PNR Robyn Marsack Like Brighton rock, the name MICHAEL SCHMIDT is embedded in PNR whenever you bite it. The name is the quality mark, from the editorial in issue 2 of Poetry Nation, in 1974 (his name was absent from no. 1), to issue 271 of PNR in 2023. Issue 6 in 1976 announces a new format, new frequency and that ‘we’ will be joined by new editors, Donald Davie and C.H. Sisson: the editorials will be ‘unsigned’. So in 1977 there is a whole new gang: the General Editor, the new editors plus Brian Cox, James Atlas as American Editor and Val Warner as Assistant Editor. Soon the editors decide to sign their editorials, taking it in turn to lay down gauntlets. In 1979 the trio of Schmidt, always the General, Davie and Sisson are unsupported for a while; co-ordinating editors come and go throughout the magazine’s history. The editorial that caught my eye in the Archive is Sisson’s from 5:5: ‘One of my worries about this magazine is that it is not doing enough for the suppression of what is called poetry’ ... read more

Silis MacLeod ‘Deep in the forest a call was sounding, and as often as he heard this call, mysteriously thrilling and luring, he felt compelled to turn his back upon the fire and the beaten earth around it, and to plunge into the forest, and on and on, he knew not where or why; nor did he wonder where or why, the call sounding imperiously, deep in the forest.’ – Jack London, The Call of the Wild
Often called ‘Europe’s Last Great Wilderness’, Highland Scotland holds great emotive power for those who know it well as much as for those who do not. We have a strong impression of the place: its mountains, lochs, coasts, the bothies. One of the most iconic images of the Highlands must be that postcard scene of a sloping hillside above a sea loch, on which is perched a small, whitewashed cottage with a red ... read more

Judith Bishop I

Was the Death of the Author, announced by Roland Barthes in 1967, an ‘accident’ of thinking? Like, or unlike, the swipe of the laundry truck that killed the writer one morning in the Quartier Latin – écrasé, crushed – a brutal word, close to erase – shutting down the body of a singular man who, later in life, had fallen in love with his own human singularity?

‘What did you do, Ray? Aw, shit...’ – Dr Peter Venkman to Dr Raymond Stantz, Ghostbusters (1984)

Camera Lucida, Barthes’s most poignant work, had appeared in 1980. In 1981, Yves Bonnefoy, whose work exudes a grave vitality very different from Barthes’s, was elected to the Chair at the Collège de France left open by the latter’s death in 1980. I was first attracted to Bonnefoy’s work by a poem about a lizard on ... read more