Redskin versus Paleface Poets

In my last article for Just Beauty, “Where Do Poems Come From?”, I mentioned the distinction that the American critic, Philip Rahv, drew in the 1930s between writers he identified as either ‘palefaces’ or ‘redskins’. Henry James belonged to the former and Walt Whitman to the latter.

It’s similar to the opposition of head and heart, Apollo and Dionysus, or Classicism and Romanticism, and is often the subject of debate in relation to poetry today. Should it ‘come as naturally as leaves to a tree’, as Keats thought, or is inspiration for amateurs, as punk poet, John Cooper Clarke, believes? Two poetry magazines that started life last year belong to different sides.

Both The Aftershock Review and The Little Review are print magazines and both have clocked up four issues, but there the similarities end. Most immediately striking is their difference in size: Royal in the case of The Aftershock Review (156 mm x 234 mm to be precise), whereas The Little Review (in line with its name and unrelated to the famous early 20^th-century modernist magazine) is a pocket-sized A6. But the real distinction between them is their take on poetry: one is redskin, the other paleface.

Redskin versus Paleface Poets

‘Founded in the North West and shaped by a queer, disabled and neurodivergent editor, The Aftershock Review is more than a magazine. It is a space where poetry refuses silence, where survival becomes language, and where trauma is transformed,’ proclaims the cover. Its founder and editor-in-chief, Max Wallis, suffered a mental health crisis in 2024, as a result of which he was sectioned under the Mental Health Act and diagnosed with PTSD and severe ADHD.

The Aftershock Review was born out of his recovery. ‘Where Issue One named the damage, and Issue Two mapped the fragments that remain,’ the blurb says, ‘Issue 3 asks, more dangerously, What do we need but a bit of hope?’

As you might expect, a lot of the poems in the magazine, including Wallis’s own, are written in ‘confessional’ mode. His prose poem, ‘Well Done, You Didn’t Die’, begins:

I noped out of the meeting with thirty anonymous people like me because what violence        integrates with mindfulness and recovery? And Oh, I know it is okay, really; it is not their fault I am triggered. But it would be nice sometimes to not think of it, to think: future, nouveau, growth, a blank slate. . . .

Redskin versus Paleface Poets

But that’s by no means true of them all. In fact, there’s a range of styles on offer and Wallis has been able to attract an impressive number of names that are familiar to poetry readers, the best known appearing in large type on the front cover. That said, in a recent Facebook post he wrote of having declined poems by multiple T S Eliot Prize winners and shortlisted poets, as well as poets with major publishers, while at the same time being proud of having accepted many poets being published for the first time. Next year, he hopes to dedicate an issue to ‘poets without any accolades, publications or magazines to their bios.’

The Little Review lists just a few of its contributors in small type on the back cover and in the main part of the magazine identifies authors, many of whom are well known, simply by their initials, with a key at the back. The idea is to focus attention on the writing rather than the writers in much the same way that practical criticism exercises were given to us blind. (I have to confess that I found myself guiltily turning to the key, before reading each poem—old habits die hard!)

A tendency towards the impersonal is also detectable in the poems themselves, which are typically more distanced from their subjects than those you will find in The Aftershock Review. Whereas the poems there may have titles such as ‘Panic’ or ‘Coming Out as a Survivor of Sexual Assault’, in The Little Review you are more likely to find ‘Pallets’ or ‘Fragment of Pottery Decorated with a Human Face’, the latter by TD (Timothy Donnelly) beginning:

Evidence says seagrasses evolved from red and green algae

  into ferns and great conifers before something like nostalgia

 

drew them back to the sea-bottom via sugar cane, bamboo,

 and major grains like rices. Don’t quote me here – this is loose . . .

The magazine is edited by Tristram Fane Saunders, a poet, editor and journalist, who is currently Fellow Commoner in the Creative Arts at Trinity College, Cambridge. He has said in an interview: ‘We have no interest whatsoever in the lives or careers of our contributors. We care about writing, not writers.’ In line with this, the submissions are anonymised, before he sifts through them.

Redskin versus Paleface Poets

However, the magazine’s most striking innovation is its ‘NB rule’. Standing for ‘no bores’ rather than ‘nota bene’, it describes the magazine’s requirement that every poem submitted must be accompanied by at least one book review. Fane Saunders explains that this addresses the problem editors generally face of being inundated with poetry submissions, while finding it hard to attract poetry reviews. The two problems are connected, he says:

“…the editors were plagued with Writers, when they wanted Readers. We have met Writers. We dislike them. The Little Review is not a magazine for Writers. We are a magazine for Readers.

“By Writers (capital W) we refer specifically to those people who write stories or poems but never read them. They are legion. Many have published books. Nobody really enjoys a book by a Writer; there is nothing to enjoy (imagine a record by a musician who has never listened to music). Like conversationalists who only speak and never listen, they are bores.”

He considers poems and reviews separately, so the publication of one does not necessarily mean that the other will be printed, but one way or another at least half of an issue’s content is taken up by articles and reviews. (The Aftershock Review publishes only poetry.) Unsurprisingly, a number of its poets are also critics, although some of the most entertaining and insightful reviews are said to have come from readers who have never before written a book review for a magazine.

From my descriptions, you might think that The Little Review represents the establishment and The Aftershock Review is an outsider—indeed it carries a quote from The Guardian describing it as ‘a jolt to the mainstream’ (this from the poet, Hugo Williams, in an article by Suzi Feay). In fact, Wallis’s magazine has been supported from the outset by some well-established poets—Williams himself and Pascale Petit—and receives funding from both The Arts Council and The T S Eliot Foundation. Two of its poems were longlisted for The Forward Prize this year—no mean achievement for a new magazine, but unlikely to be achieved by one operating outside the mainstream.

The Little Magazine, on the other hand, receives no external funding, relying instead on sales and subscriptions, as well as a small amount of advertising revenue. Of the two, you might also argue that its editorial approach is the more innovative.

Which of the magazines you prefer is likely to depend on whether you are a redskin or a paleface—or at least, someone who prefers writers who are one or the other. However, both journals are well worth reading and equally deserving of support. Indeed, since each is so different from the other, you might like to consider subscribing to both.