Poetry Magazines - The best collection of poetry magazines online - Simon Armitage

The following questions were sent to a number of poets, for them to answer individually or to use as a basis for a general statement about the writing of poetry today.

(a) Would poetry be more effective, i.e. interest more people more profoundly, if it were concerned with the issues of our time?

(b) Do you feel your views on politics or religion influence the kind of poetry you write? Alternatively, do you think poetry has uses as well as pleasure?

(c) Do you feel any dissatisfaction with the short lyric as a poetic medium? If so, are there any poems of a longer or non-lyric kind that you visualize yourself writing?

(d) What living poets continue to influence you, English or American?

(e) Are you conscious of any current ‘poeticization’ of language which requires to be broken up in favour of a more ‘natural’ diction? Alternatively, do you feel any undue impoverishment in poetic diction at the moment?

(f) Do you see this as a good or bad period for writing poetry?

JOHN FULLER

(a), (b) and (c). A related group, because I think the problem of reaching a wider audience is one of form rather than content. By seeking the audience, one finds something bigger and better than the lyric (political satire? opera? cookery verse?). I myself am very interested in the possible alliance of poetry with music and the stage. What one writes about comes next, and one may have to try to interest more people less profoundly to keep poetry alive at all.

     Surely one should always write about what interests people? It’s just that this happens to cover fairies and the Fall of Man, the French Revolution and the damsel with the dulcimer, Miss Gee and Spain. Nor can one help writing out of one’s beliefs, but one needn’t write of them or under their orders.

(d) If one can name influences, one is also probably trying to avoid them. By the time he can risk a post-mortem, the poet can be as wrong as the next critic. However, I still like Auden, Tate, Empson, Marianne Moore, etc. And, surely, aren’t dead poets always the submerged nine-tenths of influence? It makes any list one can give very misleading.

(e) Words should be as simple, ideas as original as possible. Almost the reverse is true of the most noticeably bad contemporary poetry. But I am in favour of formality of diction as well as formality of prosody, though I like it to be direct rather than pedantic or abstract.

(f) It is on the whole a bad period for poetry because there is far too much published in a very limited sphere without there being a regular poetry magazine with high critical standards. There are signs of a fresh lease of life for verse as an aural art: I find this exciting, not so much in the field of the reading or poetry festival, but as a broadening of scope which might aid a plunge into drama. But plays with songs, rather than verse plays, i.e. Brecht, not Eliot.