“Fuck It Let’s Do it, Despite the Odds” — A Very Eclectic Survey and Some Thoughts on Contemporary Magazines

I'm tired. (Without formality, wouldn't every academic article begin like this?) Because of my tiredness, which is both physical and conceptual, I devised a ruse to get me out of this rut. To begin writing, I involved other people.

I was happy to receive the invitation to contribute to this special issue for Post45, but having read and written quite a lot about little magazines over the last few years, I didn't want to repeat myself more than necessary. Besides, I realized quickly when I started my research on small-press culture about 10 years ago that editors and contributors have always debated the nature and purpose of the little magazine long before scholars came along, sometimes explicitly, sometimes less so — and so any scholarly attempt to describe magazines must begin from the ground up. It's important to me to acknowledge this generative power of magazines and "generative" is also, perhaps unsurprisingly, a word that writers often use to explain why we still need magazines. So, I decided to send a questionnaire to some editors I know (or know of) as a sure-fire way to boost my enthusiasm before the imminent deadline in the hope that this would create a more dynamic contemporary archive; to get us a little closer to practice, to community, to conversation, in other words.  

My choice of an eclectic survey isn't accidental. Surveys, forums, and questionnaires are popular forms found in magazines themselves (see Cole 2018, Seita 2018). In 1981, the Bay Area-based newsletter Poetry Flash published "The Flash Mag Survey," sent to 70 writers and editors asking them what their five favorite magazines were.1 The editor Steve Abbott, a gay writer who died of AIDS-related illness in 1992, introduces the section with his own selections, some of which I'd like to quote at length, to give you a flavour of Abbott's editorial style and what I see as his and many magazine editors' characteristic generosity:

Already, we're right in the middle, a real thicket, of a rich sociology of magazine culture I will refrain from delving into here because my intent for this piece is to show and make available and put in conversation rather than to (over-)analyze.

Barbara Einzig picked "Montemora, for its solidity, though I like to shake it while I read."3

Jessica Hagedorn: "People, lotsa pictures, gossip and highly entertaining while you're sitting in your favorite xerox gallery waiting for your manuscript to get done."4

Dennis Cooper: "Peeping Tom, a British mimeo mag mixing uneven but hard-working poetry with gossip and slander about the, apparently, oppressive & ultra-boring British lit establishment. Terribly silly but its verve & integrity are impressive."5

Abbott ends his introduction to the survey with a call to new mag editors, offering to "help get the word out."6 Criticism, in the best sense, is also a kind of "getting the word out." It can, like editing, be a way of giving back to a community that has nourished you. From the beginning, part of my motivation in doing research about magazines was to share the voices of those editors and contributors who so often don't make it into the canon, and if they do, probably not with their supposedly peripheral comments in magazines, which is why I admire them even more.

In my own mini survey, my first question to correspondents was: "why print?" By this, I meant to distinguish print from digital publishing, but also had in mind "print" as in "publish." Why do we continue to publish, contribute to, and read magazines? What's this desire about? I was aware of the slightly ham-fisted nature of this question or indeed "debate," in which I am not invested — and as the editors of DreamsTimeFree put it, the "digital is overrated," perhaps precisely because it "dominate[s] the architectures of our lives"7 — but it was a conversation starter that allowed editors to declare their magazine's raison d'etre.8

SPAM, for example, started as a print zine and ran for 10 issues, initially with the intention of "putting the internet on the page." The result was refreshing: "to see a YouTube comment posted on a black-and-white page, in a poetry zine." While the editors continue to publish print anthologies and single-author pamphlets, the zine reincarnated as the digital SPAM Plaza, which was founded "out of a perceived lack of spaces (especially in the UK) for critical review, experimental nonfiction and essays centred on poetry and poetics. Crucially we wanted this to be a space that took poetry off its pedestal." I hear resonances here of Bernadette Mayer's desire for her magazine 0 To 9 to resist the "precious" object, the "perfection of the poem with white space around it, set off from other things" by a luxurious margin.9 To create new or alternative spaces and opportunities, in turn, is a common and almost perennially true motivation for small-press publishing. Similarly, Linda Kemp, the editor of Futch, a creative-critical digital magazine centred around neurodiverse and / or LGBTQI*+communities founded in 2020 just before the pandemic, speaks about the need for "conversation," "social space" — not just replicating a community, but also leading to new "community formation."

