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

 I was working as an engineer on a pleasure boat, taking trippers from Brixham across the bay to Torquay. Despite it being sunny there had been a heavy swell that day making berthing in Torquay difficult. A girlfriend, Carolyn, and her friend had come to ride across the bay with me. But with all trips being cancelled we wandered out to the breakwater’s pebble beach. While they paddled I sat on a rock and read the book Carolyn had bought me, Henry Miller’s ‘Smile at the Foot of the Ladder’. His only fictional work. However, out of a mundane day he delivered something more than whimsy into my life. Although it was fiction I didn’t doubt the truthfulness of its observations. I sat on that rock stunned, finding it hard to believe that just those few pages could have had such an impact on me, could have taken me so far out of myself. The writing of that one book I saw as a whole life well spent. Decided that if I could achieve something like that, could have that effect on another human being unknown, unknowable to me, then my life too would have been worthwhile.

I wrote my first poem that evening. To see if I could. Because poetry then wasn’t my aim. I wanted to create a whole book, a world of the mind to inhabit another mind. And for the next twenty odd years I wrote and sent off synopses and MSS to publishers. Aside from the regular rejections enough publishers did express an interest, did offer enough words of encouragement to keep me writing. Some even tried to get my books published, but ran out of money, met with resistance from colleagues, got sacked....

 I had written occasional poems but hadn’t thought of even trying to get them into print. After twenty years of not having had a word in print, with danger seeming to lurk in every corner of my life then, I decided that I had to have something in print. So I wrote a poem. Being a novelist manqué it was 5 pages long. A painter friend sent the poem off to his friend Michael Hamburger. Michael told me that in that one 5 page poem I had at least twenty poems. Within months I had my first poems accepted by magazines. Within a couple of years my first collection. And once in print then the novels also found publishers, works of twenty years before easing their way into print.

People I’ve been drawn to, have become friends, have largely been arty, eccentric types. I have always read pretty near everything that’s come my way, all genres, all disciplines, so hard to pinpoint my influences. But two poets whose delivery certainly influenced mine would be Thom Gunn and Arthur Rimbaud. Latterly the visual techniques of post-modernism rather than post-modernism per se has been of influence, as has been the prose poems emanating from Scandinavia, Marianne Larssen’s especially.

I hesitate to give advice to any other poets, our paths to poetry all being so different. Except that I would agree with Leonard Cohen that ‘poet’ is a verdict not an occupation. But once it has been decided that poet is what you are, do get involved somehow in the poetry world. I used to stutter and know that I am no performer. So I started a magazine solely to allow others the experience of being in print. Being a publisher led me to organising book fairs and festivals. And once you’re involved, who knows where poetry will lead you....