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

It is moving to be asked by a literary magazine what it has been like for me living in England and being a poet in a language other than English. That experience belongs to a much larger picture.

I first came to this country as a student in 1960, went back to India after three years, and started to teach there. After my marriage to an Englishman in 1964 – we had met at Oxford – I returned to England and began to live here on a more permanent basis. At first I didn’t quite envisage a full-time career in writing. I wrote all along anyway, but I had been trained for an academic career, and expected to have one, combining it with writing in my spare time. It was only after I had had my children, completed my doctorate, and made numerous fruitless applications for jobs and research fellowships, that it dawned on me that discrimination on multiple fronts was going to see to it that I would not be able to launch an academic career in this country. I might have succeeded against all the odds had I had a friend in a high place prepared to give me a kickstart, but no such benevolent godfather materialized in my life. With that realization I decided to cut my losses and to turn into an asset the circumstance of being married to a decent man who was prepared to work hard to pay the mortgage and essential household bills on his own. In life’s guerrilla warfare this could be my womanly coign of vantage. Away from the middle-class pressures of my Calcutta background, where dropping out of academia after Oxford would have been regarded with horror, I could have a no-frills life-style with the basic amenities and devote myself entirely to writing, especially to writing in Bengali. Not being addicted to material pleasures, I didn’t mind this too much. I could always cook my own curries for solace. Holidays were not affordable unless we were invited by friends to stay with them, but then I hadn’t been used to going on holidays on a regular basis in my childhood either.

The good side of being a diasporic writer in England writing in an Asian language is that you are left completely alone to do your own thing, you are not interfered with. If you can cope with the inevitable isolation of your situation, the loss of sterling earnings, and the problems of long-distance communication with editors, publishers and readers, you can carry on as you please. The bad side is that you become more or less invisible: people have difficulty in visualizing you as an author and seeing you in your true literary context. This is not propitious for meaningful interaction with English-speakers. When people do not know, and what is worse, do not want to know, where you are coming from, you are turned into a perpetual outsider against your will. This then becomes a mechanism for locking you out of all the potential arenas where you were in a position to make significant contributions, converting you into a second-class citizen.

I was born into a very literary culture and have written poetry in my mother tongue since childhood, encouraged to do so by my parents. Although I remember learning to add up and take away, I do not remember a time when I could not read and write Bengali. I was born one year before the death of Rabindranath Tagore, who had shaped the cultural consciousness of my parents’ generation. To them, reading poetry was part of being educated and cultivated, and they believed that if you had a talent for writing it, you should certainly polish that talent. My early childhood was spent in various country towns in pre-partition Bengal, wherever my father happened to be posted. In those days I did not go to school, and my education was in my mother’s charge. It was she who actively incorporated creative writing into my education. She would set me a task: to write a poem on a specific subject, such as ‘Spring Morning’ or ‘Rainy Afternoon’, and disappear into the kitchen. I well remember how inordinately long those sessions of disappearance used to seem to me. Sitting in the veranda, where all my lessons took place, I would stare at the world outside, at skies, clouds, trees, grass, sunshine, rain, crows, ants, hens, and the like, and write my poem with chalk on a wood-framed slate writing-board. My poem finished, I would impatiently wait for my mother to reappear so that I could read it out to her aloud, the consummation of the creative process. To me poetry has always been a natural extension of speech, a heightened, eloquent, and magical variety thereof, something you do from time to time in the normal round of being alive and human, the primal form of creative writing, linked to the earth, with lots of staring out of the window for inspiration.

