New Magazine in Manhattan

Modern poetry is the sick man of the arts. Precious, arid, obscure, it sometimes seems too feeble and withdrawn to be nursed back to life. Indeed, modern poetry has played the game of ten little Indians with its readers for so long that in recent years neither London nor New York could claim a magazine devoted to first-class poetry. Now each may stake half a claim to a new bimonthly: Poetry London-New York. Price: 75-c- a copy. Stamped on the sedately styled cover of the first issue is a red-and-black lyrebird drawn by Mobilist Alexander Calder as a symbol of the editor's feeling that "the lyrical spirit is badly needed in poetry today." Between the covers appear works by an honor guard of Anglo-American poets, among them Robert Graves, Roy Campbell, W. H. Auden, Marianne Moore, E. E. Cummings. The spur behind the would-be poetic renaissance is an unusual editor-poet and long-time friend of poets and poetry, Thurairajah Tambimuttu.

Subpatron of the Arts. Tambimuttu (Tambi to intimates), born in Ceylon, educated at a Roman Catholic college, is no stranger to the West. Tambi settled in London in 1937 at the age of 21, and within two years launched Poetry London on a -L-5 shoestring. The magazine went broke on the second issue, but Tambi kept it alive by coaxing the publishing firm of Nicholson & Watson Ltd. into taking a planned loss of -L-6,000 a year (roughly $24,000) as a "prestige gesture." With Poetry London and the -L-6,000, Tambi played his role of sub-patron of the arts with a flourish, built PL's circulation to 10,000, made it a proving ground for Britain's promising younger poets. But a managerial rift brought the magazine to its death in 1951.

From the time he took in the New York skyline in 1952, Tambi thought of erecting an intercontinental "skyscraper of poetry." Poetry London-New York slowly took shape in the fusty, rambling apartment in Manhattan's far East 80s that Tambi shares with his pretty, Bombay-born wife, Sana Tyabjee. The first issue hit the bookstalls last month, at a cost of about $6,000, and an unsolicited angel, Dwight Ripley, "an American painter educated at Harrow," made up the bulk of the deficit. Tambi pays his contributors "according to need" at a top rate of $1.25 a line, but most of the poets in the first issue donated their poems. A soft-spoken man who chainsmokes Pall Malls and dresses in Indian fashion, Tambi bills his own services at $80 a week, agrees with T. S. Eliot that every poet should have a job other than poetry.

"Bully Them." The odds are that Poetry London-New York will not prove the securest of jobs for Tambi. But the initial printing of 4,000 copies sold out; a supplementary printing of 2,000 was going fast at week's end, and readers got a good 75-c- worth. Among the familiar universal themes of love, life, courage, birth and death, the magazine tucks in such old-fashioned surprises full of simpler merits as a bit of verse called The Rift by Walter de la Mare:

'We argue on of gods, not God, And might all strife resign, If only I could find in yours, What you reject in mine.'

Best of the newcomers is Britain's Chris topher Logue, who brings to the naked charms of his ladylove the sensual splendors of The Song of Solomon. For other issues, Tambi hopes to secure poems from Dame Edith Sitwell and T. S. Eliot.

"But," he sighs with the editor's age-old lament, "I have to bully them."

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