Aesthetics of obscenity: the avant-garde text and underground impact of My Own Mag and Poetmeat

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article uses archival research to analyse the text, aesthetics and impact of two little poetry magazines of the early 1960s: Poetmeat edited by Dave Cunliffe and Tina Morris, and Jeff Nuttall’s My Own Mag. Building upon previous studies which show the part small press publications played in distributing innovative US verse and the influence that had upon UK poetry, it illustrates how the experimentalism of Poetmeat and My Own Mag contributed to this process. This research builds on my own book Hidden Culture, Forgotten History (2017), James Charnley’s recent Nuttall biography Anything but Dull (2022) as well as the work of art historian Andrew Wilson and academic Gillian Whiteley to argue that the production of these two journals pursued a political as well as a cultural agenda. I contend that little poetry magazines went beyond the dissemination of avant-garde verse, illustrating how the experimentalism carried by the two journals was part of a process which bridged the gap separating different artforms, the development by which conceptualism later came to the fore. Further, it proposes that the cut-ups of William Burroughs were key to this transformation. Finally, the article concludes by raising questions about the behaviour of Cunliffe and Nuttall which may explain their continuing obscurity.