Modernist Mag (by David Yezzi)

I realize it’s cheeky of me to kick off my first day of guest-blogging on the BAP site not with a look at a best American literary journal but with one of the coolest poetry magazines from the U.K.: Agenda. I’ve followed Agenda for years, beginning with my time at Parnassus: Poetry in Review--more about the new issue of that estimable doorstop later in the week!--when it would show up in Parnassus's dilapidated one-room office on Union Square in New York crammed with news of that vital tradition of innovation and experiment called modernism.

Is it strange to think that there should be a magazine devoted to modernist poets coming out of England? Only last week, someone suggested to me that modernism had to a great extent bypassed Britain. True, the poems of Hardy, Edward Thomas, Betjeman, and Larkin might lead one to think this, but what of David Jones, Basil Bunting, and, more recently, Geoffrey Hill, who strikes me in many ways as the last of the modernists? Several years ago, Agenda put together a splendid special issue on Hill. (Others special issues have focused on: Thomas Hardy, T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Robert Lowell, William Carlos Williams, Hugh MacDiarmid, Kathleen Raine, David Jones, R.S. Thomas, Thom Gunn, Charles Tomlinson, Peter Dale, Seamus Heaney, Derek Walcott.)

In fact, the modernist slant of the journal is not strange at all: it was founded by Ezra Pound and William Cookson in 1959. Agenda is currently edited by Patricia McCarthy, who co-edited the magazine with Cookson for several years before his death in January 2003. As Cookson tells it: "Pound liked the first issue and wrote, 'Pleased with Agenda. It don’t look too Poundista. At lease not too unadulteratedly.' "

The current issue is titled "Lauds," after Auden's poem from Horae Canonicae. I love the photo on the cover of young Wystan reading with his mother sometime around 1912. The little sailor suit just kills me. The issue includes tributes to Auden and to Louis MacNeice, both of whom had their centenaries last year. Peter Mumford, at the time married to Auden's niece Rita (whose sister Anita was a long-time editor at Agenda!), recounts family dinners in the Sixties and early Seventies with Auden in his essay "The Memorableness of W. H. Auden":

These dinners were very much family occasions; and as with all family reunions not without their tensions. Wystan enjoyed them because of his affection for a family he did not have, and because this was a place where the public figure, his face recognized wherever he went, could become entirely the private man. . . .

. . . Wystan, who always arrived promptly at six for his martinis, brought with him laughter, with irritation at times, concerning every-day things, and gossip about mutual friends. The local and the particular sometimes ranged into the universal. On one occasion, he was especially delighted by Martin Gardner's The Ambidextrous Universe (1964) which provided the scientific evidence for Nature having a "left-handed twist."

That sounds like Auden down to the ground. The issue also includes a feature on Michael Hamburger and a host of fine poems, as well as poems by two "Broadsheet Poets," from the magazine's ongoing series of features on younger poets. It's well worth a look--DY

Comments

[Noah Burke]

Thanks. Sounds like a worthwhile mag. Looking forward to your posts.