Introduction

1. DEFINITIONS

The Little Magazine is not difficult to define: it is an anthology of work by strangers; an anthology of work by friends; an exhibition catalogue without the existence of the exhibition; a series of manifestos; a series of anti-manifestos... It's printed by photo-litho; or typed onto a mimeograph stencil... It's a twenty-year sequence; or it turns out to be a one-off.

Its history is unproblematic. Certainly it is associated with artistic movements such as the Pre-Raphaelites, whose The Germ flourished briefly in the middle of the nineteenth century, or the Votricists, whose Blast, first published in 1914, inaugurates the period of this book. But the chapbooks of songs, ballads, and tales sold in earlier centuries may claim ancestor status, as might manuscript copies of poems distributed among a select few. Though the little magazine is probably called "little" because of the comparatively low numbers made of any given issue, larger circulation literary journals published commercially have influenced the little magazine (and vice versa), and it can be difficult to say where a little magazine stops and a more commercial literary journal starts. It is also not easy to ascertain the circulation figures for either kind of publication.

Faced with these definitional complexities, the compilers of an annotated bibliography and union catalogue of little magazines might best describe the little magazine in terms ofindividual characteristics, some of which need to be present in any given magazine to qualify for its inclusion, and some of which, if not necessary to the definition, give a better sense of the rarer, "classic", little magazine.

For the purposes of this book, with its specific focus on poetry, the little magazine can be very broadly defined as a publication that contains or concerns itself with poetry (which may mean an absence of poetry itself, if the prose or artwork has a strong connection to poetry)

and
is intended to last more than one issue (although many little magazines are not successful in that ambition, and we have included some deliberate one-offs)

and
is published on a non-commercial basis (although we have included some magazines that aspired to commercial success and even some which appear to have achieved it)

and
has the explicit or implicit intention to assert its contents' difference, be it formally, regionally, ethnically or otherwise, from a poetry 'norm', 'centre', or 'establishment' (although we have also included magazines whose distance from a notional norm is difficult to measure).

This last element elides identity politics with poetics; it is in poetics that the "classic" element of the little magazine is encountered. A classic little magazine, in the view of the present authors, publishes the work of a group of artists or writers who assert themselves as a group (e.g. the Surrealist Group of England's publication of The International Surrealist Bulletin in the mid Thirties)

and/or
work that is singular and independent of any specific group or movement

and/or
work that explicitly or implicitly asks to be measured in relation to the originality of its forms, either by offering the work as innovative, for example Kingdom Come's championing of the New Apocalyptic poets during the Second World War, or, on the contrary, by taking issue with the work of the formally novel and asserting traditional forms instead (a stance taken by The Dark Horse, a magazine begun in 1995 and still extant)

and/or
work within notionally hybrid genres, such as And's visual poetry, Kroklok's sound poetry, or the prose poem

and/or
work deriving from and/or circulating to a small number of artists and writers (e.g. Robert Sheppard's Pages, published between 1987-1998, though later published on the Web), serving to maintain a kind of magazine-enabled community, keeping the individuals abreast of each other's work and providing other forms of friendly interchange, such as wider literary information

and/or
work that suggests a self-conscious sense of the physical and graphic design of the magazine as being in tune with the content, be it the futurist-like cover to Irish modernist The Klaxon (1923) or the pre-Punk do-it-yourself attitude of "bag mags", where different pages made by different authors are simply arranged in a bag (the last issue, in 1970, of The Black Country Meat Chronicle was in this form)

and/or
strong assertions—artistic, literary and political views—perhaps even to the point of exaggeration, unfairness, and even vituperation (Blast is perhaps the best example of this)

and/or
work that displays an engaged awareness of literary and artistic movements abroad, whether that be the American avant-garde in Peter Manson and Robin Purves's Object Permanence (1994-1997), or the translation of European authors in Lee Harwood's Soho (1964)

and/or
work that, simply, as time has gone by, has proven to be influential.

2. LITTLE MAGAZINES AS A RESOURCE FOR LITERARY HISTORY

A detailed history of the modern British little magazine has yet to be written, but it is hoped that this book and the key texts mentioned in the How To Use This Book chapter, cited throughout, form the building blocks with which to begin to construct such a history.

But why are little magazines worthy of such treatment at all?

One answer to this question is that work published in the little
magazine is often that much closer to the original creative process than the version of the work that is later, in the process of being collected for a volume of poems, a novel, or book of essays, afforded more time for reflection and revision. Of course, it may not be collected in a later publication at all.

Little magazines are the first place of publication for many authors later felt to be significant. As documented here, Norman McCaig's first poems appeared in the 1930S and 40s, but his wider reputation would only be formed a decade or so later, by which time he had repudiated his earliest work. One of Basil Bunting's earliest appearances was as a reviewer of Conrad in the 1924 magazine The Transatlantic Review, but his rediscovery, and the publication of Briggflatts, took place in the 1960s (in part associated with the rise of a flourishing little magazine scene).

Perhaps because of the language-saturated qualities of poetry, and the dominance of poetry within little magazines, authors who begin their early careers with poems may go onto find a quite different literary form more suited to them. The playwright Harold Pinter and the novelist Ian Rankin, for example, each tried poetry before they had successes in the genre for which they would find renown.

Little magazines are also a marker of milieu. For instance, a survey of literary taste for any particular period can be made by analysing who was or was not published where, a process which tests under the pressure of evidence later assertions and remembrances of movements and schools. If there was an Auden Generation, did the poets concerned tend to be published in particular places? If they did, were there poets who specifically weren't published in those magazines? Were there particular magazines for that grouping? And so on.

Other literary trends can be looked at empirically via the little magazine, too. Translation, for instance. Translations which might never find book publication nevertheless may educate and inspire the little magazine readership (which is likely to contain a high proportion of writers, thus making a real impact on homegrown literatures). In looking at publication patterns the measure of engagement with a specific literary culture from overseas can be gauged, for instance the rise of East European translation in the latter half of the century. As our survey shows, the modern British little magazine has been both a landbridge and a landing strip for creative work from Europe and the Americas.

These reasons, and no doubt many others of the kind, make the little magazine, as a key node in any literary infrastructure, worthy of collection and study. A library that houses and develops a little magazines collection is an immense resource for biographer and literary historian, allowing the exploration of not just the early thoughts, experiments, and impetuosities of particular authors but of broader literary trends and debate as well.

The little magazine is not only of interest, however, as a seed nursery for emerging authors before they are transplanted into celebrity. Major writers, for instance, have found actually editing a little magazine to be fundamental to their artistic practice for a significant part of their creative life, a pattern than can be seen in Wyndham Lewis, Hugh MacDiarmid, Laura Riding, Lee Harwood and Ian Hamilton Finlay. The literary magazine is, we would argue, a kind of artistic form in itself. The art of the editor is always a collaborative, commissioning but coercive art, like the art of a film director; like the exhibition curator, the editor has to decide what works will be presented, and what context will be provided in that presentation; the physical appearance of a magazine means that it has its own visual rules to play within or to subvert.

Perhaps the central importance oflittle magazines, however, is that they represent the ongoing, contemporary presentation and dissemination of the most innovative and exploratory writing of the day. Indeed, many significant writers continue to contribute to magazines long after they have become famous, finding this form of publication sympathetic to the experimental spirit of their art. James Joyce's continued publication in little magazines is one such case, with his final work, Finnegans Wake, appearing serially in transition. Readers and literary historians can also recover work that has been hitherto neglected but which, with the passage of time, emerges with renewed significance. Of course, very few little magazines achieve the greatness of the form at its best, but we hope that this book will be a first guide to the British little magazines that have tried.