Editor: Richard Tabor r.tabor-
Simonburn Cottage, Sutton Montis, Yeovil, Somerset BA22 7HF
Richard Tabor founded Lobby Press in 1978 with the intention of breaking down barriers
between more overtly experimental and more formally conservative poetic forms. His
intention was to publish sets of four pamphlet-
Each set was accompanied by the Lobby Press Newsletter, the first printed on just one side of A4 paper, but it quickly acquired a life of its own as a forum for short poems, reviews and fierce debate. By the following year Jeff Nuttall was urging readers “wanting to know how poets are arguing and what they are arguing about” to subscribe to “Lobby... A sort of bear pit of a magazine”. It had already caused a storm at the 1979 Cambridge International Poetry Festival in its evaluation of a programme which Tabor had helped to devise, as a committee member.
The following February Clive Fencott was the first author to force Tabor to change the book format when he insisted, rightly, that his sound text, The Autobiographies of Dick Turpin, needed an A4 format. Thereafter any rectangular shape went but production got slower. The most recent was Peter Larkin’s excellent 1993 book, Cloud Assail. The last Newsletter appeared in 1982, a 148 page bumper double issue accompanied by a cassette (as were issues 16 and 17) featuring then USA L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets and the English writer, performer songwriter and translator, Paul Buck. Although a remarkable and exciting issue the project had become too big and collapsed under it’s own weight. Tabor in fact printed a twentieth issue in the old, more modest, corner stapled A4 format but never distributed it.
When the Newsletter last appeared the project had undergone a huge shift, overtly favouring the “experimental” poetries. This was reflected in the 1983 launch of ‘procedures’, jointly edited with Richard Hammersley, although geographical distance prevented further issues from coming out. In the late 1980s Lobby made another attempt to publish conservative forms with the new, but this time with the explicit aim of introducing the latter to a wider audience. A joint editorship with Steve Davies of a magazine called ContraFlow came to an end when Tabor’s distaste for much of the material in it became too much to bear.
To get a feel of the pottery scene immediately before and after Thatcher launched her attack on “society” and culture get the books, get the magazines and above all, get the bound volumes of the Newsletter!
“... energy, ingenuity and a commendable willingness to take risks.”
Jeff Nuttall, The Guardian, 6th March 1980
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