Migrant the Magnificent
In July 1959
several hundred copies of a magazine emerged from the house of a British
doctor, then living in Ventura,
California. They were posted to
poets across the United States,
Canada and the British Isles. With a light blue cover and soft yellow
pages the magazine was unconventional but welcoming in design. The printing,
from an unsophisticated Sears Roebuck duplicator, had the look of a typewriter.
The homespun atmosphere was also underlined by the text only appearing on one
side of the page. Despite this – or, rather, because of it - Dr. Turnbull,
later better known as the poet Gael Turnbull, had started one of the most
influential poetry magazines of the last half of the century. It would only run
until September 1960, when its eighth issue brought the magazine to a close.
Nevertheless, quietly, exploratively, and with the invaluable British editing of
his old schoolfriend Michael Shayer, Migrant heralded the decade of ideas and
creativity now thought of as the Sixties.
The Play
Way
Born in Edinburgh
in 1928, Gael Turnbull was the son of a Scottish minister and an American of Swedish descent. The family
lived where his father preached, first in Jarrow and
then, from 1934 to 1939, in Blackpool. At the
beginning of the Second World War the family emigrated to Winnipeg in Canada. Turnbull returned to England in 1944 where he was a boarder at Perse School,
Cambridge. It
was here that he met fellow-student Michael Shayer. They were to be life-long
friends.
Perse School’s English Department
particularly emphasised the teaching of drama through the students’ performance
of texts, an approach known as “the Play
Way”. A dedicated theatrical space, “The Mummery”,
was set aside for just this and the idea of literature as an aural form made a
profound impression on the two boys. Both were later to lay emphasis on the
performance of poetry.
The friends were able science students, however, and each decided to
study natural sciences rather than literature at Cambridge (Turnbull at Christ’s College,
Shayer at Clare). Shayer, who had joined the student mountaineering club, broke
his leg while climbing in the Lake District.
His hospitalisation for three months intensified his interest in writing: a
friendly hospital orderly lent him James Joyce’s Ulysses (the official book trolley did not contain it), an
experience Shayer regarded as life-changing. On his return to college he asked
to be transferred to an English degree but was persuaded to stay with natural
sciences. His tutor persuaded him that great writing did not necessarily
require the formal study of English.
North America
After Cambridge, Turnbull moved back to
North America, successfully completing a medical degree at the University of Pennsylvania,
Philadelphia, while, back in England, Shayer
served two years National Service with Shell. They corresponded and also
exchanged ‘audio letters’ recorded on the predecessor of the cassette (extracts
from this type of recording would later be transcribed in Migrant). Soon Shayer joined Turnbull in Philadelphia which was enjoying a quietly
bohemian arts scene: the two would visit “The Heel”, the Horn and Hardart cafeteria where classical musicians, actors, and
poets would meet, and they’d attend plays and poetry readings, one by E. E.
Cummings.
In 1952 Turnbull married Jonnie Draper, a drama student at Pittsburgh’s Carnegie
Institute of Technology (which, despite its applied sciences focus, had a
celebrated liberal arts programme). However, a new law meant that even non-nationals
resident in the United States could and would be called up for the Korean War.
The friends sought to avoid this. Shayer boarded the Queen Mary back to England.
Turnbull took a ‘day trip’ bus to Montreal, to
be joined by Jonnie travelling on the train: in Canada they made their new home.
After requalifying, Gael was able to practice medicine in Iroquois Falls,
Northern Ontario. During this period he
corresponded with many Canadian poets, and was especially associated with Contact, a magazine and small press
edited by Raymond Souster. He co-translated several
Francophone Quebec poets with Jean Beaupré, including
Hector de Saint-Denys-Garneau and Roland Guiguère. These translations were published in very limited
editions in association with Contact. As Phyllis Webb later recalled, “Gael had quickly and astutely diagnosed the need for more communication
between French-speaking and English-speaking writers in Canada and set
out to remedy the situation.” (Phyllis
Webb, “Air, Air” in Peter McCarey (ed.), A
Gathering for Gael Turnbull (Au Quai, 1998).