The years immediately after independence and partition, though beset with terrible problems for West Bengal, were nevertheless times of hope, political idealism and cultural ferment for us. Many Hindu families with roots in Eastern Bengal, like ours, had lost their homeland, but in Calcutta we were still close to the Enlightenment-style ideas and ideals of the Bengal Renaissance. The pursuit of material comforts had not yet grabbed the attention of our middle classes, and the drift to the USA for careers and affluent life-styles had not begun. Calcutta of the fifties, where I came of age and had my formal education, was, despite the pressing problem of having to accommodate a huge influx of refugees from East Pakistan, an open, inquisitive, and multicultural place, with members of every major religion, large communities of Biharis, Oriyas, Sikhs, Gujaratis, South Indians, native Eurasians, its very own Alliance Française de Calcutta, and a Chinatown. Growing up there, I never had a doubt that the world was a very variegated place, with thousands of languages and dialects, each precious to its speakers. In my generation we expected to do our creative writing in our mother tongue, even if part of our schooling was in English, and no matter how many other languages we learnt. English had to be mastered, of course; in my case it was my Honours subject at university. Sanskrit was an asset to anyone planning to write seriously in Bengali: I did it at school and also at university as a subsidiary subject. There was a renewed interest in European languages other than English, so that we could construct a clearer mental image of the Western Other, instead of relying excessively on English; I had to take French and German lessons from my father, who had taught himself these languages and read widely in their literatures. Contrary to language teachers in this country, my father believed that poetry was the best slip-road into a new language, so that by the time I came to Oxford with a scholarship to do an English degree all over again (as was done in those days), I had not only published Bengali poems in school and college magazines, but had read some poetry in five other languages, including Anglo-Saxon, not counting translated texts, which included Homer in French prose. German was heavy going, but it gave me a head start in Anglo-Saxon, the poetry of which I came to love and eventually to translate. The French helped me in later years to teach myself some Spanish, from which also I have translated a little into Bengali.

Among my father’s many literary friends was Buddhadeva Bose, a key figure of post-Tagore Bengali modernism and the founder and editor of the poetry quarterly Kabita (meaning ‘poetry’). They were both graduates of Dhaka with roots in East Bengal, and their friendship continued in Calcutta.

Kabita, which ran for twenty-five years, was the leading Bengali poetry magazine of its time and also an extremely important magazine for the discussion and review of poetry. From the pages of this magazine I learnt what I did not learn at school or college: how to relate to contemporary poetry. Tied to the magazine was its very own publishing house, Kabitabhavan, ‘The House of Poetry’. Both were run from the poet’s home. The apartment at 202 Rashbehari Avenue in southern Calcutta where Bose lived with his family and from which he carried on all his literary activities was an institution in the city’s arts world. Affectionately referred to as ‘202’, it was a place where writers, intellectuals, publishers and their friends dropped in at all hours of the day and late into the night for endless cups of tea and animated conversations. It was a platform and a network of which poets anywhere in the world would be proud.

Thanks to my father, I had the privilege of entry to ‘The House of Poetry’ at ‘202’ from childhood onwards and remember meeting many luminaries of Calcutta’s intellectual world in that living-room. Bose encouraged me as a fledgeling poet, and when I started to write poetry seriously, he gave me some valuable advice. My college days in Calcutta saw me begin to write poetry ‘as an adult’ and publish in college mags. The post-Tagore generation shared an international outlook and took in the intellectual movements that swept across the world in the inter-war years. They understood the literary experiments that had changed, or were changing, the face of writing everywhere. Quite a few of them, Bose included, were active as poetry translators. Thanks to them, when I arrived in England for the first time I was familiar with the work of many Continental authors, either in the original or in translation. My teachers and classmates did not really understand my cultural baggage, that I not only had a rich native heritage but also Baudelaire and Rilke in Bengali versions ringing in my ears. This has been a persistent problem in my English life. In the sixties I was often asked if there was a literature in Bengali. And even the other day I met someone at an Oxford High Table – not a science and technology person but an arts person – who had never heard the name of Rabindranath Tagore. Naturally ‘post-Tagore’ would be a meaningless concept to him. It is difficult to explain myself in an environment where the names of poets who have shaped me and been my mentors do not mean anything.

Bose selected some of my poems for his magazine, but unfortunately it was soon thereafter that he had to cease its publication. By that time I had come to Oxford to study. My mother sent those poems to the weekly magazine Desh, and the editor welcomed them. My first poem to be published in a mainstream outlet, outside of school or college magazines, was published there in December 1961, when I was in my second year at Oxford. One by one several of my poems were published there, and by the time I returned to Calcutta in 1963 I had acquired some reputation as a promising young poet. It is an interesting fact that I made my name as a promising Bengali poet while I was an undergraduate at Oxford.

