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

     A friend, a mild fan, and scrupulous collector, of what is still sometimes called “stadium rock”, once made me a tape of live examples. It now seems strangely definitive both of the genre and of its peak period, the Eighties, and perhaps that is because there are no songs on it. Instead, run together – over a background of echoey whistles, gusts of applause and bursts of feedback – are introductions to songs, bizarre verbal interludes from concerts by, amongst others, U2, Simple Minds and The Alarm. These “intros” range from the mostly harmless (Bono: If you want to say no to torture, if you want to say no to the false imprisonment of prisoners of conscience, sing: “no more”...) to the mostly gormless (Jim Kerr: It’s going to be one of those mad mad nights... just look at that moon!) to the entirely giftless (Mike Peters: I want to be one of you tonight! Can I be one of you tonight?). The tape might have been called Most Atrocious Rock Introductions In The World... Ever!

     I was reminded of this quirky assemblage while reading Neil Astley’s introduction to his anthology New Blood in which he quotes Adrian Mitchell’s beguiling dictum: “Most people ignore most poetry because most poetry ignores most people”. Astley deploys this phrase as moral support for his popularising approach to poetry, a negative touchstone for a book which will probably seem as much of its period, the Nineties, as any stadium rock turn was of the Eighties. Astley ignores, if he is aware of it, Mitchell’s later admission that he deliberately placed the phrase at the beginning of a book so that critics would discuss the proposition rather than the poems it introduced. Significantly, we remember Mitchell’s “spin”, but not the book it spun.

     All the contributors in New Blood are doubly introduced, by a brief essay of their own (there is one exception) and by an even briefer, blurb-studded appreciation by Astley himself. It is from the latter kind that we learn Elizabeth Garret has “formal grace and sinewy intelligence” (Maura Dooley), that Gwyneth Lewis has “a tough, demanding intelligence” (Maura Dooley), and that Maggie Hannan’s poems “glitter with an intelligent, dark humour” (Maura Dooley). Happily enough Maura Dooley is introduced as having a “sharp and forceful intelligence” (Helen Dunmore). Less is more, Maura less. New Blood is such a family affair, a “house for life” according to Astley, that one feels one has stumbled, cold and sober, on a stranger’s wedding reception, where everyone has long since become embarrassingly intimate.

     But it’s when the poets introduce themselves that the fun really starts (there’s more than enough rope in 300 words). From the mainly harmless: “When I become absorbed in working on a poem I feel it physically – a prickling sensation on my skin, a warm tightness in my belly, a sort of arousal...” (Linda France); to the mainly gormless: “The idea of the poetic persona is attractive to me. I am prolific and protean: qualities which have their drawbacks” (Roddy Lumsden); to the entirely giftless: “To me Ruskin is sexy. He was born old and it’s all happening without him. But his head is another planet, mysterious and full of wizardry. He finds the deep peace that is being not doing. Sex has to end sometime. Neither a rock nor a woman can be dissected for their soul. Water can fall upwards” (Deborah Randall). Discuss.

     Sixty years ago, Geoffrey Grigson brought out one of the most focused and durable poetry anthologies, New Verse. Drawing on contributions from his magazine of the same name, it included many of the great and good poets of the 30s, from Auden to Allott, from MacNeice to Madge. In his quirky, prickly and instructively sceptical introduction Grigson was prepared to be critical of his contributors, and (can you imagine?) even to make fun of them. Bearing in mind the sport New Verse had with the “old Jane” (Edith Sitwell), what would Grigson make of Pauline Stainer, or of Astley’s description of her as “a latter-day English mystic”? Stainer, whom we can almost see dancing by the Aegean in a toga with H.D., writes an introduction which is in a league of pottiness all its own: “My poems are full of journeys made and unmade... I am drawn to luminous horizons... I made a journey to the salt edge of things. Like Keats after reading Lear I hear the sound of the sea constantly”.

     Perhaps it seems unfair to talk so much about commentaries and commentators rather than the poems commented on. But if this anthology is important it is for what it says about the promotion of poetry – for belonging as much to media culture as to literary history. This point is well illustrated by how self-conscious some of the poets are on the subject, even when they attempt a defensive satire as in Brendan Cleary’s ‘The New Rock ‘n’ Roll’ (where he points out a poet is not a rock star):

& we never held our lighters up, grinning near the end
when he kicked into his sonnets like anthems...

Similarly, W.N. Herbert, with the New Generation promotion in mind, writes about himself writing about himself as a New Man who changes nappies: “Sensitive male minus labour pains equals poem”. Like the language the jokes are flat. What sets out to be a satire of media culture ends up as another of its many satellites. What else could compel Don Paterson to write, “These poems clearly compelled themselves to be written” (about Tracey Herd’s work). What other than a lazy promotional culture? Since Paterson’s words don’t even make metaphorical sense (how can anything compel itself to be written?) the only sense we can make of it is as part of a promotional continuum (this film demands to be seen), a sign flashing up automatically when automatically triggered.

     The kind of poetry you write arises from what you think poetry is – if you think like Marianne Moore that a poem is an imaginary garden with real toads in it, or, like Ian Duhig, that a poet is an exiler of toads, you will write accordingly. If you think poetry is about transmitting signals of belonging (can I be one of you tonight?), you will write like many of the contributors here. And you will write poems which are easy for a pull-out supplement to categorise, poems easily spun, like the ubiquitous New Lad poem, or the ubiquitous Cosmic Woman poem. While the former usually involves allusions to football and rock music (Geoff Hattersley’s title ‘Frank O’Hara Five, Geoffrey Chaucer Nil’ says it all), the latter is usually a narcissistic, sub-Plath cocktail of blood, moon and Universal Rhythms like Ann Sansom’s ‘The World is Everything’:

Where I come from the language is water,
the essential beat of a line is tidal,
a sweep of blood to the heart
before the slow boom of a mother’s voice.

     Certain poets here do rise above the rest; there are correct, solid poems from Julia Copus, Nick Drake, Maggie Hannan, John Kinsella, Stephen Knight, and Katrina Porteous. But one writer who shows up almost all the others is Ian Duhig. He has in abundance what some of the others lack altogether: personality. His is the anthology’s one classic poem, ‘From the Irish’, and his too are most of the anthology’s very good poems. It’s a pity that Duhig is incorrigibly slapdash – but he is always interesting (most people are not interested in most poetry because most poetry is not interesting). An original who writes, more than an original writer, either he doesn’t belong in this book or he’s one of the few who do, there being much to exile from this imaginary Guardian with real toadies in it.