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

One of the conventional yardsticks of a poet’s “success” is the number of collections published. It’s a yardstick Mario Petrucci (debut collection Shrapnel and Sheets from Headland back in 1996) rejects. When we talked at his home in North London, he quoted Horace approvingly:

If it be your fate to write,
let your productions.... not see the light
till time and care have ripened every line.

So new books are on the way, to follow the much praised Shrapnel and Sheets. But all are ripening in their own good time. Meanwhile, talking to Mario, it’s clear how enthusiastically he has been building on his early activity as founder editor of the magazine Bound Spiral (1987 - 97) and as co-organiser, with Sue Hubbard and Denis Timm, of Blue Nose Poets through the 1990s.

In his farewell Bound Spiral editorial, Mario pleaded, “Please, please, please get involved in poetry”. As he explains, this for him has meant a range of contributions across the whole current poetry scene: over 300 poems in magazines, over 60 of them in anthologies; a dozen major poetry prizes; and continuing involvement in the evolution of the Blue Nose Poets from pioneering live poetry venues and events to organiser of competitions, tutoring, and residential workshops (watch out, he says, for the Easter 2001 re-launch of an expanded Blue Nose programme of competitions, tutoring and events reaching out beyond poetry into all aspects of creative writing, under the new title, Writers Inc).

In addition, there’s ShadoWork, a collaborative writing, voice-training and performance group Mario officially co-launched in 1998; a series of placements as poet in residence, notably with the Imperial War Museum (from 1999), and the London Borough of Havering (2000); continuing tutoring (Arvon, Poetryclass etc) and competition judging; and a Royal Literary Fund fellowship at Oxford Brookes University. All this is accompanied by a series of critical articles passionately exploring how to ensure writing and reading poetry retain their relevance in the twenty first century. In a hard hitting article in a recent Agenda [Vol.35 No. 4], for instance, Mario asks whether today’s poetry workshop is a friend, or perhaps an enemy, of creativity?

Overall, it’s not a bad literary CV for a Cambridge physics graduate, who gained his PhD in optoelectronics at UCL at the age of 29. But, as Mario explained to me, “at the end of that process, finding myself confronted with a very high probability of spending the rest of my life as a research assistant, I found that basically physics didn’t answer the questions of my life. Rilke says, ‘See, I am living! What lives me?’ And physics wasn’t the solution. I’d already begun dabbling with poetry. And now it burst out spontaneously. It was almost as if an old spring had been blocked, and suddenly loosened. I really did think it would be a phase that would last a couple of years. At best. That’s over fifteen years ago!”

That mention of Rilke, and the earlier Horace quote, seem typical - my conversation with Mario was peppered with an intellectually demanding array of references, from contemporary poets like Heaney, Shapcott, and Sweeney, via Plath, Beckett and Emily Dickinson, into the thinking of the Sufi mystics, Illich and Hegel. And especially Milan Kundera, a particular Petrucci hero for his insistence that each generation must deal with contemporary experience through its own literature, as its contribution to “the people’s struggle, the struggle of memory against forgetting”.

Mario, born in Lambeth in 1958 to Italian parents from the Lazio region north of Naples, was brought up partly in London, partly in Italy. He navigates the waters of European history and culture with an enthusiasm he’s keen to share. His mother tongue is the local Lazio dialect, but he lives in North London and writes in English, the language in which he was schooled. “If pushed in a corner with a blade at my throat, I would say I was Italian - but with a veneer of mahogany and oak.” By this he means “the emphasis, in the England of that time and place, on manners and appropriate behaviour. Which I also always resisted, being quite a nasty little kid, by all accounts!”

