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?

EDWIN BROCK

     Judging by the sales of poetry, the question ‘what is the use of poetry?’ must be asked by a good many readers. And it is asked justifiably, for those editors and publishers who do use it treat it as though it were produced by the victim of some rare disease, who must be kept alive so that the doctors may have something to write about. Keeping the disease alive is even given a name — it is called Prestige.

     Why, then, does the poet go on doing it? If this is a ‘bad period’ for poetry, why doesn’t he give up and try to write the successful novel which would at least solve his financial problems? And what is his disease?

     William Barrett, in a comment upon man in today’s society, has this to say: ‘Every step forward in mechanical technique is a step in the direction of abstraction. This capacity for living easily and familiarly at an extraordinary level of abstraction is the source of modern man’s power. With it he has transformed the planet, annihilated space, and trebled the world’s population. But it is also a power which has, like everything human, its negative side, in the desolating sense of rootlessness, vacuity, and the lack of concrete feeling that assails modern man in his moments of real anxiety.’

     For the existentialist (Mr Barrett is writing of existentialism) the moment of anxiety is the moment of decision: that point in time when, having been made acutely self-aware, a man is most capable of choosing between this future or that one. For the poet, this moment produces poems; and it is the poet’s inability to accept abstraction which is his disease.

     But why poems? Why is the cry made in this form which, for so many readers, is an anachronism?

     The clue is in the phrase ‘lack of concrete feeling’. It is the tangibility of poetry, the heightened self-awareness, which enables a poet to express in these words the most concrete realization of this man in this situation. Prose can’t do it for, in the main, it accepts abstraction as its starting point; and, in any case, is already in the hands of the enemy — writing market reports, theses, and accounts of the Royal Family.

     But what about abstract poetry? I deny that such a thing exists. For me, the adjective and noun cancel each other out. I cling to the concrete by the skin of my teeth, and hope that by paring it down, simplifying it, expressing it in the most colloquial manner, its reality will shine through.

     At best, this attitude produces a poetry where the language is the situation which is the poem — it could not, for instance, produce the discursive ‘philosophic’ parts of the Four Quartets. I suspect it is an attitude which confines its expression to short lyric poems (you cannot prolong a cry) unless you extend your definition of poetry to include plays like The Caretaker and Waiting for Godot.