Mark Valentine
On the trestle table beneath the balconies and chandeliers of the Winter Gardens in the old spa town there was a run of pocket-sized poetry journals. The coats that carried a copy when it had just come out would have also contained an identity card and a ration book, probably a crumpled packet of cigarettes and a box of matches, and perhaps a notebook made from rough ‘economy’ paper.
Illuminated by my interest as I riffled the pages, the woman on the stall named a price for the lot, a score or so issues, which I took. That will probably be the only sale I make all day, she said, lugubriousness being an art perfected by second-hand booksellers.
I like looking at old periodicals because they give you a sense of their time, the cross-section of a moment. You seem to catch the tone, the style of that day. These survivals offered that in particular because of the character of their editor. Charles Wrey Gardiner (1901-1981) was a key figure in the poetry world of wartime London, who ran the Grey Walls Press and edited the journal I had just bought in a six inch ziggurat, Poetry Quarterly. He was also a poet himself and the author of several volumes of frank autobiography.
His magazine favoured new young poets, typically in their early twenties, who often drank and smoked and talked together in informal circles around Soho and Bloomsbury. It was loosely aligned to the Apocalyptic and the New Romantic movements of the time, a reaction against the ‘pylon poets’ of the Thirties, but also a rediscovery of the power of symbol and myth.
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