18 - Phoenix or dead crow? Irish and Scottish poetry magazines, 1945–2000

Summary

In 1930 Ezra Pound called T. S. Eliot's Criterion ‘a diet of dead crow’. Phoenix was a 1960s poetry magazine edited by Harry Chambers, first in Liverpool, finally in Manchester, most significantly in Belfast. Literary magazines attract metaphors of birth, death and biorhythms. To quote Robin Fulton: ‘Some dull magazines have survived for a long time. Some bright ones have scarcely survived infancy.’ Launching The Lace Curtain, Michael Smith wrote: ‘Poetry magazines … have, like butterflies, an all too short life; and in our mean Irish climate this brief span is even more curtailed.’ Ian Hamilton concludes:

ten years is the ideal life-span for a little magazine … There are the opening years of jaunty, assertive indecision, then a middle period of genuine identity, and after that … identity becomes more and more wan and mechanical … It is in the nature of the little magazine that it should believe that no one else could do what it is doing. This belief is almost always tied to the requirements of a particular period, to a particular set of literary rights or wrongs … Each magazine needs a new decade, and each decade needs a new magazine.

Magazines can be reborn under new editors, as when Fulton took over Lines Review (for a decade) in 1967. In 1969 Frank Ormsby and Michael Foley gave James Simmons's Honest Ulsterman, '60s-styled ‘handbook for a revolution’, a more strictly literary dynamic.