Origin and Black Mountain Review
The American poet
and editor Cid Corman had first published a poem by
Gael Turnbull in the Spring 1954 issue of Origin.
Turnbull was in good company: that issue also featured work by several
significant poets of the period, including Robert Creeley,
William Carlos Williams, Robert Duncan and Charles Olson. Denise Levertov guest-edited a further edition of Origin (XIII; Summer 1954) in which
Turnbull had more of his work published and Corman published
one of Turnbull’s first books in the Origin Press imprint, the Nordic dramatic
monologues of Bjarni Spike-Helgi and
other poems (1956).
At this time Black Mountain
College, the experimental arts college
in North Carolina,
was in its last creative phase before its eventual closure in 1956. Charles
Olson was its Rector and Creeley was editing Black Mountain Review (1954-1957). The
magazine featured many of the poets that Corman had
been publishing (Paul Blackburn, Louis Zukofsky, Denise
Levertov, Charles Olson, Robert Duncan, were perhaps
the core of Black
Mountain poetry). The Review also reproduced the work of
modern artists such as Philip Guston and Franz Kline.
A student of photography at Black Mountain, Jonathan Williams, ran the press Jargon
Society, and distributed the Review
outside of New York
(presumably left alone because Paul Blackburn was able to distribute the
magazine there). An energetic correspondent, Turnbull was in touch with most of
these figures and began to develop a network of very individual modern poets,
soon to be among the contributors to (and select audience of) Migrant.
He was also valued
by editors as someone with his ear to the ground in territories with which they
were less familiar. In 1957 (back now in England) he guest-edited an element of
the last issue of Origin, seeking work
from then relatively unknown English poets such as Roy
Fisher and Alan Brownjohn. He
canvassed poetry from Philip Larkin, though with less positive results. Larkin,
while initially sending poems, withdrew them by registered post after seeing a
sample issue. (See Roy Fisher, in conversation with John Tranter, Jacket 1 (Dec. 2001)). Later, Migrant would publish an article by Brownjohn that compared Larkin and Creeley
and suggested in fact a degree of complementariness: despite Larkin’s refusal
to be part of the avant-garde, the editors of Migrant were very open to
aesthetic difference.
If guest-editing
was one of the ways that Turnbull began to learn the skills of an editor, and helped
him develop British and American contacts for Migrant, the closure of Black
Mountain Review in Autumn 1957 and of Origin
with the Winter issue of that same year may have set Turnbull thinking about Migrant as a magazine to answer the gap.
However, by this time Turnbull was back in England again, surveying the
British scene.
Migrant
Books c/o National Provincial Bank
In 1955 Gael Turnbull returned to England
from Canada, settling in Worcester from 1956-1958.
In late 1956, he set up Migrant Books as a UK distributor of books by Divers
Press, Origin Press and Jargon Society. These presses published the work of his
old friends in the American avant-garde poets, Creeley,
Corman, and Olson (Creeley
in fact was Divers Press and Corman Origin). Their work was very little known in the United Kingdom, though it had appeared in little
magazines that Turnbull had read with fascination: John Sankey’s
Window (London)
– where Turnbull appears to have first seen Roy Fisher’s poetry - Robert
Cooper’s Artisan (Liverpool)
and W. Price Turner’s The Poet
(Glasgow). All of these magazines had closed by the end of 1956.
It is noticeable that there had been a strong provincial element to this
first wave: the established and centralised conduits appear generally not to
have been finely tuned enough to detect, receive or understand the new poetry;
or, if they did understand, like Larkin they did not at all like it. Migrant
Books as a distributor was therefore an important way of opening the doors
wider in Britain
to experimental American work. Turnbull was helped in this by the poet and
editor W. Price Turner who gave him a copy of the The Poet’s mailing list. By the same token, the major British writers
later associated with Migrant would also be based outside of London,
Oxford, or Cambridge:
Roy Fisher (Birmingham),
Ian Hamilton Finlay (at this period, various locations in Scotland), and Edwin Morgan (Glasgow).