Kashif Sharma-Patel, editor of theHythe, the digital arm of the 87Press, also mentioned "dialogue, discourse and aesthetic interplay" as crucial to its vision.10 With this focus on community comes what the editors of SPAM have identified as a unique sense of "generosity" and "intimacy."11 There's a discovery effect through magazines (more so than books) where readers find new writers and vice versa. Magazines continue to provide, as Jess Chandler of Prototype puts it, precisely such "an outlet" and "purpose,"12 each potentially becoming "a platform to interesting artistic practices that use the written word."13 As Sharma-Patel put it, theHythe "resides to my mind somewhere between network and infrastructure, providing service, amplification and access." Along similar lines, Bricks from the Kiln, founded in 2015, "came out of, and is continually fuelled by, necessity, need, curiosity and frustration — our own more than anyone else's. A perpetual itch" to generate a dialogue between research and practice across art, literature, and design, not "widely available in the design circles we operated in at the time."14

This attention to the magazine as a community-forging organ is for me the strongest link between contemporary magazines and historical avant-garde and small-press projects. In my survey, I asked the editors if they identified with this tradition and pretty much everyone did, some with hesitation (is it "grandiose and presumptive" to identify with the avant-garde today? Matthew of Bricks from the Kiln asked), some with a firmer embrace. TheHythe, for example, hopes to challenge the avant-garde's image "as a sanitised, formalist vessel, one retroactively purified of its dissident edges (queer, poc, neurodivergent)," asking how it can "still bear a subaltern insurgency in the contemporary."

In their sometimes less tame or tameable formats, magazines push back against the publishing establishment. Sometimes they do this simply by not fitting into a given format or even a bookshelf and this "anti-publishing-establishment" spirit can bring a certain "freedom."15 (Jess, Prototype and Test Centre). Sometimes a lack of archiving or relative ephemerality shows how magazines have always been "open to the problematics of appearance/disappearance, control/randomness" (Mau Baiocco, SPAM). And yes, as Maria Sledmere/SPAM, put it, "There's a 'fuck it let's do it, despite the odds' vibe to small press publishing."

Whether or not magazines identify with the term "avant-garde" or with a history of small-press publishing more broadly, it's easy to spot how a similar language circulates that also defined earlier, historical publishing projects, many of which talked about experimentation and process. (I'm particularly fond of Agnes Ernst Meyer's phrase ''Nothing but a laboratory, a place for experiments' in the proto-Dada 291.16) Jess Chandler's Prototype, and also the now discontinued Test Centre, bear witness to those ideas even in their titles. Sometimes this identification or affiliation might also be formal (Test Centre's stab-stapled and spineless A4 paper deliberately had a "very DIY feel") or conceptual (Aspen provided inspiration for Inscription; Icteric for Bricks; Zarf, TYCI, and Object Permanence for SPAM).

This question of identification or affiliation is interesting to me because I sense a slight shift here from earlier magazine communities. While there is an ongoing emphasis on community, there's less of a magazine identity to which you as a contributor subscribe. (We've come a long way from William Carlos Williams declaring that the magazine "Others got them all", meaning: all his good poems.17) Things feel more dispersed right now. You might send a piece here, then there; the same goes for reading. In my questionnaire, I asked if any of my interlocutors subscribed to other magazines, perhaps out of an underlying guilt that this is what we ought to be doing to keep small-press publishing alive. In conversation with Margarita Athanasiou, an artist and director of the Athens Art Book Fair, we wondered about this decrease in subscriptions.18 I speculated that it's because of easier access to opportunities and the kind of work you want to read and look at. Subscribing to a magazine from the 1970s all the way to the early 2000s was a way to stay in touch with experimental art and writing practices. Looking at numerous letters to editors and other archival correspondence, I noticed that those readers who subscribed to a magazine were either very aligned with its vision or felt they should subscribe to stay on top of the news as it were. Subscription shows commitment. Margarita remembered the excitement that came with waiting for a new issue to arrive in the post, which creates a very different temporality to the (often though not always) instantaneous allure of digital publishing.