Recently I quizzed my closest friend from those days, with whom I am still in touch. We used to share curries and kosher wurst together; she introduced me to European choral music and I introduced her to the music of Tagore’s dance-drama Shyama; we used to talk about everything under the sun for hours and hours. As I recall, I sometimes made rough translations of poems I was writing and showed them to her. But when I asked her if in those days she knew that I was a poet, that I was regularly publishing poetry in a literary magazine, she said: ‘I was in awe of your knowledge of languages, but I don’t think I had a clear image of you as a published poet. You didn’t make much of that side of your life then; you kept it in another compartment.’ No, I didn’t! It is just that even close friends had difficulty in piecing me together, seeing who I really was. My cultural identity was opaque even to them. This situation is prototypical. So far I have published six full-length collections in Bengali, and the majority of these poems are written on English soil, where I have now spent most of my adult life. England does not claim this corpus, nor anything else I write in Bengali. It is touching as well as amusing to recall that as far back as the mid-sixties some Bengali students of engineering at Glasgow, outraged by my anonymity in Britain, engineered to have a translation of one of my poems published in their college magazine, so that I could at least ‘belong to Glasgow’ in a marginal fashion!

As an earth-linked poet, almost the very first area where I had to make an adjustment was in the representation of the new natural environment and the re-alignment of the emotions with it. A language reared in the tropics, moulded by powerful summers, intense monsoons, and the delicious post-rains season, had to be adjusted, teased, re-tuned to express the English landscape and climate. The new backdrop was familiar to me in the abstract from my study of English literature, but now I was acting on this very stage, so had to make its furniture my own. It wasn’t just that I had to write about snow and frost, or flora which hadn’t been part of my environment before. Day and night; midday, afternoon and evening; the sun and the moon and the very quality of their respective lights; rain and fog; spring, summer, autumn, winter, and their meanings: all had undergone shifts which now had to be recorded with accuracy if I had to function as a poet. I found this an exciting task, a way of expanding and enriching the possibilities of Bengali by passing my new experiences through it. The very names of the months in the Western calendar had to be given new nuances. Tucked away in this new climate were patches and pockets of weather that could be brought into alignment with Bengali notions of rains and post-rains. They had to be discovered and recorded. In those days winters were more severe; I saw the winter of 1962-63, which not only brought many details of English writing alive that had been obscure before, but also offered a new vision of the earth for portrayal in Bengali. I have put the honeysuckle, the horse-chestnut, the syringa, the peartree, the dandelion, the cow-parsley and many such items into the grid of Bengali poetry. My poems have recorded the long soft unearthly twilights of June, the strange soft rains of April, a mild winter giving glimpses of the post-rains, and the spectacular leaf-falls of autumn.

When I branched out into fiction, I set my stories in this country. Both my novels depict a multicultural British world, and I had to learn how to represent this new social world for a far-off audience. I was very anxious to get to the inner human cores of my non-Bengali characters, to depict them without distortion, caricature or exoticism. From the feedback I have received from my readers it seems I have had some success. In the seventies, I began to write some poetry in English. With English as the language of my daily life here, and poetry being to me a natural extension of speech, this development was inevitable. Something at least of my poetic persona became visible to British friends at last. I have now published three full-length collections in English.

The poetry scene in this country is split between ‘them’ and ‘us’, those who are perceived to be ‘high and mighty’, and the many regional groups with their little magazines, workshops, and festivals. Active bilingualism in creative writing was long non-U to the literary establishment: the English didn’t do it themselves, so viewed it with suspicion. Are attitudes changing now under the pressure of circumstances, because some of us are showing that it can be done, because social anthropologists are beginning to take note of us? Has a paper I wrote in the book Bilingual Women (Berg, 1994), which I co-edited with others, played a tiny role in changing attitudes somewhere along the line? But if one of your two languages is Asian, rather than, say, Welsh, you are still at a disadvantage, especially vis-à-vis the ‘high and mighty’. At the other end of the spectrum the more regionally based groups have already begun to be more actively welcoming of the diversity Britain can now offer.

There is this wonderfully instructive anomaly now – that those of South Asian origin who write exclusively in English have a chance of being snapped up in the new ‘post-colonial’ canon, while someone like me who has been functioning as a fully-fledged diasporic Indian writer for the best part of forty years is still invisible in British critical discourse. Writing in your Asian mother tongue diminishes your status and casts a shadow on you even when you write in English. Things have begun to change, but such changes of attitude are cumulative political and sociocultural processes and take time. The ‘high and mighty’ are a remote and inaccessible set of people, as befits the elite of a post-imperial nation. They have internalized the values of an imperial aristocracy, and there is even a noticeable social distance between them and lesser mortals. You cannot make eye contact with them, reach them easily on the phone, or be invited to their homes. I notice these little things as an incomer to this society from another place. It is therefore going to take time for writing in an Asian language to be regarded as smart enough by those who formulate the rules of the club.

