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?

ROBERT CONQUEST

     Most of these questions can be answered by the single point that you can’t ‘programme’ a poet as you can a computer or something; he can’t even do it to himself — the things that strike what one might call his poetic imagination adequately are not necessarily those that his political, or even his artistic, conscience (or any other conscious force) would prefer him to write about. But, in more detail:

(a) Not more effective as poetry. The Thousand Worst Poems About the Atomic Bomb is an imaginary collection rivalling in awfulness even The Hundred Worst Poems About the Death of Dylan Thomas.

(b) No doubt, but only indirectly: I have strong political views in some spheres, but at most two or three poems out of six score odd I have published show much sign of this (perhaps because my political views themselves involve hostility to the exaggerated pretensions of politics). I can’t distinguish between use and pleasure here: pleasure (or ‘elation’ as Dr Davie puts it) is the use of poetry.

(c) I suppose all poets have a vague notion of a historical or cultural quasi-epic they’d like to write. But an enormous amount can be said in forty-seventy lines. Perhaps if one never wrote a poem longer than ten or twelve lines, one would get restive.

(d) Consciously, none. Unconsciously all that I like, I suppose. I find Auden cropping up when I don’t want him, and Gunn in a more welcome way, but not thus as major influences, which mostly come undifferentiably, in an undeliberate compost.

(e) I agree with Pasternak: the bane of modern verse has been ‘dreams of a new language’. He adds that the real creator ‘uses the old language in his urgency and the old language is transformed from within’.

(f) As good as any, so long as the poet ignores the unprecedentedly noisy voices presuming to issue his marching orders.