PN Review 200th Issue Celebrations!

All are invited to the International Anthony Burgess Foundation in Manchester from 5.30pm on Thursday 8th September for wine, discussion and debate to celebrate the 200th issue of the UK's leading poetry magazine, PN Review. The evening will include a lecture by Booker-prize longlisted author (and New Poetries II contributor!) Patrick McGuinness, who will discuss Donald Davie and the history of PN Review. This will be followed by The New Editors' Forum: a discussion about the future of poetry magazine publishing, chaired by John McAuliffe (Manchester Review) and featuring panel members Rory Waterman (New Walk magazine), Carol Rumens (the Guardian) and James Byrne (The Wolf). There will also be a poetry reading by Tara Bergin and Jeffrey Wainwright. 

PN Review, the outstanding poetry magazine of our time, was founded in 1976 as Poetry Nation by Michael Schmidt and Brian Cox. The complete PN Review digital archive was launched in January. This vast online resource, spanning four decades of literary writing, can be accessed at www.pnreview.co.uk.

Michael Schmidt on 'Classics'

The word 'classic' has specific meanings and implications, none of them to do primarily with popularity or range of appeal. Penguin Classics come close to the present in the work they include but in general acknowledge that a classic has already endured; a text can only become classic when it is stable, that is, when the author is no longer there to alter it. It would have strained the classic category had Robert Lowell, reviser par excellence, or David Jones, or W.H. Auden been admitted in their lifetimes. A living classic is put to death as soon as classic status is conferred. The text is set in stone. Several generations of schoolchildren read selections of Ted Hughes and Thom Gunn and never had an inkling that Crow or Moly had occurred. Both poets stayed in the happy time-warp of their late twenties for decades, and they weren't even called Classics, though 'set text' is the next category down.

from New Poetries III © Michael Schmidt

Michael Schmidt on 'Voice'

'Teachers and critics talk about ‘voice’, not as an instrument with which a man might, in Wordsworth’s phrase, speak to men, but as an individuating medium, defined by its inflections and distinguishing mannerisms. The poem performs some kind of self, but being performative it is also ironic and the real self is withheld. Anecdote (dignified as ‘narrative’) displaces complex form, and the poem builds towards that audible point of (Larkin’s term) ‘lift-off’ when the audience, if there is an audience, is conditioned to respond with the ‘ooo’ or ‘aaa’ and the intake of breath. A palpable hit. Such poems are shy of abstractions, of the ‘sensuous cerebration’ that Charles Tomlinson admires in the French, of the demands of traditional form and what can be done with it and experimentally against it. Ezra Pound’s ‘Go in fear of abstractions’ has become a commandment that the obedient – obey. They go in fear, and one thing they fear is the long poem in which ‘voice’ is soon exhausted and other resources are required.'

from New Poetries V © Michael Schmidt

Welcome to New Poetries

 
In the wet Manchester May of 1994, Carcanet published the first of its now five-volume New Poetries anthologies, Maurice Tempelsman read Cavafy's 'Ithaka' at Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis's funeral, and movie-goers first heard John Hannah read Auden's 'Funeral Blues' in Four Weddings and a Funeral. That same year, Paul Muldoon's The Annals of Chile appeared from Faber, going on to win the T.S. Eliot Prize, and Coach House Books published Christian Bök's Crystallography, a warning bell that signalled the arrival of conceptual poetry. In the autumn, there were films about poets, Alan Rudolph's Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle, and Michael Radford's Il Postino. This was in the years between Walcott's and Heaney's winning of the Nobel Prize for Literature -- the last major poets to do so. And poetry itself was in the middle of something: it was selling, it was in the movies, there was product (Muldoon) and counterproduct (Bök).

Much of what was happening in 1994 continues today: for better or worse, poets are still at the cinema -- Plath (2003), Bright Star (2009), Howl (2010) -- and have even started popping up in fiction -- Bolaño's The Savage Detectives (2007) and Nicholson Baker's The Anthologist (2009); Muldoon is amid the most influential poets of his generation, and, to a very different generation, so is Bök. In the middle of all this the latest New Poetries arrives.

Over the past seventeen years, Carcanet's New Poetries anthologies have introduced some sixty poets to readers, 'published from Britain, [providing] a vista across a worldscape from a fixed point'. This blog is dedicated to the difference and variety of the New Poetries anthologies, to 'the irreducible plural of the title'. We hope readers will find here some thoughtful discussion on the workings of poetry, and ideas about and around the writing of poetry today.

Evan Jones