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?

THOM GUNN

     Diction: The terms ‘natural’ and ‘poetic’ are not that relevant to us, implying that we are in the situation of Wordsworth or Pound, who were faced with a ‘poetic’ language gone stale. But their battles have been won, and we all use natural language nowadays, John Masefield, John Betjeman, Jon Silkin, everybody.

     The distinction that is relevant is between formal and informal kinds of natural diction. They are both available. It looks, for example, as if the potentialities of William Carlos Williams’s informal language are at last being exploited intelligently by some of the young Americans, and another kind of informality has been used with imagination and sensitivity by Amis and Larkin; while the potentialities of formal language in poetry are as rich as ever — as can be seen from the diversity of its success in the work of Edgar Bowers, Hyam Plutzik, Ted Hughes, Donald Davie and Robert Conquest (whose ‘On the 1956 Opposition of Mars’, in the PEN New Poems 1957, is one of the best poems since the war). What is important is that two kinds of diction can at last coexist — and they must continue to, if we are to get away from the boring up-and-down of alternating fashions in poetry.

     Though diction is only a part of it. After all, diction, form, subject, and tone depend on each other. There appears, for instance, to be a relationship between the use of free verse or syllabics and a particular kind of informal language. When I began writing poems in syllabics a few years ago I found that I suddenly had access to a certain spontaneity of language and perception that I hadn’t been able to get when using traditional metres. Yet I feel uneasy about the split in my work between the two kinds of poems I write, the metrically intense and the syllabically casual. Each excludes too much of the other. The poem I want to write, in fact, is one in which the qualities of each could exist: it would be a kind of equivalent in poetry to the best of Isherwood — for example, the passage about the liner in The World in the Evening or the first two pages to the second ‘Berlin Diary’ in Goodbye to Berlin, where the particularity of the things described does not diminish the intensity of their implications and where the language is plain, unornamented, and eloquent.