a great deal of poetry. This effect was most noticeable for me in the two ‘features’ included in this issue, even though I enjoyed reading both of them. Recently, Poetry Review has started running conversations or exchanges between two poets — the idea seems to be that the the two are exchanging ideas on a more equal basis than in a conventional interview. In this issue, the conversation (described as ‘an intertwined discussion’) is between Tishani Doshi and Safiya Kamaria Kinshasa. I always enjoy reading this kind of thing, though I do think there’s some loss of edge compared to the best interviews: the ‘mutual’ format means there’s a lot of polite flattery and congratulation which (let’s be honest) can be boring to read.⁵ As a result, the exchange takes a while to warm up and I learnt less about either than I did, for instance, from Timothy Green’s interview of Tishani Doshi which appeared in the Fall 2021 issue of Rattle. The most frustrating thing, though, is that this informal exchange was presented without any framing information whatsoever, and the two participants are not even included in the brief bio section at the back of the issue. Does the magazine assume that all its readers already know who both of these poets are, and what they do? Some details emerge from the conversation of course, but the informality means there’s not the same level of detail offered as in a more structured interview, in which an interviewer often summarises the work, or an aspect of it, as part of a question. And in any case, it feels a bit arrogant to expect the reader to embark upon the piece without any information offered as to why they might be interested.

I found a similar problem with the feature on a recently discovered early poem by Michael Donaghy, an American poet who settled in the UK and had a considerable influence on a particular generation of UK and (latterly also) American poets before his early death at 50 in 2004. Most people involved in UK poetry who are over, say, 40 will know Michael’s name, but I’m not sure that younger readers, or readers of any age who have a more casual interest would do so.

In this feature, four poets (Andrew Neilson, Moniza Alvi, Ali Lewis and Kayo Chingonyi) reflect briefly on this newly discovered poem, a manuscript copy of which is reproduced. All four are honest enough to acknowledge, though in different ways and to different extents, that it’s an interesting but overall not quite successful poem. As such, it’s not an enormously inviting way into Donaghy’s work. Alvi at least tries to point readers in her comments to where they should start if they are interested in reading more of him, but I wondered why this feature did not do much more of this — why not frame the muted virtues of this very early poem, for instance, by a discussion of the strengths of his mature verse, and print some examples? As it stands this, too, feels like a piece aimed at “insiders”: those who are already convinced that Donaghy is worth reading, ‘fans’ enough to be interested in some borderline juvenilia.

So on this showing, Poetry Review is a bit dour and cliquey. There is some good writing, both in prose and in the default form of serious, challenging free verse. But although there is some variety of style and form, there’s much less variety of tone, and the overall effect is somewhat monochrome. The reviews offer a taste of some recent collections and a chance to guess from a few quotations whether you’d agree with the chosen terms of praise. The longer features, in particular, feel positively ‘clubb-y’, addressed only to initiates: I didn’t feel entirely included or catered to by either, and I am hardly the greenest possible reader. This strikes me as odd for the UK poetry magazine with the largest single circulation and an official remit for outreach. Paradoxically, despite the emphasis upon diversity, this feels like a rather narrow version of contemporary English poetry and criticism — much more so, in fact, than I encounter even in other print magazines, such as PNR, PBLJ, Poetry London or The Dark Horse, let alone the huge range available online.

But as I noted at the outset, the world of poetry magazines is an enormous and diverse one, and perhaps it’s just time for me to swap out PR for something else. What are your favourites? Which do you subscribe to? Do contribute comments and reviews of your own, and if any particular consensus emerges I will edit accordingly.

1. It used to be the case that some of the largest bookshops — like the much-lamented Borders (where I discovered most American poetry for the first time), and, at least until fairly recently, Foyles in London — stocked quite a range of literary magazines. This meant that if you could get there, you could at least have a proper browse, but my impression is that even Foyles stocks many fewer these days than they used to.

2. Working from memory here, and setting aside French ones, I have or have had subscriptions to: The Dark Horse, PNReview, Agenda, 32 Poems, Poetry, Rattle, The Poetry Review, Poetry London, Poetry Birmingham Literary Journal and Modern Poetry in Translation as well as quite a large number of more general literary and cultural periodicals which publish poetry and reviews of poetry, including the TLS, LRB, NYRB, LARB, Spectator, New Statesman etc. Magazines I have bought either regularly or occasionally, but without (as far as I can remember) ever subscribing include The North, Ambit, The Stinging Fly, Magma, Butcher’s Dog, The London Magazine, Mslexia, Oxford Poetry, The Rialto. Online magazines which I look at at least somewhat frequently include Anthropocene, The Friday Poem, bad lilies, Black Iris, The Brazen Head, The Interpreter’s House, Wild Court and berlin lit.

3. For financial year 2022-2023 it reports a subscription circulation of just over 5,000 copies, made up of about 4,500 full members of the society (who receive the review as part of their membership) and a further c.500 individuals who subscribe to the review only. Presumably they also sell a few copies to non-subscribers, but probably not a very large number.

4. There’s also one very unfortunate (I take it) typo on p. 87, where the text reads ‘kickers’ where it should (I assume) read ‘knickers’. Mostly, however, the typographical quality of the Poetry Review is very good.

5. An interesting earlier piece in this sequence, an email conversation ‘across the generations’ between Don Paterson and Gboyega Odubanjo appeared in Poetry Review last year, not long before Odubanjo very sadly died prematurely. This was a more engaging version of the form, partly I think because the exchange was quite prickly on both sides, with an early edge of actual hostility which softened into some respect, if not perhaps understanding.