A Note on Ninth Decade
Ninth Decade was a venture by Tony, Ian Robinson, and me. I think we met first at Ian's house in Fulham to discuss the amalgamation of our three magazines: Tony's Shearsman, Ian's Oasis, and my Atlantic Review; our book publishing would be unaffected. Thinking up a title for a magazine can be daunting; you want to avoid the dull (Modern Verse), the amateur (Avenues to Poetry), the frivolous (Cow Pats), the pretentious (New Frontiers), the disingenuous (Yet Another Poetry Magazine), the obscure (The Kingdom of Hurrahs). I seem to recall we covered three A4 pages with possibles. We finally took our cue from Robert Bly's The Fifties: A Magazine of Poetry and General Opinion (later The Sixties), which was quite adventurous for that time, publishing many translations of Scandinavian and French writers. We wanted a well-produced periodical which emphasised the internationalist, innovative work of the decade and which each of us had been publishing separately in our respective magazines.
The first issue came out in 1983 and lasted until number 14 as Tenth Decade in 1991.“It was set up to explore the significant confluence of foreign and native writing in Britain that began in the 1960s and has continued unabated into the present day,” as the blurb for our subscription form had it.
The contributors of course reflected our editorial preferences: Tony's for Europeans such as Claude Royet-Journaud, Eugène Guillevic, Emmanuel Hocquard, the British Martin Anderson, and the American Gustaf Sobin; Ian's for Scandinavians including Werner Aspenström, Tomas Tranströmer, and Kjell Espmark, and the British John Ash and Roy Fisher, among many others; and mine for Americans such as Larry Eigner, Robert Kelly, Michael Heller, Toby Olson, Fielding Dawson, Jackson Mac Low, David Ignatow, and Gilbert Sorrentino, again among others. “Ninth Decade is required reading for those interested in contemporary Modernist poetry experiments,” noted Serials Review. Looking back, I think Tony's contributors were the more adventurous choices, whose sometime minimalist work I couldn't always get to terms with at the time but which have grown on me since. The magazine was liberally illustrated with Ian's and the late Ray Seaford's surreal drawings on the covers and inside pages, supplemented from time to time by the graphics of Jean Demélier, Stanley Engel, Brian Lalor, and Mary Maloney; Seaford was also Design Editor.
After the last issue, Tony and Ian continued with their magazines and I concentrated on my Permanent Press and on working collaboratively with artists. Tony's Shearsman reached us from wherever he was based – Hong Kong, Macau, Houston, Santiago – until he returned to Britain.
Ian Robinson died in 2004.
Ninth Decade was a venture by Tony, Ian Robinson, and me. I think we met first at Ian's house in Fulham to discuss the amalgamation of our three magazines: Tony's Shearsman, Ian's Oasis, and my Atlantic Review; our book publishing would be unaffected. Thinking up a title for a magazine can be daunting; you want to avoid the dull (Modern Verse), the amateur (Avenues to Poetry), the frivolous (Cow Pats), the pretentious (New Frontiers), the disingenuous (Yet Another Poetry Magazine), the obscure (The Kingdom of Hurrahs). I seem to recall we covered three A4 pages with possibles. We finally took our cue from Robert Bly's The Fifties: A Magazine of Poetry and General Opinion (later The Sixties), which was quite adventurous for that time, publishing many translations of Scandinavian and French writers. We wanted a well-produced periodical which emphasised the internationalist, innovative work of the decade and which each of us had been publishing separately in our respective magazines.
The first issue came out in 1983 and lasted until number 14 as Tenth Decade in 1991.“It was set up to explore the significant confluence of foreign and native writing in Britain that began in the 1960s and has continued unabated into the present day,” as the blurb for our subscription form had it.
The contributors of course reflected our editorial preferences: Tony's for Europeans such as Claude Royet-Journaud, Eugène Guillevic, Emmanuel Hocquard, the British Martin Anderson, and the American Gustaf Sobin; Ian's for Scandinavians including Werner Aspenström, Tomas Tranströmer, and Kjell Espmark, and the British John Ash and Roy Fisher, among many others; and mine for Americans such as Larry Eigner, Robert Kelly, Michael Heller, Toby Olson, Fielding Dawson, Jackson Mac Low, David Ignatow, and Gilbert Sorrentino, again among others. “Ninth Decade is required reading for those interested in contemporary Modernist poetry experiments,” noted Serials Review. Looking back, I think Tony's contributors were the more adventurous choices, whose sometime minimalist work I couldn't always get to terms with at the time but which have grown on me since. The magazine was liberally illustrated with Ian's and the late Ray Seaford's surreal drawings on the covers and inside pages, supplemented from time to time by the graphics of Jean Demélier, Stanley Engel, Brian Lalor, and Mary Maloney; Seaford was also Design Editor.
After the last issue, Tony and Ian continued with their magazines and I concentrated on my Permanent Press and on working collaboratively with artists. Tony's Shearsman reached us from wherever he was based – Hong Kong, Macau, Houston, Santiago – until he returned to Britain.
Ian Robinson died in 2004.