Perhaps most
significantly in these early years, Migrant distributed Charles Olson’s Maximus Poems. Prime examples of what Olson
called Projective Verse, a freer poetry that used the space of the page with a
sense of exploration and the breath of the voice as a marker of rhythm, they
had been published by Jonathan Williams,
1-10 in 1953 and 11-22 in 1956,
but with no British distributor. Turnbull sought to correct this: after buying
stock, he simply stamped the colophon with Migrant Books c/o National
Provincial Bank, Worcester, and began to distribute them using his growing
address book as a mailing list. The bank was used effectively as a post
restante address, presumably while he sought a more permanent home. Because so
many of Turnbull’s correspondents were poets Migrant Books became an early and
key bridge across the Atlantic between British
and American avant-garde writers.
It was during this time in England that Turnbull met Roy Fisher and encouraged him to think of himself in
the company of the authors Turnbull knew and championed. Almost like a
manuscript pre-cursor of Migrant,
Turnbull kept a notebook into which he would copy interesting poems he liked
and he would then show this to fellow poets: this was how Roy Fisher first came to know the work of Basil
Bunting, later celebrated as the author of the long poem Briggflatts. As Roy Fisher would remember: “I met Gael Turnbull and I was exposed on one day to
Olson, Creeley, Bunting, Zukofsky,
Duncan,
Ginsberg, Corso, Ferlinghetti,
Ray Souster and, most of all, William Carlos Williams.”
(quoted in Michael Peter Ryan, “Career Patterns among Contemporary British Poets”
unpublished PhD dissertation, University of London, p.86; itself quoted in
Simon Jarvis, “A Burning Monochrome: Fisher’s Block”, in
Kerrigan and Robinson (eds.), The Thing
About Roy Fisher: Critical Studies, Liverpool University Press, 2000, p.189).
Turnbull and Shayer must also have remembered their days in Perse School
and its emphasis on the performance of literature. They were certainly aware of
the burgeoning folk scene in England;
in fact they read alongside these musicians at folk venues. Shayer was
determined to get away from the idea of poets hiding away behind the book or
typescript they were reading from: like folk performers he would recite his
text from memory; and, again like that of the musicians, the text might well be
the work of someone else (in Shayer’s case, Robert Creeley especially). Later, in the Sixties, authors
associated with Migrant performed their work on a Migrant ‘platform’. This took
place at the Edinburgh Festival as early as 1961 and at other venues, including
one reading in Dulwich in 1962 with the younger poet Tom Raworth, editor of Outburst. There were Migrant readings at
the Traverse Theatre in 1963, too.
Migrant’s first
book appeared in 1957: The Whip by Creeley. This was a three-way publication between Migrant,
Jonathan Williams and the press that had published Turnbull in Canada, Contact Press (Toronto). It was printed in Mallorca,
where Creeley lived, almost certainly under Creeley’s supervision. However, it would not be until
Turnbull took control of the printing process himself that more of Migrant’s
own publications would appear, and with regularity. This happened after Gael
had again been on the move: he moved back to America in 1958.
Migrant the Magazine
In Autumn 1958 Turnbull moved to Ventura
California, where he practised as
an anaesthetist. He bought a Sears Roebuck duplicator and began to publish Migrant.
Jonnie Turnbull, Gael’s first wife, recalls the first attempts:
When Gael decided to start up a
little mag, the first hint of what he intended came
when he suddenly appeared one afternoon carrying what looked like a large, very
cumbersome piece of junk. It was an old
mimeograph machine which he had found downtown in a ‘second-hand’ shop. My first reaction was, “You’re not serious”;
and I tried not to laugh or be too disparaging when he finally, proudly, had it
set up. It was ancient – a far cry from
the electric machine I had used at secretarial school “What’re you going to do with it?” I
asked. “Start a magazine,” he replied.
