Hi Bill,

thanks for raising the issue of the readership implication discrepancies so
clearly.

Well, no thanks in a way. It's a damp room to revisit but as you rightly
say, has become pivotal to revisionist historical accounts of a certain
'fall from grace' and the wake that dogs certain of us.

I have some small chips to throw into the fat. I'd also prefer to see the
argument that Andrew Duncan wields in full, or even a sizeable chunk lifted
here onto the list. But presuming that can't happen with undue haste, I can
add a nugget of personal remembrance (this being a season for that).
Andrrew is not going to walk away from this scene of carnage, as he
appears, from his articles, to feel that a great betrayal of promise
occured, not by those who set out to quash the direction in which the
Poetrry Society was heading but by those who brought it to that point.

I was, as a young poet, eager but green in respect of the subtleties of
state funding and of internescine poetry politics, and somewhat at your own
bidding as you might recall (and I thank you for that generosity of
spirit), the Printshop Manager at the Poetry Society during part of that
time when production of the Poetry Review was brought into the building and
under the direct control of the Council. It strikes me still, in the most
positive sense, as a classic case of taking control of the means of
production. And of extending the same to a great many others. Working,
closely alongside Bob Cobbing and yourself and Lawrence Upton (who set up
and ran the incipient bookshop there). I'd done a bit of printing,
letterpress stuff before that. I do remember a lock-in at the Earls Court
basement with a manual and a brand new Offset Lithography machine, trying
to get paper to make a successful passage from the feed to the delivery
trays respectively. I remember that we had training in compositing and
binding and platemaking and the like.

There was already a basic printshop up and running, using the duplicators
and electronic scanner that had been so well developed as a writing tool in
its own right by Bob Cobbing. The entrance of the litho machine into this
provision was though significant. At one point we had up to forty books
being produced through the printshop in a single month. Admittedly many of
those were slim volumes. It was certainly a mixed grill of productions.
Many poets learned to print and to make books there for the first time.
Many poets started their own presses out of that building. Not that there
is anything necessarily good about that other than the understanding of
book production coming to inform the writing, a direction we certainly
encouraged in terms of book formats and sizes and textual design and such
like.

The first issue of Poetry Review that Bob and myself printed was Volume 66
Number 1, 1975. It's priced on the cover at 40 pence (so placing that
alongside the relevant sales figures you provided gives some measure of the
print run, although my memory and what a fickle and abject beast it can
become is of 2000 copies) and was the first issue to adopt the enlarged
format (A4) which, and I quote from Eric Mottram's editorial note:

'it is hoped will better accomodate the spatial forms of the wide variety
of poems in today's poetry scene.'

The final para of Eric's editorial shows the full mettle of his stance
though, also the nettle that those who grew openly hostile to finally
grasped.

'It [Poetry Review] simply takes a modest place among many magazines now
circulating. (Anyone with an ounce of talent can be published today: being
published simply means that someone encourages you work). Poetry Review
tries to publish new work which shows quality and courage, and hopes to for
poetry a fraction of what, for example, William Glock did for cotemporary
music at the BBC. I has registered major changes in British poetry since
the 1960s, and it publishes against the false idea that poetry is primarily
inherited, imitated and accepted forms in prosody and subject materials. It
does not believe that poetry should necessarily communicate with the
rapidity expected by the consumer of cigarettes, aspirin, newspaper print,
or verses at the bottom of a column in a posh weekly or after the news on
BBC2. Poetry is not recognition patterns within a spectator-consumer
society, but, rather, language which activates imagination and surprises
the reader into new abilities. Therefore Poetry Review has not expected to
please the casual reader who is tempted to identify value with his own
tastes. In British poetry today there is no mainstream middle of the road
established kind of taste, except in the murderous dreams of censors and
government financial controllers. Our best poetry is part of an
international health of poetry which takes forms the artsist need.'

You can see, from looking at this volume that we were still learning how to
use offset litho well. Numbers 3 and 4 and Volume 67 numbers 1 and 2 show
strong improvements certainly. But 'production values' did impact on the
festering wounds that the various activities and proclivities embodied by
the council in 1976 had already opened. Issues of 'production value' and
'quality of delivery' were sticks to beat the council with. They concealed
that it was rather a glutinous morass, of being spotted as 'financial
controllers', 'censors' and 'quality controllers' in advance that brought
the heavy mob into town for the final shootout. My sense is that the
Thatcher backlash came early here, shows its incipient horns. Little
England came home to crow.

Of course the reticence and pomposity of those who sought to root out
funding for writing from the public funding system altogether, and to do so
from within, as Charles Osborne had openly admitted, contributed massively
to the maelstrom. There was dry rot in the Earls Court basement, the
building badly needed capital investment and revenue funding to extend the
extraordinary range of activities that it sustained on a G string. But this
was also the time of Callaghan's gathering debacle with the unions, and of
punk. Perhaps we shouldn't underestimate the extent to which what was
emerging from the printshop was a punk publishing aesthetic (one which I
wholeheartedly encouraged!).

A remaining irony is the extent to which D.I.Y blossomed during the
Thatcher era.

hope this helps

love and love
cris







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