PN Review Online - About PNR

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For thirty years, PNR has been the premier British poetry journal. Its coverage is broad and generous: from John Ashbery to new young English poets, from essays on Continental poetics and fiction to reviews of neglected poets both living and dead. At a time when poetry is largely neglected, PNR continues to make an eloquent case for its centrality to our culture.

Marjorie Perloff

About PNR

Poetry Nation 1

Charles: Belinda, dear, have you seen my Craig Raine?
Belinda: Oh, I expect Zoë has it. I remember her saying at breakfast how perfectly ludic it was.
Jeremy: I don't think she has, Mummy, she's in her room, listening to her Brian Ferneyhough records.
Charles: It's a bit much when you can't put a slim volume down without it sprouting legs. I can't even find my Poetry Nation Review -- there was an editorial I wanted to read attacking the Arts Council.
Jeremy: Don't they get an Arts Council grant, Daddy?
Belinda: Oh, darling, I'm afraid I used it to line the cutlery drawer with!
Nicholas MurrayNew Statesman Weekend Competition 11 Feb 1983

History

Launched as Poetry Nation, a twice-yearly hardback, in 1973, PN Review -- now an A4 paperback -- began quarterly publication in 1976 and has appeared six times a year since 1981 (PN Review 21). 172 issue of the magazine have now appeared. It is currently published from the Department of English, University of Glasgow.

Each issue includes an editorial, letters, news and notes, articles, interviews, features, poems, translations, and a substantial book review section.

Poetry Nation was founded by Michael Schmidt and Professor Brian Cox at the Victoria University of Manchester. When it went quarterly, the title changed to PN Review and Cox and Schmidt were joined on the editorial board by Professor Donald Davie and C.H. Sisson. Brian Cox retired, followed some years later by Donald Davie and C.H. Sisson, since when the magazine has been under the General Editorship of Michael Schmidt.

'The offices of Carcanet Press and of PN Review were destroyed in the Manchester bomb of 15 June and only a portion of their records has been recovered...' Independent

The Corn Exchange Dome after the bomb PNR has suffered a number of physical setbacks, most notable among them the Manchester Bomb of 1996. Ten years later it celebrated its thirtieth anniversary.

'It has [...] attempted to take poetry out of the backwaters of intellectual life and to find in it again the crucial index of cultural health. In so doing it has often succeeded in broadening the horizons of our view of twentieth-century poetry and in encouraging poets to be ambitious about their concerns.' Cairns Craig Times Literary Supplement

PNR contributors include

Tatamkhulu Africa -- John Ash -- John Ashbery -- George Barker -- Patricia Beer -- Sujata Bhatt -- Caroline Bird -- Eavan Boland -- Alison Brackenbury -- Anne Carson -- Paul Celan -- Gillian Clarke -- Mark Doty -- D.J. Enright -- Elaine Feinstein -- Lorna Goodison -- W.S. Graham -- Durs Grunbein -- Thom Gunn -- Sophie Hannah -- Marilyn Hacker -- Seamus Heaney -- John Heath-Stubbs -- Michael Hofmann -- Mimi Khalvati -- Thomas Kinsella -- Kenneth Koch -- Marius Kociejowski -- Gunter Kunert -- R.F. Langley -- Gwyneth Lewis -- Dulce Maria Loynaz -- Carola Luther -- Patrick McGuinness -- Bill Manhire -- Christopher Middleton -- Robert -- Minhinnick -- Dom Moraes -- Edwin Morgan -- Sinead Morrissey -- Andrew Motion -- Paul Muldoon -- Les Murray -- Michael Palmer -- Pier Paolo Pasolini -- Octavio Paz -- John Peck -- Robert Pinsky -- Joachim Sartorius -- Peter Scupham -- C.H. Sisson -- Iain Crichton Smith -- Charles Tomlinson -- Jeffrey Wainwright -- Robert Wells -- Matthew Welton -- Gregory Woods -- Jane Yeh

What other editors have said:

'...probably the most informative and entertaining poetry journal in the English-speaking world.' John Ashbery, Executive Editor, Art News

'The most important journal concerned with poetry, [it] is gaining its proper recognition, surrounding its admirably intellectual criticism with an even richer spread of actual poems.' Marilyn Butler, Editorial Board, Women: a cultural review

'... the cleverest of the current poetry magazines' Ian Hamilton, editor of the review and The New Review

'...worthy of careful reading and digestion, [...] with new poetry, translations, interviews and critical essays. A little daunting for the common reader, perhaps, but there are serious and intelligent minds behind it.' John Lehmann, editor of the London Magazine and Penguin New Writing 1946-1950

'Your magazine is excellent.' Octavio Paz, editor of Plural and Vuelta

'For thirty years, [it] has been the premier British poetry journal. Its coverage is broad and generous: from John Ashbery to new young English poets, from essays on Continental poetics and fiction to reviews of neglected poets both living and dead. At a time when poetry is largely neglected, [it] continues to make an eloquent case for its centrality to our culture.' Marjorie Perloff, Advisory Editor, American Poetry Review, Contemporary Literature, Oxford Poetry Review, Paideuma, Sulfur; Editorial Board, Modern Language Quarterly, Modernism/Modernity

'It would be fine to have a cultural revival based on Manchester instead of Oxbridge...' Edgell Rickword, editor Calendar of Modern Letters, Left Review, Scrutinies, Our Time

'...high-toned but bracing' Boyd Tonkin, Books Editor, Independent

...its elevated stroppiness of tone and a sense of breaking new ground that I haven't come across for some time' W.L. Webb, literary editor, Guardian

PN Review 170 The editorial in PNR 170 tells the story in greater detail:

As PN Review marks its thirtieth birthday with this issue, we salute the anniversary of an even longer-lived journal, Saint Botolph's Review . Its first issue appeared half a century ago and all its original contributors apart from Ted Hughes are still alive. At the 1956 launch party in Cambridge Ted Hughes first met Sylvia Plath. Saint Botolph's Review describes itself as 'an occasional journal': the 2006 issue is number 2. The original contributors are represented, Hughes in ghostly form. May the whirligig of time bring round a third fascinating issue.