There is certainly a different temporality and embodiment of publishing and reading a print magazine: "You can also carry it around and read it again and again, whereas if I read a great poem on some website I might forget where I read it, because I'm terrible with organising bookmarks. You can sort of splay a magazine out on the breakfast table and read it with someone else, you can pass it around."19

Many of the editors I corresponded with highlighted the obvious advantages of digital publishing as allowing (hypothetically) greater access, and the possibility for sound and video to comingle with text. And yet, as the Inscription editors pointed out with reference to their own journal and their inspiration Aspen, there are many ways in which a print journal can become multimedia through the inclusion of tapes, LPs, MP3 sticks, visual art or text across different inscription surfaces, etc. (I've yet to find a print magazine that includes video — I envision a miniature version of Joan Jonas's My New Theatre installation. If anyone is interested in trying such a thing, get in touch with me.)

Print, as Matthew Stuart and Andrew Walsh-Lister of Bricks from the Kiln highlighted, is "a longer, more difficult and expensive process, which, truth be told, can be perversely advantageous, on an editorial and formal level. The labour and the costs involved are inherently restrictive, they seemingly raise the stakes, yet force upon us valuable questions. We find this friction productive and generative, it keeps us on our toes and requires a deep consideration of the value of each issue and piece of material we publish — is it worth it and why? The inbuilt slowness is a benefit to us as well; there's time to reflect, test, allow things to percolate and bubble to the surface that might otherwise be missed, for connections to grow organically."20

Inscription, Prototype, and Bricks all emphasised that their choices of design, paper, and layout crucially affect how we understand the content. Inscription, especially, is all about the materiality of reading: "what pages do other than simply convey information." Quite literally these pages gradually rotate in the first issue (you have to turn the magazine in order to read it). Issue one also sports a hole in the center that allows you to put it on your LP player (that is, if you're willing to rethink what "playing" or listening to music might look or sound like); issue two has two beginnings, and you can start from either end. The editors' notes were "translated" into computer punch tape. The magazine is "a capacious container with lots of extraneous parts."21

Interested in the container metaphor (perhaps one of the most pervasive in our linguistic toolkit), I asked editors to find a metaphor either for their own magazine or for magazines more broadly:

I've elsewhere described contemporary magazines as "vivariums"26 which I would now revise given this watery expansive driftwood turned poetic picnic sur l'herbe, so it's more merrily uncontained.

Several editors saw the act of publishing as "generative," "responsive," or even "addictive." As Maria Sledmere puts it (SPAM): "There's an addictive quality to making zines, because they have this magic power of making contact, of proliferation. Zine publishing is a rapidly changing ecosystem but its accessibility and low budget means there's almost always room for more contributions."27

To end my mini survey, I explained that I've always been fascinated by how many historical little magazines used to list other magazines they had an affinity with, a practice that continued in early blogging culture (blogs linking to other blogs). Whenever I think about magazines and their linkages, I'm also always thinking about Juliana Spahr's and Jena Osman's first issue of Chain for which the editors created a forum on small-press publishing and magazines edited by women and invited a series of chain poems by yet another group of women, both of which were intended to expand their community and function as "a gesture toward conversation." In that spirit, I asked, which magazines would you — or do you — list on your (imaginary) back pages? 

Inscription:

Each article in the issue is typeset and laid out according to the conventions of a previous journal or magazine. Some are high-brow and avant-garde, some pulpy and low brow: Blast; The Egoist; Art Monthly; Cabinet; Amazing Stories; Spare Rib.

Futch:

Ah yes, listings, those were the days . . . Amberflora, datableed, the Journal of British and Irish Innovative Poetry, Litmus, LUDD GANG, Manifold, Shearsman, SPAM, Splinter, Tenebrae, Tentacular, Tripwire, the ZARF archive (💜), would all be and perhaps will be on/in the Futch Press Journal listings page.

