Issue 8 of P76 Literary Magazine was launched on 10 September at the Bergy Seltzer Bandroom in Brunswick Victoria as part of the 2023 Sonic Poetry Festival. This is an edited version of the opening speech given by editors Linda Adair and Mark Roberts.

P76 may not be the most prolific of small literary magazines, but it is one of the longest running! The first issue of the magazine was very much a grass roots/underground effort. Printed on a second hand gestetner machine in a shared house in Rochford Street, Erskineville, it belonged to a long tradition of unfunded small literary magazines that provided a platform for poets and artists to publish, collaborate and connect. Magazines such as P76 sit below (or above if you like) the established mainstream. The funded journals supported by governments and/or institutions which, while important, can also throw up barriers to writers and artists who fall a little outside of the mainstream.

Shortly after that first issue appeared in the spring of 1982 the long relationship between P76, Rochford Press (and later Rochford Street Review) and Melbourne began. Mark Roberts co-editor of the first issue along with Adam Aitken, drove to Melbourne with a hand full of magazines and met up with a group of poets and publishers that he had connected with through the magazine and the Poets Union. Now, 41 years later, P76 has come out of (semi) retirement to produce issue 8 in conjunction with the 2023 Sonic Poetry Festival.

The Sonic Poetry Festival, like P76, has grown out of the community. Running on next to nothing the festival has bucked the trend of ‘cookie cutter’ literary festivals where the many of the same writers and commentators present similar sessions across a funded ‘festival circuit’. To quote from the organisers of the festival:

Our aim is to connect poetry and spoken word practitioners of all varieties, audience members, gig organisers, convenors and facilitators in a celebration of poetry and the spoken word. We would like to create entrances for gigs, artists and the poets out there quietly writing and reciting. We also seek to create pathways for people who need poetry in their lives and don’t know it, and serve micro-communities that deserve to exist.

Such an ethos attracted P76 out of its slumber and, despite a very short, even frightening, time frame, we have pulled an issue together, featuring a number of poets who have appeared at the festival, together with other writers with a strong and long connection to Melbourne / Naarm. Writers in the issue include Pete Spence, Jurate Sasnaitis, Angela Costi, Robbie Coburn, Robyn Rowland, Es Foong, Amanda Anastasi, Mark Roberts, Linda Adair, Tina Giannoukos, Gig Ryan, and John Jenkins. One particular highlight is the essay on the history of the publisher Rigmarole of the Hours by Robert Kenny. The resonances between the struggle to run a press such as Rigmarole and a festival like Sonic are many. Our literary culture depends on initiatives such as these, just as much as it depends on the ‘flagship’ journals and the venerated Writers Centres.

A final comment must be made about the way technology has developed over the last 40 years or so. While this issue may not have depended on typing poems onto stencils and days of cranking handles, there was something about the smell of gestetner ink that got to you after a few days and nights …

Click here to order your copy of the limited print run P76 Issue 8.

 – Linda Adair and Mark Roberts, P76 Issue 8 Editors

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