As soon as we discovered what
an inky mess the thing was, it was immediately relegated to the end of the
workbench in the garage. It consumed and
exuded heavy black ink to such an extent, the stuff got everywhere – hands,
clothes, floor, bench-top, the paper-feed and the exit tray, tea mugs – never
mind the drum and stencil to which it was supposed to be confined. The wipe-up cloth was always useless.
Undeterred though, Gael was
soon cranking out the sheets of the first issue of Migrant. He happily shared the garage with black-widow
spiders, the occasional tarantula, the guinea-pigs in the cage on the
workbench, and the cat and cat-basket beneath.
Sometimes there was even a roadrunner speeding past the garage-door, up
from the ravine, or – when you went outside – a great black condor circling
high beyond the upper-terrace. I saw it
once – Gael a couple times.
(Jonnie Turnbull, “Migrant Reminiscences”, in PS [the Prose Supplement to Painted, spoken], No. 1 (2006))
The first issue
captured the spirit of Migrant: an
epigraph taken from Samuel Johnson that emphasised literature that was plainspeaking and rooted in everyday speech, there was a
charming poem about writing sad books by Pierre Delattre
(later better-known as an artist), six poems by Edward [Ed] Dorn; poems by Turnbull
himself (disguised as Thomas Lundin), French
literature in translation (Leon Bloy translated by
Michael Shayer); and an extract from an anonymous letter intended to stimulate
debate. Extracts from letters were used in this way throughout the run of Migrant, producing a questioning,
thought-provoking, open collage of texts as counterpoint to the crafted poems.
The experiences of the manager of an English launderette were also included,
establishing connection to a wider world, playing with literary register, and
establishing a sense of social context, in a similar spirit, as Shayer has
observed, to Mass Observation.
From the start,
Turnbull decided that it would not be aimed at the ‘general reader’, though
anyone interested was encouraged to subscribe. It was essentially for poets.
Subscription was a voluntary affair: “Subscription is by donation, even a few
stamps will be of help; or just a postcard to indicate that you would like to
receive it regularly.” (When Corman re-started Origin in the Sixties he would adopt
this approach, too.)
By the second
issue, the Canadian poet Ray Souster made an
entrance, and the Black Mountain connection hinted at by the inclusion of Dorn
in the first issue, was now in full swing: Creeley, Corman, and Duncan all had work included. Later issues
would include Denise Levertov, Larry Eigner, the Canadian Jay Macpherson, the English poets Charles Tomlinson, Hugh
Creighton Hill, and in the fifth issue, Roy Fisher
and Edwin Morgan (translating Mayakovsky into Scots),
followed by Alan Brownjohn (comparing Robert Creeley with Philip Larkin in issue 6 (May 1960)), “The
Drama of Utterance” (Hugh Kenner, in issue 7 (July 1960)) [on William Carlos
Williams, a presiding spirit of Migrant];
Ian [Hamilton] Finlay; Henri Michaux, trans. by
Raymond Federman. Finally in issue 8 (Sept. 1960),
there was Edwin Morgan (translating Pasternak),
a prose piece by Charles Olson, German translations by Anselm Hollo, the Canadian Louis Dudek,
translations of Georg Trakl by Helmut Bonheim; more Duncan and more Fisher.
There were some
reviews: Shayer wrote a supportive article on Don’t Look Back in Anger, Turnbull (as Lundin
again) one on Gregory Corso’s Bomb. As well as letters
about literature and about the magazine, usually published without their authors’
names, Migrant also transcribed tape
recordings and reproduced diary entries, contributing to the collage. The
magazine must have been an extraordinary eye-opener to its readers, welcoming
both European and North American poetry in the same breath as it asserted the
value of new English and Scottish poetry.
