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?

ROY FULLER

(a) In a sense poetry now is very much concerned with ‘the issues of our time’. For example, in a recent first book by a young poet almost successive pages dealt with killing animals, the Bomb, the Camps, capital punishment. I think poetry would be more ‘effective’ if it were concerned with those issues less directly or with less obvious issues — as, say, Auden’s Paid on Both Sides was concerned with the issues of its time.

(b) The use is essential, the pleasure incidental.

(c) Yes, great dissatisfaction, both for myself and others. I visualize myself writing several kinds of longer or non-lyrical poems but doubt whether I shall ever manage any of them. Donald Davie is one of the few of my contemporaries aware of this tide in poetic affairs, but I hope the unease will spread.

(d) I think I am possibly too old to be influenced afresh.

(e) Of course, one isn’t aware that diction has become artificial until the new diction comes along. There is much ‘poeticization’ even in the plain diction used currently by many poets — in the very convention of the sort of poem that starts ‘I remember my accountant father’ or ‘I see an earwig cross the path’. Perhaps this is ‘undue impoverishment’ though.

(f) I think it is not too bad. World affairs are so frightful that they seem to have passed beyond the paralysing effect they had in the thirties — DOOM no longer insists on coming in at the end of every poem. (On the other hand we are at a rather awkward distance from the experiments of the Eliot revolution.) I just wish English poets would be less cosy and self-satisfied and inbred as a group, and that their poems would take imaginative flight from the first person.