Audience 1, 2, & 3

The more unnecessary pretensions any new publication makes, the harder the time it has establishing itself. Audience, a new pamphlet of poetry and criticism turned out by a group of instructors and graduate students, has avoided this pitfall. By restricting its ambitions and its format, the editors have already produced three issues that fulfill the magazine's intentions--to air a little more of the writing and thinking going on in Cambridge.

An application of the newly-acquired Dylan Thomas manuscripts in Houghton Library to the published text of Sir John's Hill has been the magazine's most valuable critical contribution to date. In a short essay in the first issue, Audience editor Ralph Maud shows how the manuscripts give a new insight on Thomas' process of word choice in a few lines of the poem. His critical remarks are specifically directed and clearly stated, and the piece is of greater concrete value to Thomas scholarship than a more pretentious approach might allow.

Equally simple but less important is Perry Organ's series of remarks on The Gospel Witch in the third issue. Nevertheless, Miss Organ's commentaries, which deal with the written play rather than with the recent performance, are equally clear and to the point. In line with a policy of printing essays of current critical interest, the editors hope in the next issue to include an article on Edith Sitwell's phonetic theories.

Poetrywise, Audience has contained works by Donald Hall, Byron Vazakas, John Hollander, and Edward Honig. The second issue printed a previously unpublished scene from William Alfred's Agamemnon in the same modern idiom which characterizes the reworking of the play as it recently appeared. The most remarkable of the single poems, to my mind, is Honig's Snowbird Blues, in which his jerky rhythm and unusual images create a bizarre and troubling effect.

A catalogue of the contents of these three very short issues would probably be the best way to show what the magazine is trying to do, that is, to publish a representative selection of the works of a group producing in Cambridge but which has had no regular outlet before. The need is a valid one, and in its first three issues Audience has shown itself capable of filling it.