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

It is with great sadness that we have learned, just before going to press, of the death of U.A. Fanthorpe, a significant loss to poetry. Our thoughts are with her partner, R.V. Bailey, at this difficult time.

Both U.A. Fanthorpe and R.V. Bailey have been particularly supportive of the launch of ARTEMISpoetry. We were delighted by readers’ warm welcome for ARTEMISpoetry, Issue 1. If you have views on ARTEMISpoetry – or about poetry generally – that you’d like to share, please write to us. From Issue 3 onwards, we will publish selected letters.

Thank you for submissions of poems, articles and artwork. Penelope Shuttle, our distinguished poetry editor, had a very hard choice and has selected exciting, very diverse poems. Please keep the submissions coming and encourage other women poets to do so. Katherine Gallagher, whose important work spans two continents and includes ecological themes, will be poetry editor next time. Please plan ahead for submissions both to ARTEMISpoetry Issue 3 and to the SLN 2009 poetry competition, when the judge will be the outstanding poet, Pauline Stainer (see Noticeboard).

We hope you will find plenty of meat in this issue. We have articles about fleeing from Hitler’s Europe and about how hard, but how rewarding, it can be to write about loss. These sad themes are off-set by Myra Schneider’s article about a problem we all have in common, how long it takes to write a poem, and Hylda Sims gets lively and up-front in Part 1 of her advocacy of the ballad tradition.

Where is women’s poetry at? In comparative terms, flourishing... A copy of Stand magazine from the early 1970s came to hand recently. It included no poems by women, no reviews of books by women and had only one woman contributor, Anne Cluysenaar. Penelope Shuttle was mentioned in a footnote to Peter Redgrove’s work...

Given the rise and rise of women’s involvement in poetry in recent decades, both as practitioners and consumers, perhaps we need to guard against complacency? Such factors as the predominance of women attending poetry workshops could be related to women’s increased interest in self-expression and gaining skills but also to the decline in poetry’s status, making the more ambitious sex give this art form less attention? Or, as in Anne’s poem, Perception as a Furry Thing, (Second Light Launde Bag, 2004) is it that “men come pre-validated / according to the Stewart Theory of Easy Successful Men”?

In the arts, equality is not the objective. Surely, talent, energy, ambition, individual voices are all that count? Yes and no. Confidence is also important. Writing poetry – involving nervous energy and self-criticism – can be discouraged by a climate sometimes hostile to women writers. Scepticism still surfaces: is poetry by women ambitious enough, is it too focussed on the personal, does it lack some male poets’ drive, authority, links with intellectual tradition? These doubts too easily become selffulfilling prophecies.

Please, then, will publishers, editors and festival organisers, ask themselves if they are being truly representative when, even by accident and without any conscious prejudice, they get gender balance wildly out of kilter? What a shame that the Spring 2009 issue of Poetry Review went out with roughly three times as many poems by men as by women, with a similar ratio amongst contributors overall.

The title of the forthcoming SLN Autumn Festival, Fifty/Fifteen Festival (19-21 November 2009, see Noticeboard) refers to fifty years of the exponential rise of women’s involvement in poetry and fifteen years of SLN, the network supporting and promoting women’s poetry. The outstanding poet Anne Stevenson, biographer of Sylvia Plath, will be one of the readers. Stevenson represents a transatlantic link with the beginnings and continuation of the great ‘take-off’ of women’s poetry. Her own work, increasingly ambitious, makes her a key figure and mentor. We hope to see you in November!

Dilys Wood and Anne Stewart