Ambit

a magazine founded in 1959 by Martin Bax in an attempt to invigorate British poetry, which he saw as having taken on an apathetic character; since then it has appeared as a quarterly, publishing stories, graphics, critical articles, and reviews. The lively tone of Bax's initial editorials anticipated the flamboyantly irreverent and anarchically experimental character Ambit rapidly assumed; the erotic and sometimes scatological tendency of some of the writing and illustrations it carried in the early 1970s caused Roy Fuller to protest that its Arts Council subsidy should be withdrawn on the grounds that it was ‘often pornographic, occasionally obscene’. Alan Brownjohn, Peter Porter, Edwin Brock, Tony Connor, and Peter Redgrove contributed poetry in its early years and remained associated with the magazine through the following decades. Ambit's innovative ethos became pronounced in the 1960s when emphatically unconventional work by George MacBeth, Ivor Cutler, Eduardo Paolozzi, and others appeared frequently; concrete poetry and collages combining graphic and textual elements were also regularly featured. The authors whose prose fiction has been published in the journal include Christopher Middleton, J. G. Ballard, and William Burroughs. Gavin Ewart, Herbert Lomas, and Vernon Scannell are among the critics who have maintained Ambit's high standards of reviewing. The magazine is among the most valuable and stimulating to have appeared in Britain since the 1930s.