It seems puzzling
that it should have closed so quickly. In 1960, however, Turnbull and Shayer
began to move Migrant more in the direction of book production and in the
September of that year the last issue of the magazine was issued. It appears
that the magazine had helped some of its authors towards more extensive work,
building a collection, say, and certainly becoming more self-conscious - and more internationally aware – in their
work. In that year Migrant Press, as a book imprint, published an early
appreciation of Charles Olson’s poetry, Ed Dorn’s What I See in the Maximus Poems; Matthew
Mead’s A Poem in Nine Parts; and Ian
Hamilton Finlay’s The Dancers Inherit the
Party. The magazine may have closed, but this was because the scene, as it
were, had now been set: books themselves were to carry on the Migrant idea.
Nineteen sixty-one
was characterised by a new Migrant booklet every couple of months or so: books
by Anselm Hollo, Edwin Morgan, Roy
Fisher, Shayer, and Hugh Creighton-Hill. Turnbull and Shayer
were especially encouraged by the success of Finlay’s book, his first book of
poems, whose edition of 200 copies had sold so well a second edition was produced
in 1962, and Finlay’s work was to be profoundly influenced by the ethos of Migrant. As Shayer became more
experienced in the production of books, Migrant publications became more
professional in appearance: Pete Brown’s Few
(1966) has a typeface and design beautifully suited to the humour of the poems,
Anselm Hollo’s &
It Is A Song is also very attractively designed, with musical notes
integrated into the cover’s look.
Ian Hamilton Finlay
One of the most
significant poets that Michael Shayer as British editor introduced to Migrant was Ian Hamilton Finlay. Finlay
and Shayer corresponded and soon there were more poems than could be published
in the magazine. From this relative abundance came The Dancers Inherit the Party (1960), perhaps the press’s greatest
commercial success, requiring and receiving a second edition within two
years. Although Finlay has since
acquired a forbidding reputation these poems are fun, fey, almost musical; they
are also often amusingly sly. The elements of whimsy and lightness are arguably
part of a more serious questioning about the nature of poetry (and being), with
Finlay’s work attempting to widen widen poetry’s
field to non-traditional areas, with a particular emphasis on play.
Migrant Press
circumvented the traditional publishing establishment which may have wondered
about putting a Finlay in print, but the imprint did much more. Shayer and
Turnbull showed Finlay that it was relatively easy to set up a pamphlet imprint
(Finlay soon established his own, The Wild Hawthorn Press); and that a magazine
was also relatively easy to manage : with Jessie McGuffie
and P. Pond [i.e. the blues singer Paul Jones], Finlay set up his magazine Poor. Old. Tired. Horse. soon after, in
1962. For a poet who wanted to learn from others as much as communicate his own
sensibilities, one of the best activities to master is that of magazine editor,
as Turnbull and Shayer had, and for five years Finlay’s magazine published
sound, concrete and minimalist poetry from Brazil, the Soviet Union, Cuba,
France, the United States, England and Scotland. Finlay already had European
reference points in his aesthetic but Migrant
appears to have greatly widened his American knowledge: Dancers Inherit the Party was sent to
writers such as Robert Creeley, Louis Zukofsky and Lorine Neidecker, the latter recognising a kindred spirit in
Finlay and beginning an important if brief creative correspondence with him.
(See Gael Turnbull, “Dancing for an hour” in Chapman No. 78-79 (1994), and other articles in that issue)
Sadly, a decade
later, a dispute between Finlay and the publisher Stuart Montgomery over a new
edition of The Dancers Inherit the Party appears to have contributed to the downfall of
one of the best poetry imprints to emerge in the 1960s, Montgomery’s Fulcrum
Press. Montgomery
had wanted to publish The Dancers Inherit
the Party and very much had Turnbull and Shayer’s
blessing to do so. However, his wish to designate it a first edition, rather
than the third edition it actually was, attracted Finlay’s anger and resulted
in an expensive court case which Montgomery lost, a serious financial blow to
Fulcrum (and, because of Fulcrum’s significance, to the professional marketing
and distribution of left-of-field poetry in the UK). The publisher seems to
have been severely weakened by this, as well as by a flood which damaged stock,
and Fulcrum closed in the mid 1970s.
