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?

ANTHONY THWAITE

     ‘The issues of our time’ seem to me to have been pretty extensively dealt with in poetry lately, if by ‘issues’ are meant cruelty, love, violence, poverty, the family bond, sexual hysteria, elation, oppression, birth, copulation and death. But I suppose ‘issues’ have a narrower application than that. I think it’s rather too late to attempt to interest more people more profoundly in poetry, but this has little to do with poetry’s subject-matter: poets aren’t really going to win more readers for themselves, are they, by writing about the H-bomb, the Common Market or African Nationalism? The reasons why not many people nowadays read poetry are more complicated than that; but I think it ought to be remembered that not many people are profoundly interested in literature, or art, at all.

     I have certain firm religious beliefs, and other feelings, less certain than beliefs, about politics. Sometimes these get into my poetry in a direct sort of way, but not often. And I would say that these poems are not my best. I feel that my best poems spring quite specifically from some event that has happened to me, or some incident or object I have seen. In other words, it would be conceivable for me to write a goodish poem about my going to a meeting in Richmond and hearing my MP say that he would rather be dead than Red, but almost impossible for me to write anything at all about Hiroshima. This, I’m sure, is a limitation, but there isn’t much I can do about it.

     I should like to write long meditative poems, using immensely elaborate stanzas, and I should like to write even longer narrative poems, using a relaxed and fluent verse. As it is, I just plug away at poems which never, or almost never, seem to stretch beyond 60 lines. I sometimes think that if I gave up my job and lived in Crete I would write an epic; but I’d like to have more practical evidence that this would happen before booking my passage.

     Rigidly sticking to ‘influence’, rather than just ‘poets I like’, I think Auden is still a tremendous figure. After that, I have a great admiration for Philip Larkin’s poems, and am often annoyed at how much they creep into my own. I think he has a fine originality, which hasn’t been properly considered.

     I always attempt natural diction, though I don’t at all think that this is the only manner for a poet today: I enjoy a good deal of George Barker’s poetry, for example. But I think the aim is always, by whatever means, accuracy and relevance.

     It is a good period for writing when I’ve just finished a good poem: a bad one when I’ve written nothing for a couple of months. I’m sure Cowley wrote that remark about ‘a warlike, various, and a tragicall age’ being the worst time to write in during a temporary personal drought.