It is strange to look back from the vantage of thirty years to where PN Review started, and wonder at the chanciness not only of its survival (it is a decade since the Manchester bomb destroyed our Corn Exchange offices and much of our history) but also of its sparring and feinting editorial stances, its alternations of stress and focus.

In the three years between the publication of Poetry Nation I (1973) and PN Review 1 (1976) something like an editorial, design and production revolution took place. Poetry Nation in its durable demy-octavo hardcover binding was set in hot metal by Mackay's of Chatham, at the time a fine book printers. Issue I opened with an elegy by Charles Tomlinson, 'The Way In', later title poem of a fine collection, in which he laments the depredations of the developers as he drives into a Bristol made unfamiliar by 'a future' which 'seethes/As if it had waited in the crevices'. The first 48 pages are given over to poems, with substantial work by, among others, Peter Huchel, Douglas Dunn, Fleur Adcock, and C.H. Sisson's great poem, 'The Usk'.

There follows a symposium in which the editor (the same editor who writes this) contends with the Partisan Review, with English and American experimental writing, and seems to propose something like a New Formalism as a radical, even a Marxising antidote to the excesses of experiment and the aftermaths of modernism which trouble him. He sees Poetry Nation as a journal of the left. His declaration is followed by suggestive demurring comments from Donald Davie; a densely argued clarification by Terry Eagleton (who was the editor's tutor at university), 'Marxism and Form'; an essay on the poetry of the Viet Nam conflict by Robert B. Shaw (an American poet still woefully undervalued), and a remarkable interview with that first great English Marxist editor Edgell Rickword, a neglected poet too. Adrian Stokes's essay 'Psycho-analysis and Our Culture' first appeared in that issue (he had died the year before), James Atlas's thoughts on translation, and Damian Grant's seminal essay on John Montague, Seamus Heaney and Paul Muldoon. It was a rich profusion, and confusion of themes, inherences and generations. The Guardian called it a thrust from the cultural right, which seemed at the time like a deliberate misreading. Then it was pointed out that the title included the word Nation, a term whose toxicity in the European context at the time put it beyond polite use. The intention had been to evoke a republic rather than a tyranny of letters. 'Poetry Nation' was abbreviated to 'PN', in the spirit of TP's Weekly, T.P. O'Connor's tabloid (1923-1929), which reprinted material but also launched authors and was associated with Algernon Blackwood, Arthur Machen and Oliver Onions.

PN Review 111 1976: PN Review availed itself of new technology. An IBM golf-ball composing machine required the general editor to typeset this and the next fifty issues himself, stripping in corrections with cow gum. Adopting its floppy A4 format, this was indeed a magazine which decisively displaced the anthology. It had an urgency about it, the aesthetic preoccupations of Poetry Nation giving way to no-nonsense thrift. PNR now boasted not two but four editors: C.B. Cox and I were joined by Donald Davie and C.H. Sisson, both regular contributors to the hardback journal.

'...as poets ourselves, my fellow editors and I would want to deny that poetry is necessarily a specialised interest. [...] PNR aims to combine "serious literary and cultural criticism with essays on contemporary political and social theses'. And we think we have shown that such a combination is still possible.' Donald Davie, letter to The Times

That first issue began, as every issue since has done, with an editorial. Octavio Paz, a great editor, critic and poet, becomes a central figure, and his view that a crucial tasks of criticism is to clear creative space was embraced, along with a firm commitment to translation. The final paragraph of that first editorial in PN Review 1 was drafted by the four editors (the only time that all spoke with a single voice): 'A belief in the centrality of the creative imagination and of the critical intelligence has impelled us to increase Poetry Nation , to turn it into something of a glass house, tempting to stone-throwers. We wish to give play [...] to the sort of intelligence for which poetry is an intellectual value.' That mad collocation of poetry alongside the words 'intellectual' and 'value'! What language was this?

'I have a job in Lewis's and my co-workers and I all read your new magazine PN Review. We all think it is ever such good fun and we are so tired of all the usual sorts of magazines like Jackie and Darling. We all read it during the lunch breaks as I have said, and I have written some poems myself.' Geraldine Moped (Edwin Morgan)

PN Review no longer segregated poetry and prose. It mixed them. Octavio Paz's great essay on Solzhenitsyn took pride of place, then a substantial essay on Karl Kraus, whose writings Carcanet was just bringing into print in Britain. Calvin Bedient contributed an essay on Thomas Kinsella, Geoffrey Hill, W.S. Graham (a key poetry contributor to the magazine) and Ted Hughes, and a chapter of what would become Blake Morrison's book on The Movement was included, along with an assessment of the politics of Wyndham Lewis and C.H. Sisson's essay on Charles Maurras which lead to a virulent controversy with Stand magazine. A review of Sylvia Plath's Letters Home resulted in the first threat of a libel action against the magazine.

Through all its twists and turns, responding to social, technological and cultural change, PN Review has stayed the course. How much longer can that course be? While writers of moment, poets and critics, essayists and memoirists, and of course readers, keep finding their way to the glass house, and people keep throwing stones, it will have a place. Another thirty issues, perhaps?