PN Review's 50th Anniversary

A Speech by Robyn Marsack

This year marks the 50th anniversary of PN Review. As part of our celebrations, we are taking a look back through our archive to send you the best of PNR directly to your inbox twice a week for the next twenty five weeks.

We’re delighted to get things started with a speech by Robyn Marsack, a long-time friend of Carcanet Press, which was delivered at the opening event of this year’s StAnza Poetry Festival.

A Speech by Robyn Marsack

‘Let me quote Paul Muldoon:

“If one of the defining characteristics of most magazines is that, like most bands, they have a short shelf life, then PN Review is immediately uncharacteristic. It's been going so long that many of us have all but forgotten what the P and the N stand for. I think of them as opening and closing the word Provocation. And that's why I so love the magazine.”

The magazine began as Poetry Nation Review, in 1973, as a hardback which appeared twice a year, then as a paperback quarterly in 1976, and has appeared bi-monthly since 1981. Its original quartet of editors were Michael Schmidt, Brian Cox, Donald Davie and C.H. Sisson: all four of them poets and critics with very decided tastes and particular formations. None of them was a stranger to controversy, and so PN Review – as it came to be called in 1976 – has continued: Rebecca Watts’s thought-provoking essay on ‘The Cult of the Noble Amateur’ in PNR 239 remains the most read item in the archive, with over 170,000 views.

I think the magazine shares characteristics with StAnza: it welcomes new voices alongside established writers, rediscovers and reflects on past poets and is decidedly international in its scope.  Uniquely among existing poetry magazines, it declares an allegiance to Modernism and its aftermath; and it retains an unequivocal commitment to nurturing a critical context for contemporary poetry. In short, it takes the art of poetry seriously, and has done so through all the social, cultural and technological changes of the last fifty years, under Michael Schmidt’s sometimes solo, sometimes shared editorship – which is also a unique achievement. Speaking for myself, two months are hardly sufficient to read the rich array of poetry, notes, essays and reviews it carries.

I wouldn’t be doing my duty as a Carcanet Board member if I didn’t encourage you to take out a subscription under the terms offered to StAnza’s friends, or to buy PNR 269 to sample the magazine.  In a poem from the Archive in this issue, Silis Macleod writes: “There are three tae qhom I huv promised love / Tae three a service of uneven skill” and the first of those he names is “the important cause of poetry”. Here’s to PN Review, and its love for and long service to the cause of poetry.’

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Robyn Marsack began her long association with Carcanet Press by editing the first edition of Edmund Blunden’s Selected Poems in 1982, and worked as a publishers’ editor until she became Director of the Scottish Poetry Library 2000–2016. She was a Royal Literary Fund Writing Fellow at the University of Glasgow 2016–2018. She has co-edited several poetry anthologies, including OxfordPoets 2013 with Iain Galbraith, and edited Blunden’s Fall In, Ghosts: Selected War Prose, published by Carcanet in 2014.

Subscribe to PN Review magazine at pnreview.co.uk.