Basil Bunting and Roy Fisher
Basil Bunting is a poet now recognised as one of England’s
greatest modernists. He was the only British author included in Zukofsky’s 1930s anthology of “Objectivist” poets and though
later the author of the celebrated Briggflatts (1966), when Gael Turnbull first met him he was
more of a past poet than, as it were, a living one. Gael Turnbull knew
Bunting’s poems from the Cleaners Press edition, Poems 1950, which he had seen in America in the first half of the
1950s: it was from that book that he had copied out poems into his commonplace
book. Turnbull appears to have sought
him out in 1956, when Bunting was working as a journalist in Newcastle
and Turnbull was back in England.
Bunting responded to the formal engagement of the younger man’s poetry in a
letter of January 1957: “It is so long since I saw
anything worked out to its final simplicity and elegance except by hands even
older than my own that I find it difficult to know how to praise your gift
without seeming to overpraise it.” It was at this stage
that they also began a correspondence that lasted for many years.
It is likely that the friendship and encouragement
of Turnbull and Shayer (who also visited Bunting) prepared the ground for the catalytic
effect of Tom Pickard’s later interest, Bunting re-applying himself to poetry
in the 1960s, with the eventual result of Briggflatts. In fact The Spoils (1965) was mooted as a
Migrant Press book, but the better production and design that could be offered
by Pickard’s Morden Tower Bookroom, with Richard
Hamilton’s images, meant that Turnbull and Shayer were happy to let it be
published there, Migrant handling the distribution. Again, this is typical of the
way that Turnbull and Shayer saw Migrant: it was a kind of creative think tank,
with acknowledged limits. If a publisher could do better with and for the same
author, once the potential had been glimpsed in a Migrant publication, then the
editors appear to have been more than happy to see that author work with others
– and they’d help with the publication if they could.
When Turnbull returned to England in 1964
he and Bunting renewed and strengthened their friendship. Bunting’s masterpiece
Briggflatts was sent to Turnbull in various drafts
for comment as the poem evolved. Michael Shayer recalls when he first heard
Bunting read from Briggflatts,
in fact when it was only two-thirds finished:
And then there was one evening when Gael
had invited [Basil Bunting] down to stay. Gael was living in Cradley, just the other side of Malvern at the time and
Gael had invited Basil down for several days and we had a flat in Worcester. First floor
flat in Worcester
which was convenient. And it was arranged that Basil would do a reading of some
new poem that he was working on and we had quite a select audience there,
whistled up at very little notice. My memory is that there was Roy [Fisher], I
think there was Adrian Mitchell, there was, who else? Michael Butler was another,
I should think and one other. Anyway there we were, five or six, or six or
seven of us sitting in a sitting room and Basil started reading his bloody
poem. It was coming out of nowhere, if you understand what I mean. There was
nothing that prepared any of us for anything like that and I remember feeling
that it had an enormously primitive and medieval in the sense of something
going back a thousand years to Norse history or something. It had that sort of
feeling to it. And on the one hand you heard it, in a sense that you heard the
music of it, then there was this narrative of some kind coming in, that nothing
could have prepared you for. And we were all bowled over by it but I don’t
think any of us had any idea of what sort of thing this was. And another, the
other thing about it that really struck me at the time was that he said that
this was “part of a work in progress. This was about three of the five sections
in it. And I’ve got an overall sense of what the overall structure of it is”
and I thought how incredibly risky it was in the sense of giving hostages to
fortune, to say that at that point on the other hand you have to remember that
he had a whole lifetime of development behind him and he was absolutely in no
doubt that he could do it. Whereas I, being much younger, would feel that if I
were in that position I would keep it hugged to my chest. I wouldn’t reveal
anything until I’d finished it. He was confident enough at that point, he knew
he would do it. Unless he got killed on a railway or something. Then I think
early in ’65 he’d finished it.