This impulse to resist, to challenge, runs through Mario’s conversation, and through his writing. In the early 1990’s his poetry started being published in magazines and winning competitions. In 1996 his debut collection, Shrapnel and Sheets, was published as a Poetry Book Society Recommendation. Poems from it, and newer works like Bilancio, explore the oppositions, what he calls “the strong dialectic”, which characterise his work. Talking, we identified the attraction, and the dash, between the generations of one family and two (Italian and English) nationalities. Also a strong sense of how personal histories pull us as individuals in different directions. War, with its competing loyalties and its devastating outcomes, is a constant theme. So too is an interest in how the commercial, industrial, and technological thrust of the 20th century operates at the grassroots (separating us from an earlier intimacy with the soil itself, as in Bilancio). Liberal democracy, strictly applied, strengthens society, but loosely applied can weaken it (ruthless commercial development is mourned in Bilancio). Art and science struggle to co-exist. And there’s a fascination with the contrast between surface and what’s beneath (literally beneath our feet, in the case of a number of the site-specific poems coming out of his Year 2000 residency with the Borough of Havering - like Roman, in the haughty voice of one of the builders of the original Roman road, dressing down today’s users of the Al 2; or in the extract from Thames, where in 2000 AD it is an old man on an Essex allotment, and an exploring child, who dig us back to the Pleistocene).

Both Thames and the earlier Bilancio show how Mario characteristically combines powerful narrative or descriptive content with strongly felt lyricism. “I think you have to say it is, or has been, a dominant mode in my writing: the narrative, personal lyric. But not the only one. There are other experimental modes - which come into prominence more strongly as I progress as a writer”. That progression is moving Mario towards not just one, but four projected publications of original work, as well as a re-issue of the 1999 ecological sequence, Bosco, which Hearing Eye are bringing out as a book. The 33 poems that came out of his Year of the Artist residency with Havering will soon be published under the title, The Stamina of Sheep. The next “collected” to follow Shrapnel and Sheets is “ripening nicely” under the title Flowers of Sulphur (science opposed to art?). There’s a novella about loss, in what Mario calls “a very experimental form And finally, there’s Monte Cassino, which Mario has been working on for the past nine years. “It’s a sequence of poems based on the World War Two battle. And it deals specifically with the nature of war, and how we understand war, and historicize war. It’s making all the contradictions manifest. I use a variety of voices and perspectives. The narratives in the different poems don’t agree. Opposition on every level I can find!”

In one sense, this is familiar Petrucci territory. But increasingly, he says, he’s balancing the personal lyrical narratives of earlier poems with material handled in much more diverse ways, and no longer written from a personal viewpoint. A recent outcome of this approach has been “The Poetry Hunt”, which he created for families and school children visiting the Imperial War Museum. The poems are hidden around exhibits, in such a way that just finding them is a challenge. Once found, though, their placing in relation to the exhibit (tank, Spitfire, searchlight) and the poems themselves create a further challenge: to see both exhibit and its history, as well as language, through radically different eyes. One poem, Trench, can only be discovered by looking through a sniper’s telescopic sight. Its two stanzas read:

Sniper, Sniper, in your tree -
Has your eye dosed in on me?
Did your sights hot-cross my head
Before you chose young Phil instead?
If looks could kill, would I be dead?

Sniper, Sniper, the one you get
Doesn’t hear your rifle crack.
They’re saying here you’ve got the knack.
They’re telling me I’ve lost a bet -
They say I’m dead. I just don’t know it yet.

‘Poeclectics’ is what Mario calls this pluralizing tendency in himself, and, he argues, in many contemporary poets; the move towards using a much wider variety of voices and styles (as a critic, he enjoys coining new terms!). And he sees the Poeclectic approach as crucial in liberating poets from “being trammelled into any particular mode. Your own dialectic tension is the dynamo - but now erupting in different ways. There are increasing numbers of poets who will adopt different personae, voices, tones, diverse subjects, alternative styles, according to the subject at hand and its requirements. It’s not simply about expressing a voice or a theme in new ways. This is about a greater focus on the needs of the individual poem. And I’ve called this plural approach Poeclectics because of the variety it allows one writer to bring to their work. I identify with that strongly.” As Horace might now have to put it, “Time, care, and Poeclectics, ripening every line”. Or Mario, in sporting mode: “collections are like soccer teams. There’s a temptation to field eleven strikers. But you need a balance, the softer poems, the smaller voices, alongside the big hitters.

Illustration by Marsha Levin