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

Many years ago, whilst collecting material in Ethiopia for my novel, The Last of Days, I met an Italian septuagenarian in the Eritrean port of Assab. Tio, “Uncle”, as everybody addressed him, admitted to being an insabbiati. The term means “fish caught in the sand” and was coined for those Italians with colonial dreams who, having participated in Mussolini’s invasion of Ethiopia in 1936, chose to stay on after Italy’s defeat at the end of World War II.

Over the years many of these expatriates, increasingly pining for home, became disillusioned and bitter. Not so Tio. Though he barely eked out a living – at the time of our meeting, he was working as a receptionist in what was then Assab’s only tourist hotel – he relished his deracination. For he had been captivated by the beauty of Ethiopia’s many peoples, particularly of their women.

Tio and I spent many days and nights drinking and being entertained by a bevy of such beauties. During sober moments, he showed me his considerable stamp collection and recounted how he had managed to procure some very rare specimens. (Months later, in London, a philatelist to whom I had brought a gift from Tio, informed me that Tio’s collection of Ethiopian stamps was incontestably unique and worth a sizeable fortune.) Most of the time, we talked about our fraternity, “the other”: exiles, refugees, immigrants, displaced people, outsiders, outcasts, strangers – a subject that had preoccupied us both throughout our lives.

Tio kept offering the “fish caught in the sand” image as a representation of our species. A creature neither quite dead nor quite alive; a creature that could not adapt to its native matrix – or never got the chance to do so – yet one that managed to survive, sometimes even thrive, in unknown and outlandish environments. Indubitably, an ancient species with genes that must still be the envy of chameleons.

Since then I have been guided by that image. It has helped me to fight off the depressions of exile, the harsh realities of exclusion, and the inevitable feelings of worthlessness. It has even supported me, when, masochistically, I chose to pursue a literary career. (Masochism, as we all know, is the “other”’s opium.)

Thus, though Turkish is my mother tongue, I write in English. (Infact, I have two other mother tongues, Ladino and French, but witlessly – shrewdly? – I allowed these to rust.)

Nowadays, after long years of apprenticeship and experimentation, I can write in English with relative facility and can even nurture the confidence that I am finally at home in it as I used to be in Turkish. (Alas, I no longer have that proficiency in Turkish. Whenever I attempt to write in my lovely mother tongue, I end up producing sentences that sound very much like those clipped, vacuous exercises – Turkish versions of la plume de ma tante.)

However, my confidence in my command of English serves me only when I write prose. When it comes to writing poetry, all the assurance of having mastered my adoptive tongue evaporates immediately. I become anxious and vertiginous, as if wavering on top of a precipice with the abyss calling me in siren songs.

And so, instinctively, I turn to Turkish. For I know she, that beautiful language, is the very anima of my soul. I seek to appease her. I try to reassure her that she is the language of poetry, my language of poetry, the only language for poetry, the language par excellence for all poetry.

And to provide her with proof, I jot down a clutter of ideas, words, phrases, images, allusions. I do so feverishly until I have a sheet bearing chaotic scribbles that look like a madman’s rantings. I continue doing so until either the sheet has not a speck of space left on it or I am somewhat convinced that I have gathered not only all the material I need to compose the poem, but also a long tail of auxiliaries just in case the main elements prove insufficient.

When that happens, my confidence miraculously returns – and, with it, my command of English. Because then I feel that the conception has occurred, that the insemination – which needed to be in Turkish – has been successful, and that the poem can now gestate in my womb and, at the appropriate time, be born in English.

Why this complex psychology in the creation of poetry and not in the creation of prose?

I don’t really know. I can only hazard guesses.

Perhaps the first literature one learns is like one’s stem cell, the core for any creative endeavour. I should be honest and admit that I have a much greater love for Oriental poetry (ie. Ottoman, Turkish, Arabic and Persian) than for their North European and Anglo-Saxon counterparts. (A matter of upbringing, I am willing to admit.) Consequently, for me Oriental poetry is lush, full-blooded and writ in the colours of the rainbow; with Shakespeare as the only exception, poetry north of the Mediterranean strikes me as cerebral, anaemic and invariably stippled with grey.

Perhaps I also carry the belief that poetry is the purest form of literature. I don’t think I am alone in this belief. I know many who would swear that whilst prose is the storyteller’s tool, poetry comes from a higher provenance, that it is the distillation of the soul, hence a grade deeper than the reach of novelists and playwrights, essayists and biographers, historians and philosophers.

A final word. To those who have not loved passionately more than one language, my condition might seem too stressful, traumatic even. Strangely enough, it isn’t. Not any more, anyway. It has become part of my life like an old wrestling injury. Now, I’m attached to it; I’ve even grown to love it.