(Michael Shayer, interviewed by Richard Price, in PS [prose supplement to Painted,
spoken], No. 1 (2006))
Bunting would also read later parts of Briggflatts to
informal gatherings, once when Hugh MacDiarmid and Turnbull were in the select
audience. It is not at all surprising that Roy Fisher
was in the audience at the reading Michael Shayer remembers (Roy Fisher recalls that the poet John James, a
former student of Migrant associate
Charles Tomlinson, was also there). Fisher’s first book City had been published by Migrant in 1961, with Shayer having
strongly urged Fisher to publish it; Shayer appears to have contributed
substantially to its arrangement, too. Migrant also published a supplement in 1962, The Hallucinations: City II, which would
be issued with further sales of the original City. Later versions of City
that Fisher collected include many of the pieces in City and City II,
although the complete “Migrant
City” has never been reprinted, as such. It
is surely a landmark in the urban poetry of Britain since the war: as dreamlike
as it is analytical; songlike at one turn, descriptive at the next: “The
society of singing birds and the society of mechanical hammers inhabit the
world together, slightly ruffled and confined by each other’s presence.”
By the
mid-sixties, Fisher had been co-opted as business manager for Migrant Press.
However, Migrant as a publisher was beginning to fade: although the books by
Pete Brown and Anselm Hollo showed that the imprint
was getting on top of the design challenges of publishing, personal
complications in the private lives of Turnbull and Shayer meant a diverting
away of energy. Neither had the sensibility in any case for aggressive forms of
marketing and distribution. Although there were occasional Migrant pamphlets
until Gael Turnbull’s death in 2004, the press was essentially a fabulous creature
of the 50s and 60s: which is to say, it anticipated and laid some of the
foundations for everything since.
Shayer and
Turnbull were arguably among the key poetry editors of the Fifties who
kick-started the creativity of the Sixties small press poetry scene; in Eric Mottram’s famous phrase, “The British Poetry Revival”. While
not at all being like them, they prepared the way, for example, for the ‘Cambridge School’ poets of the Sixties and early
Seventies, a grouping, despite the name, as heterogeneous as the spirit of Migrant. J. H. Prynne may have come to
the work of Olson and Black Mountain later than Turnbull and probably only
indirectly through the Migrant publications (though he was an early reader of
Dorn’s , but some of Prynne’s earliest published work - poems and an extract
from a fascinating manifesto-like letter - were printed first in Mica, the American magazine edited by
Turnbull’s friends Helmut Bonheim and Ray Federman as a direct successor to Migrant (Mica ran from
1961 to 1962). Migrant’s support for Edwin Morgan’s translations of Russian
poetry into Scots, coupled with the Finlay success, also created new space
within Scottish literature, a refreshing exploratory attitude which was as
interested in the international as it was in the creative use of common speech.
The interest in and friendship with Basil Bunting that Shayer and Turnbull
extended were also critical factors in Bunting’s triumphant re-emergence.
Enthusiasm for the
various American avant-gardes, an interest in translation, an acceptance of a
variety of aesthetic approaches, a confidence in the independent voices of the
new poetry of England and Scotland, and the command of the means of production
by the artistic community itself: these are some of the key lessons that
Migrant, among a few other select magazines, taught - and which the flourishing
British poetry scene in the 1960s avidly learned.
Acknowledgements
I am especially
grateful to Jonnie Turnbull, Jill Turnbull, Michael Shayer and Roy Fisher for
help in the reconstruction of events. Gael Turnbull’s archive is held at the
National Library of Scotland: my thanks to Robin Smith at the Department of
Manuscripts for access to uncatalogued correspondence there. An account of
Migrant is given by Gael Turnbull in Credences, Vol. 1 no. 2/3 (1981/82). I have also used
Nicholas Johnson’s obituary of Gael Turnbull which appeared in The Independent, 7th July
2004.
I am grateful to
Alexandra Sayer, my research assistant on “Migrant and the Poetry of
Possibility”, the exhibition at the British Library, sponsored by the Folio
Society, and to run from 19th January to 25th March in 2007.
This work arose
out of the writing of the book I have co-written with David Miller, British Poetry Magazines 1914-2000: a
history and bibliography of ‘little magazines’, (British Library, 2006)
[A version of this
article was first published in PN Review]