As the empire receded, the British literati withdrew from active curiosity about the non-English-speaking world, and into that vacuum rushed the concept of profit as a solely monetary and ego-related affair. The possibility that there could be other kinds of gain and enrichment in life – intellectual, emotional, aesthetic, social – tended to be pushed aside. The lowest common denominator dominated, and dumbing down began.

The lack of interest in translation gives us a clue to the situation. Anyone who is in the business knows what a struggle it is to publish literature in translation in this country: hard enough even from European languages, immensely difficult from non-European languages. It is as if this country did not care to know how people thought in other languages. As long as the rest of the world could express themselves in some form of English, it would be fine. But actually, global monolingualism, however modified by dialectal variations, is a more frightening prospect than global warming. A certain amount of competition and predatoriness is unavoidable, but in culture as in nature we need to maintain a healthy eco-diversity. As each language is a way of viewing the world, we need to cherish and nourish all our mother tongues, and one of the best ways of cherishing and nourishing one’s mother tongue is to write in it. Therefore we have to fight for the rights of all those who wish to do so.

If people cultivate their mother tongues, it follows that the role of mediation between the different languages is going to become more and more important. If more people learn each other’s languages, study them in depth, and translate from them, they could create a more vibrantly intelligent society, and the process would generate its own viable economy.

Recently I had a go at a cultural experiment. My first play, written in 1990, had been premièred in Bengali in this country in Manchester City of Drama 1994 by a visiting theatrical group from Calcutta. That in itself, though not reported in the media, was a victory for the mother tongue and an indication of the slow shift in cultural attitudes that is taking place. In 1997, weary of my invisibility, I translated this play into English under the sponsorship of the British Centre for Literary Translation. The BCLT were able to get some Millennial funding for the production of this text, and an excellent production with a cast of native English-speakers has just finished touring, eliciting admiration from small but appreciative audiences. I believe we have touched only the tip of the potential audience. The problem, as always, is how to get more people to take seriously a work that has been translated from an Asian language. It is not easy, but evaluating the responses of those we managed to persuade
to put their bottoms on seats, I feel we could certainly achieve more in the future. Schools were actually the worst in persuading their pupils to come; but in the campus of the University of Wales, Swansea, where the English production was appropriately premièred at a conference on Writing Diasporas, an academic immediately incorporated the play into a teaching course.

What is the role of the language-communities in this struggle? I think the relationship of the serious diasporic writer to his/her linguistic community is an ambivalent area, because the serious artist wishes to belong as well as to retain the right to dissent and criticize, and the first generation of an immigrant group may not always be all that tolerant of such an individual, while the next generation may fail to acquire the language itself. The situation is additionally problematic for someone writing in Bengali, for our community is divided between migrants from the two wings of Bengal, with the troublesome and tedious cultural politics of inclusion and exclusion. There is also the question of the diasporic writer’s relationship to the original natal linguistic community, which, for many of us, is the real support line for book publication. That is another process of complicated and sometimes fraught negotiation, but as we are focusing on the situation within Britain, I have not considered it here.

It remains for me to say that there is a lot to be done in educating the reading public, including the literary elite, academia, the media, and publishing circles. Mimicking Gandhi’s famous statement about Western civilization, one could say: yes, education would be a good idea. It is a slow and painstaking task, but absolutely necessary. I am currently trying to find a publisher for the translations I have done of Buddhadeva Bose’s poetry. I would like to see people in this country coming round to the view that a great poet from one part of the world belongs to all of us, is part of a common heritage we should strive to cherish. I was talking about my project to a distinguished poet and translator, and he said, ‘But there are so many important poets; what about the Estonians wanting recognition for their poets?’ I was dumbstruck. Of course, Britain has had a long historical connection with Bengal, but it goes without saying that I would welcome translations from the Baltic languages too. If those poets are translated into English, it means I too can access them! Let all poets and their translators come and join the party!