Webzines
Poetry Library of Great Britain — Online magazine database – includes some back issues of Shearsman, but also several other magazines, rare old issues and more recent publications alike. An invaluable resource with good design.
Jacket was the best literary webzine that I have ever come across. Edited by Australian poet John Tranter, Jacket pursued a resolutely independent path, but was markedly friendly to the more innovative strain in modern writing. The magazine was genuinely international in character. John Tranter has nowretired from the fray, and his brave venture has been replaced by Jacket2 , now based in Philadelphia, and certainly not as international in scope as its predecessor, which is a great pity. The new venture is good, but not as good as the old one.
The Argotist is a busy website, edited by Jeffrey Side, and carries poems, essays and interviews with a wide range of authors.
alligatorzine is a Dutch/English magazine edited by Kurt Devrese in Ghent.
Black Box Manifold is a magazine from Sheffield University edited by Alex Houen & Adam Piette.
Cerise Press – Franco-American literary webzine, with a number of good translations, and not just from French.
The Drunken Boat – a fine US-based webzine.
Fascicle – edited by Tony Tost, this is a huge compendium of fascinating material, both original English-language poetry and translations.
Flashpoint – A mixture of the fascinating and the infuriating. Worth the time, though.
Free Verse – Good US webzine; poetry, interviews, and essays. Issue 9 had a good section of "experimental" Irish poetry, which features a number of Shearsman authors.
Freebase Accordion – Peter Manson's site, which is not really a magazine but is close enough.
Galatea Resurrects is a blogzine from California that does a lot of reviewing of contemporary poetry, and not just American poetry. Well worth tracking.
GreatWorks – Peter Philpott's webzine. Of particular interest here is Philpott's own long poem sequence In the Present Historic Sense, which is in the archive area now, but can be accessed from the Quick Index. That long poem-sequence has since been collected in Peter Philpott's Shearsman volume Textual Possessions. Well worth constant checks, as the site updates with new work frequently.
Green Integer Review — edited by Douglas Messerli, this is an online offshoot of the excellent Green Integer Press. First issue was in January 2006. The link here takes you to the press home page; cick on the Review link top-right to get to the 'zine.
Intercapillary Space — Edmund Hardy's blogzine, which includes poems and book reviews, new in January 2006. This 'zine has provided a welcome home for some quality reviewing, interviews, essays and, more recently, new poetry.
Litter is an excellent online magazine, and an offshoot of Nottingham's excellent Leafe Press.
Pages – is the online continuation of Robert Sheppard's long-dormant journal. Poetry and criticism, and well worth following. It's in a blog format which is ideal for this venture.
PORES - which stands for POetry RESearch. Some excellent stuff here for serious students of poetry.
Shadow Train – Ian Seed's monthly online magazine.
Slope – long-running webzine and small press. Good design, usually interesting contents, and this is one American zine that looks across its national borders.
Stride Magazine – webzine from the now-closed Stride publishing house & edited from Cornwall. Well worth following. Excellent reviews, in particular, often of books that don't get much attention in the trade press.
Tarpaulin Sky – online journal from an interesting US publisher. The website has one of the best designs I've seen in recent times and navigation is easy. Good work, mostly from the experimental end of the spectrum, but seemingly without adherence to any particular school.
Chicago Review is probably the best literary journal from a US university right now. I'm biased because I've contributed to it and also co-edited a special issue in 2002, but it's fair to say that anyone who likes what they see in Shearsman will like Chicago Review. If the link doesn't work, paste this in to your browser address field instead: http://humanities.uchicago.edu/orgs/review/
Dark Horse is a Scottish-American poetry magazine with a much more conservative approach than I normally enjoy, but it's hard to argue with the nose for quality demonstrated by this magazine. This website has excerpts from current and past issues which can be downloaded as PDFs. Despite the Scottish-American axis, work is taken from elsewhere too.
Mandorla is a bilingual English/Spanish magazine now published from the University of Illinois. It's an invaluable resource in both languages.
PN Review Often thought of as conservative, PNR is in fact well worth reading in its role as the house organ of the Carcanet Press. Every issue has something of interest somewhere and most recent issues have been full of excellent material.
poetryfoundation.org — Website for the magazine Poetry (Chicago) and full of interesting material. Well worth tracking on a regular basis.
