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As part of our 70th birthday celebrations we're continuing with our series of Top Ten lists, chosen by the library team with the aim of helping you discover more from the collection. This time we're focussing on poetry magazines that the library has been involved with over the past 70 years. Chosen by Russell Thompson, Library Assistant.
Encounter, Issue 3, Dec 1953
Which magazines were launched in the same year as the National Poetry Library? Encounter was one. We haven’t got the first issue (if you do, consider a bequest), but do we have this one, which includes an obituary for Dylan Thomas and an article on ‘English Ideas About Sex’.
Poetry Review, Volume 79 (1), Spring 1989
When we moved to the Southbank Centre, we made the cover of what is arguably the principal printed organ of UK poetry. Thirty-five years on, our rolling-stack shelves are still beloved by all child visitors (never mind the books, just whirl those handles) and that iconic RFH carpet continues to hold its own.
Grille, Issue 1, Spring 1992
This was edited by Simon Smith, who’d just started working for the National Poetry Library (he rose to be its head honcho from 2003 to 2007). It’s a classic piece of no-frills desktop publishing, its first page encouraging readers to submit ‘reactions and polemics’ for a future letters page. It lasted for three issues.
Poetry Digest, Issue 3, Mar 2012
We don’t actually have a copy of this, for obvious reasons (weevils), but the world’s first edible poetry magazine was produced by two more NPL employees, Chrissy Williams and Swithun Cooper. For this issue, the poems were printed onto fairy cakes, but for a later one it was apples. Tasty.
Modern Poetry in Translation, Volume 3 (17), 2012
This celebrates Poetry Parnassus, a Cultural Olympiad project that sought to locate a poet from every Olympic nation and bring them to the Southbank Centre. Journalistic cliché may suggest that the next sentence ought to be ‘What could possibly go wrong?’ – but in fact it all went swimmingly.
It’s A Strange Kind of Postmodern, 2012
Busy year, 2012. In this case we were celebrating a century of items in our collection, as we theoretically stock poetry published from 1912 onwards (date of the first Georgian Poetry anthology). This gem of a zine was created then and there, at the library itself, by the Ladies Of The Press collective.
Clunch, Issue 2, Jan 1978
Included just because it has a brilliant cover. Imagine the illustrator’s brief: ‘OK, we want three women, one dressed like Raquel Welch in One Million Years BC, but with the head of a crocodile. And one of the others with an ocelot’s body. Oh, and can you get a butterfly and a tank in there too, please? Yes, by tomorrow.’
We also have a room crammed with press cuttings, not just about ourselves, but about poets and poetic topics. The library itself has always been good fodder for magazine articles of the ‘Wow – can you believe there’s a poetry library in London?!’ variety. A random example is
Christian Woman, Jan 1991, which compares our then librarian, Mary Enright, to the Dark Lady of the Sonnets, and captures the moment when an 11-year-old is trying to get her father away from the library: ‘We mustn’t get caught in the rush hour …You’ve got a Neighbourhood Watch meeting at seven o’clock.’ Kids, eh?
T’Art, Issue 6, Dec 2023
This is one of a new crop of independently produced, lavishly printed magazines whose visual awareness is transforming our shelves into a riot of colour. And the writing’s not bad either. This issue includes a poem by one of our current library assistants, Troy Cabida (definitely one to watch, as they say).
And finally, as this post spirals away into nothingness like the water down a plughole, what must surely be the smallest magazine currently gracing the shelves:
Aswirl (The Minimal Quarterly), Issue 1, Spring 2023: A7 format (half-postcard) and, in its own words, ‘a quarterly zine celebrating brevity … because small things make a big difference’. And so say all of us. Hand author’s own.
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