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?

BERNARD SPENCER

(a) Yes, it would probably interest more people, but I don’t think, in the present state of English society and education, very many more. The dangers would be the over-simplification which we have been familiar with in our own lifetimes, over-simplifications due to the unaccommodating subject-matter and the temptation to try to lush-up a public to whom poetry has always been foreign. If he didn’t worry much about that public I don’t see why a poet who felt warm enough politically shouldn’t cultivate a side-line in political satire on the model of Byron’s.

     I think the principal issue of our time is the survival of the loving, feeling individual against the political-social spook — so every good poem is eventually taking sides.

(b) Almost not at all. Politics and religion in their present forms do not affect me at the deep level from which poetry starts. On the other hand, I can imagine a poem about the human disaster caused by some doctrinaire political or religious concept.

     Apart from its pleasure, poetry must have a score of uses. Perhaps the most important one is that described by Shelley, that it makes the writer or the reader of it go out of himself in that act of sympathy which apparently underlies the main virtues.

(c) The short or medium-short lyric is how poetry happens to me. I have enough trouble with that.

(f) A good period, anyhow in English-speaking countries, first in the sense that there is a good confusion in the world around the poet and in himself to be sorted out. Secondly, the poet now has almost limitless possibilities of form and general treatment, since there is no Dr Johnson to tell him how to write. I welcome this — it makes each poem more of an undertaking, more of a risk. What each poet has got as a guide or control or fertilizer is the nature and history of his language, without there being any widely accepted critical opinion about which aspects of this he ought to be guided by.

     Then, although there isn’t usually much money from a poem or book published, the poet can get a lot of publicity considering how few people read new poetry. Anthologies keep rolling out, even school anthologies (which is a good reminder to the poet not to be a bore, since some child somewhere who has happened to be preserved from literary fashions may see clearly what he actually wrote). University jobs, contracts for radio programmes or for lectures not infrequently follow publication. The long-term financial rewards for writing a few good poems are probably greater than they have been before in this century, and they may be less embarrassing to collect than in periods of private patronage.