Margarita Athanasiou:

—A) GLIMPSE) OF), an experimental lit and art journal based in Athens, edited by Dimitra Ioannou.

—Yusra magazine, which exists in print, has no website, only an Instagram account, and is, as Margarita put it, very political in the way it talks about gender.

(Margarita Athanasiou also self-publishes her own zine, one of them is called Having sex with spiders made me an intergalactic princess. Other zines and pamphlets are available on the artist's website: https://www.athanasiou.club/publications)

TheHythe:

• Spamzine
• Datableed
• Zarf (defunct)
• Ludd Gang
• Tenebrae (Fathomsun Press)
• MOTE
• Erotoplasty
• Paratext
• Tripwire
• Amberflora
• Adjacent Pineapple

Bricks from the Kiln:

• > The Last Books
• > Ugly Duckling Presse
• > Spam Magazine
• > Counter-Signals
• > Prototype
• > Happy Hypocrite
• > Serving Library
• > Design Writing
• > A Circular
• > MA Bibliotèque
• > SICV
• > Black Chalk & Co.
• > BOOKS (Peckham)
• > Inga
• > Good Press
• > Map Magazine

Prototype:

• Curtains
• Floating Bear
• Angel Hair
• Poetry
• clinic
• The White Review
• Hotel

DreamsTimeFree:

• https://wormsmagazine.com/
• https://stickyfingers.cargo.site/
• https://www.limbomagazine.com/

SPAM:

Zarf used to do something similar on their backpages. We're currently making a section of our website called Archive Fever which is sort of in the spirit of this but also webrings. I miss when you'd go to someone's blog or GeoCities and they'd list a bunch of websites they liked and you could navigate in this rhizomatic network of shared interests, scenes or tags, as opposed to algorithms that organise things for you (making it really hard to stumble upon lesser-known gems).

Adjacent Pineapple, -algia, Amberflora, Blackbox Manifold, Bluehouse Journal, Datableed, Erotoplasty Gutter, Ludd Gang, Tender, Wet Grain, Wonder and Zarf.

SPAM also recommended: Glasgow Zine Fest, Glasgow Zine Library, and Good Press

*

For me this short exercise in community constellations highlights the enduring importance of such gestures of connection. I want to conclude with my own list of magazine metaphors (or metonyms?, as Linda Kemp asked me once), the list being itself a favorite among a certain type of proto-conceptual or New York School magazine:

Magazines are:

Some magazines are defined by what they are not:

I will end with a line from Bernadette Mayer, found in her list of Experiments handed out during one of her Poetry Project workshops (ca. 1988):

"Please add to this list"30

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Notes: I want to thank all the magazine editors who corresponded with me — Kashif Sharma-Patel, Mat Jenner, Jess Chandler, Maria Sledmere, Mau Baiocco, Alice Hill-Woods, Margarita Athanasiou, Matthew Stuart, Andrew Walsh-Lister, Linda Kemp — as well as those who didn't have time, but whose input and small-press work I value: Carlos Soto Román, Brinda Bose, Sophia Le Fraga, Brandon Brown, Emma Gomis, and Jenny Cookson.

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Sophie Seita is an artist, writer, and researcher who works with language as a material across expansive writing projects, performances, lecture performances, videos, sound installations, and textiles. She's presented, performed, and exhibited her work nationally and internationally at venues such as the Royal College of Art, Nottingham Contemporary, Flat Time House, UP Projects, LaMaMa Galleria (NYC), Printed Matter (NYC), Queer Art Projects, Cafe Oto, JNU (New Delhi), Kettle's Yard (Cambridge), a.p./Callie's Berlin, and elsewhere. She's the author of, most recently, Provisional Avant-Gardes (Stanford University Press, 2019) and My Little Enlightenment Plays (Pamenar, 2020). Upcoming projects include an exhibition at Mimosa House, London (Oct-Dec 2023) and a book of experimental essays, Lessons of Decal, forthcoming from the 87 Press. She teaches in the Art Department at Goldsmiths and, alongside Alex Rehding, runs the Sound/Text Seminar at Harvard's Mahindra Center. 

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