Poetry Salzburg Review – Austrian magazine devoted to (largely) British poetry. Good reviews section, and an increasingly interesting selection of original material. This magazine has been growing into one that needs to be read seriously.
Poetry Society of Great Britain & Poetry Review House organ of the Poetry Society and the biggest-circulation UK poetry magazine.
Rain Taxi is a fine US-based magazine. Excellent reviews section.
Tinfish — magazine and small press producing interesting work in Hawaii, mostly from the USA and the Pacific Rim. Edited by poet Susan Schultz. A good place to find material that doesn't turn up in regular magazines in quantity.
Anvil Press Poetry Quite conservative small-press with a fine record. Authors include Michael Hamburger, Harry Guest, Carol Ann Duffy, Paul Celan, Vasko Popa, Ivan Lalic, Marius Kociejowski. Excellent translation series. Their books are superbly produced.
Barque Press Cambridge/Brighton publishing house devoted to younger authors and the occasional senior figure such as J H Prynne and John Wilkinson.
Carcanet Press Manchester-based publisher of PN Review and a solid list of poetry volumes.
Duration Press – US site for Duration and a number of other small presses and journals. Good archive of downloadable e-books, including the complete run of Jennifer Moxley & Steve Evans's journal The Impercipient dating from the early-mid 1990s.
Flarestack Poetry – site for the Somerset-based publisher of poetry chapbooks and the magazine Obsessed with Pipework. Both sides of the enterprise are worth tracking and show commendable taste. Back issues of the magazine can be seen at the Poetry Library's Poetry Magazines site.
Gratton Street Irregulars – run by Kelvin Corcoran and Ian Davidson, GSI came to life in 2010 after a rather shadowy existence prior to that. The first chapbooks in their series are excellent, and, along with Oystercatcher, they look ready to set a benchmark that others cam measure themselves against.
hardPressed Poetry Irish publishing and mail-order operation, run by Shearsman author Billy Mills.
if p then q is a new-ish house devoted to experimental poetry in the U.K. There aren't enough of those, so it's worth supporting.
National Poetry Foundation Publishers of Paideuma and Sagetrieb magazines as well as the invaluable Man and Poet / Woman and Poet series of biographical/critical anthologies.
Oystercatcher Press – there's a splendid roster of chapbooks from Peter Hughes' press, and it just seems to keep going. Buy a subscription, as there's hardly ever a dud publication, and you'll get some great surprises.
Phylum Press – remarkable small press in the US (and currently based in New Haven, CT), run by Richard Deming and Nancy Kuhl. Their chapbooks are fascinating collaborations between artists and poets and are given away free to the deserving. A press worth following.
Poetry Salzburg – Austrian publisher of British poetry, including David Miller's Collected Poems, and the magazine Poetry Salzburg Review.
Quartet Books – Independent literary publisher with a fine reputation. Shearsman author Alan Wall is also published by Quartet.
Reality Street Editions Publisher of consistently challenging new work, now based in Hastings. Well worth supporting: the current list and forthcoming publications show that the press is continiung to grow. Publisher is poet (& Shearsman author) Ken Edwards.
Salt Publishing A fast-expanding press which produces books by poets from the UK, the USA and Australia, well-known and not-well-enough-known. The press has a fine site that showcases its astonishingly ambitious publishing programme, and also has a webstore.
Tarpaulin Sky – print publisher allied to the excellent online mag of the same name. I've not read the titles, but designs look splendid and the general tone of the list looks very positive.
Zasterle Press is edited by Manuel Brito from La Laguna in the Canary Islands, and is mostly devoted to North American avant-garde work, in English. The books are distributed by SPD in the USA.
Ulrike Draesner is one of the best contemporary German poets. Her website provides excerpts from her various books, photographs, and details of her readings etc. In German only.
Andrew Duncan is a frequent contributor to Shearsman and author of two Shearsman collections. He is also well-known for his trenchant critical essays. This website contains a large number of unpublished essays and reviews which will fascinate or annoy you, depending upon your point of view or, perhaps, whether you are the target of one of his criticisms. Sometimes wrong-headed, always entertaining, this site is well worth a trawl for those of you with an interest in modern British poetry. There's even a very amusing essay on modern German poetry which I would recommend to those of you interested in that field. Almost guaranteed to offend someone.
