Poésie sans frontières

Michael Schmidt on what a poetry magazine must do to survive

Saturday July 15, 2006
The Guardian

PN Review, the political wing of Carcanet Press, says Simon Armitage, "is the most engaged, challenging and serious-minded of all the UK's poetry magazines". That hedge of well-meaning adjectives contains barbed wire: where is the jouissance, the seductive pleasure?

Where indeed in the independent "little" literary magazines does the pleasure lie? The exercise of judgment, the settling of scores, the advocacy or the pillorying of the new: each magazine has an area of rhetorical specialism, a politics, and advances or counters the interests of a movement or a generation. In the past three decades, which magazines have made a substantial mark, a difference, a contribution?[más]