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?

VERNON WATKINS

     If I were not myself a practitioner I might feel very differently about writing poetry. In theory I believe in every variety of poetic activity, in every creative form, but in practice I find myself much more compelled by a certain kind of poetry than by other kinds.

     I feel that a poet cannot choose his material, that it is offered to him in an uncompromising way. My own experience is that I am always pulled back to the demands of a poem from the wide, speculative areas which lie outside it. As for other poets, I am sure that it is better for a poet to give all his attention to the object of his imagination, even with a total disregard of the issues of our time, than to give a part of it to those issues from a feeling of duty.

     Certainly my poetry depends, for its existence at all, on a religious attitude to life.

     I believe that lyric poetry is closer to music than to prose, and that it should be read as exactly as a musical score. I also believe that it is always a gift, the reward of tenacity and minutest attention, and that unless it comes out of exaltation or moves towards it, it is not worth writing.

     I suppose every writer, in applauding another’s work, undergoes a modulation of sensibility, but I cannot see how any poet whose roots are deep can be fundamentally influenced by a living contemporary. I never think a true style can be learnt from contemporaries.

     A good poem is one that can never be fashionable. What is fresh must also be ancient, and a poem is not finished until it attains its most ancient form. The more ancient a poem is, the more modern it becomes; and will remain so, when apparent modernity is obsolete.

     The handling of language is inexhaustibly mysterious. To write poems in the order of natural speech can be very good, but that is by no means the only criterion of excellence. Every restrictive theory of writing leads to monotony, and unforgettable poetry springs only when theory is abandoned, and from recognition that the order of imaginative emphasis is right, whether it is the order of natural speech or not. Natural speech is a corrective of artificial poetic diction, but form is itself artificial, and unless the artificial demands of form are satisfied in a poem, its impulsive life will not be held in a lasting form.

     I think every age is as good and bad as possible for writing poetry. The more the fledgling is pampered, the sillier it becomes. There is now an abundance of talent in Britain and America. Some poets employ strict form, others what is almost a prose idiom. The potentialities of prose as a medium of communication must not be under-estimated, but ultimately one is bound to ask whether the virtues of the poem are prose virtues. Perhaps, if they are truly memorable, it does not matter.