The Listener

In Cambridge the other day, I succumbed to an impulse purchase in Oxfam: The Music of What Happens: Poems from The Listener 1965 - 1980 (BBC, 1981). Its 140+ pages are crammed with familiar poems, first published in The Listener. Younger readers might not know that this magazine was a creature of the BBC, and its demise is still mourned. (Budgets, opportunity costs, you know.) It has an astonishing list of contents:

Robert Graves (b.1895)
£.s.d.
Frances Bellerby (1899-1975)
Bereft Child's First Night
Stevie Smith (1902-1975)
The Galloping Cat
Friends of the River Trent
Valuable
C.Day Lewis (1904-1972)
Ballintubbert House, Co. Laois
Geoffrey Grigson (b.1905)
Difficult Season
John Betjeman (b.1906)
A Surrey Crematorium
W. H. Auden 1907-1973)
Lullaby
Nocturne
Stephen Spender (b. 1909)
V. W., 1941
W. R. Rodgers (1909-1969)
Home Thoughts from Abroad
Norman McCaig (b.1910)
Gulls on a Hill Loch
Susanne Knowles (b. 1911)
Diptych: An Annunciation
Roy Fuller (b.1912)
An English Summer
George Barker (b. 1913)
I Met with Napper Tandy
In Memory of Robert MacBryde
Henry Reed (b. 1914)
Returning of Issue
Four People
Gavin Ewart (b. 1916)
2001 - The Tennyson/Hardy Poem
Charles Causley (b. 1917)
Ten Types of Hospital Visitor
Robert Conquest (b.1917)
747 (London - Chicago)
To be a Pilgrim
Robert Lowell (1917-1977)
In Dreams Begin Responsibilities
Iris Murdoch (b. 1919)
Motorist and Dead Bird
P. N. Furbank (b. 1920)
Sundays
D. J. Enright (b. 1920)
The Accents of Brecht
Where I Am
Guest
Edwin Morgan (b. 1920)
A Too Hot Summer
Philip Larkin (b.1922)
Cut Grass
How Distant
The Explosion
The Old Fools
Donald Davie (b. 1922)
Essences
Intervals in a Busy Life
Seeing Her Leave
Kingsley Amis (b. 1922)
Coming of Age
Louis Simpson (b. 1923)
Baruch
Before the Poetry Reading
Chocolates
David Holbrook (b. 1923)
Student Daughter Home for the Weekend
Patricia Beer
Arms
The Estuary
The Eyes of the World
James Berry (b. 1924)
cousin Ralph
Charles Tomlinson (b. 1927)
Tarquinia
Thom Gunn (b. 1929)
Grasses
Expression
The Exercise
Peter Porter (b. 1929)
The Descent into Avernus
Ted Hughes (b. 1930)
A March Calf
Swifts
Crow's First Lesson
Crow's Last Stand
George MacBeth (b. 1932)
The Shell
Eric Milward (b. 1935)
The Girl's Confession
John Fuller (b. 1937)
Aberporth
Dom Moraes (b. 1938)
Speech in the Desert
Ian Hamilton (b. 1938)
Last Waltz
Peter Dale (b. 1938)
Hawk
Seamus Heaney (b. 1939)
First Calf
Limbo
Punishment
Song
Derek Mahon (b. 1941)
A Disused Shed in County Wexford
Veronica Horwell (b. 1948)
Death of a Villager 1200-1740
George Szirtes (b. 1948)
At the Dressing-Table Mirror
Christopher Reid (b. 1949)
We're All in Business by Ourselves
James Fenton (b. 1949)
South Parks Road
Patrick Williams (b. 1950)
Trails
Paul Muldoon
The Cure for Warts
Derryscollop in February
Andrew Motion (b.1952)
The Colour Works

I find this spooky for all sorts of reasons: the fact that so many of them are now dead, the way so many of these poems are now part of the literary landscape, the way some of our most illustrious contemporaries are nudging their way in towards the end, and how few unfamiliar names there are. This isn't just co-incidence: The Listener was one of the places to be published if you wanted to be taken seriously - as a mainstream poet, at any rate. And spooky because when the book was published, the magazine hadn't started the downward spiral that began when the suits started asking the BBC why it was running a literary magazine instead of concentrating on ratings. 1981 still feels like the recent past. But it was a different world.

The editor, Derwent May, was poetry editor of The Listener during 1965-1980. He says the contents represent one in ten of the poems published in the magazine during that period, out of an estimated 20,000 submissions, 'all of which I have looked at, with reactions ranging from delight to outrage.' Some were solicited:

Another morning, Philip Larkin told me on the phone that he hadn't written a poem for over a year; three days later, one of his most beautiful poems arrived for me in the post. Did my phone call, I wondered, precipitate in some strange way the writing of the poem?

You bet.

It's interesting to speculate how many submissions The Listener would get if it were still publishing. Fiona Sampson recently told Woman's Hour that Poetry Review gets more than 60,000 poems a year - all of which she reads, no doubt with similar reactions to May's. If she allows herself weekends off and a bit of holiday, that's an average of over 200 a day. A good many may warrant no more than a glance, but even so, it must take a strong constitution.

I've only dipped in so far, but will read and may report further. Oh, and I had a look on abebooks.com. If your taste runs to historical documents, this Listener collection can be picked up very cheaply.