REALITY STUDIOS 1978-1988 - now online

REALITY STUDIOS was one of the precursors of Reality Street. Starting in 1978 as a mimeographed corner-stapled monthly newsletter, featuring poetry, reviews, notes and news, and sometimes more eccentric contributions, it transformed into a fat mimeographed A4 annual volume and finally into a litho printed perfect bound publication - the last five volumes in this format are pictured above.

Reality Studios itself grew out of Alembic, a magazine Ken Edwards co-edited in the 1970s. Both magazines were pioneers in the UK in publishing American/Canadian Language poetry alongside poetry of the "British Poetry Revival" from London, Cambridge and elsewhere.

All issues of Reality Studios magazine are now out of print - but thanks to Jacket2, Kelly Writers House and Danny Snelson, the entire run is now available for download in the form of searchable pdfs.

Our thanks to everybody involved with this massive task - scanning, digitising and making available online 1,000 pages originally typed onto mimeograph stencils (in the early years) and even by its final volume preceding the digital age.

Along the way, Reality Studios also published one-off pamphlets and "occasional papers" – all long out of print – and then, after the demise of the magazine itself in 1988, perfect bound poetry collections. The first of these latter, Allen Fisher's Unpolished Mirrors, is also out of print, but was revived in 2005 as part of the complete edition of Place. Also out of print now are Wendy Mulford's The Bay of Naples and Andrew Duncan's Cut Memories & False Commands, his first substantial poetry collection.

And so all that remain in print of Reality Studios are the books listed below – which you can still buy.

John Seed:
INTERIOR IN THE OPEN AIR


"In the midst of this materiality and rootedness is a debate about the real and the imagined.... There should be more writing like this." Harriet Tarlo, Iron

With images by Bronwen Barrow.

REALITY STUDIOS, 1993, 0-9507018-9-0, 48pp, price (was £5.99) £4 


John Welch:

BLOOD AND DREAMS


A major poem sequence by a well respected poet whose Collected Poems was published in 2008.

"The intimacy between cityscape and persona is recaptured, if on renegotiated terms."
James Keery, PN Review

REALITY STUDIOS, 1991, 0-9507018-7-4, 88pp, price (was £6.95) £5