Peter Finch has long been a fixture on the UK small-press scene, as editor, poet, performer, bookseller, promoter and Lord knows what else. This site is very well-designed and entertaining.
Irish writers in the modernist tradition.
Trevor Joyce Shearsman Books author – this site contains more of his work, more for you to sample before buying his splendid Collected Poems, with the first dream of fire they hunt the cold.
Kenny Knight – Shearsman author Kenny Knight's own website, with some video footage of him reading.
Palabra virtual – Latin American anthology online: [NB link broken; I will investigate] Antología de poesía hispanoamericana — this also includes Spanish writers, so it's not quite what it says on the tin. It is nonetheless a fascinating and informative database of work that is very difficult to get hold of by other means. It's an essential resource: according to the entry page they have 772 poets and some 5,500 poems on the site. I could spend hours in it; come to think of it, I already have.
Mexican poets of a younger generation than I had previously come across can be found at El Cocodrilo Poeta Virtual. [NB link broken; I will investigate] Check out the Antología section for a number of complete books. The music that comes with it is irritating, but the poetry ranges from the excellent (Claudia Hernández de Valle-Arizpe, Ernesto Lumbreras, for instance) to the merely interesting. Nothing worse than that, which suggests that the editorial hand is good. The site contains the complete texts of a number of hard-to-find volumes, usually a few years old, but none the worse for that.
Tom Raworth's own site. Lots of entertaining material here, including photos, artwork, bibliography, corrections for typos in the author's 2004 Collected Poems, itinerary, reading schedules etc etc.
Peter Riley's website contains a lot of useful information on his work as well as biographical data and selections from his work.
Ron Silliman's poetry is not really for me (at least thus far), but his weblog is consistently stimulating. I try to catch up on it at least once a week.
John Tranter – editor of jacket (see above) and one of Australia's finest, has two sites devoted to his poetry. One is devoted to the early work, and the other to more recent work.
British Electronic Poetry Centre – still under development at Southampton University, but progress is worth monitoring.
Factory School – The Factory School Digital Audio Archive contains a large number of digital transcriptions of live readings. All kinds of gems here that you can stream to your desktop: Brathwaite, Berrigan, Bronk, Bunting, Creeley, HD, Dorn, Duncan etc etc etc and a fine 20-odd minute reading from the year 2000 by Tom Raworth. There's also some really weird readings by Pound of Mauberley and some of the Cantos. His reading of Canto 1 in particular is a travesty, but it's a glimpse of another age and of a man who probably got his reading style from Yeats. There's even one of Pound's WW2 radio broadcasts, which you can just about understand through the static. You'll need Real Player or RealOne Player to hear these but most modern browsers have them installed already. Mac OS X users can now download an OS X-compatible version of RealOne Player, so they're no longer excluded. [NB, as of Feb 2013, there was no access to the archive from the links at the site.]
Famous Poets and Poems.com is an interesting new venture in the USA which displays the work of a large number of classic poets, as well as a number of modern figures. The selection leans towards North America, inevitably, but there is a lot of good work to be had here. Treat it as a virtual library or as a huge anthology. Well-designed site and easily navigable. The best of its kind for English-language poetry that I have yet seen, and it can only get better as it adds more poets.
The Other Room is a reading series allied to the if p then q press. Lots of good material on the site, including video clips from readings.
The Page – is a guide to current writing on the web - poetry, poetics, etc. Useful portal.
Poetry Library of Great Britain — Online magazine database. This went online in 2003 and includes the early series of Shearsman (1981-2), as well as the first 10 issues of the current series. Apart from Shearsman, the magazines featured are: Ambit; Blithe Spirit; Borderlines; Brando's hat; Dream Catcher; Fabric; Fire; Magma; Oasis; Obsessed with pipework; Orbis; Painted, spoken; Poetry Nation, Smiths Knoll, The Coffee House, The Frogmore Papers, The Interpreter's House, The London Magazine, The North and Thumbscrew. Other magazines are added from time to time. There's a lot of good material in there, and it's particularly good to see magazines included which have never had a web presence, such as Oasis and Fire.
The Poetry Kit – List of mags and publishers.
Spencer Selby's list. An invaluable list of magazines worldwide that are committed to innovative and challenging poetry. An excellent place to start if you're exploring this complicated little universe.
There is now a page devoted to this subject here.