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?

HUGO WILLIAMS

(a) ‘The issues of our time’, I feel as though I’m hopping over quicksand: one false move and you’re in the muck. No. I have enough trouble with my own negotiations. Such things, however, have always been implicit in certain personal conflicts and are sometimes realized when they’re being worked out in poems. L. S. Lowry is widely accepted as being a great socialist painter, but he does not know, he is not interested, he paints people. This is the true level of poetry. It could only slacken the wire to be hypothetical. Poetry should be concerned with the heart of the matter, the conception, not the birth: i.e. the modern mental attitude. Once it moves on to the issue itself it is starting at the end of the poem. It can never dictate. It must be a complete equation in itself.

(b) Of course poetry has uses as well as pleasures. The poem is the pleasure, the use is the continuation of the thread, the spun web. But it must essentially be an entertainment; if it is written for its use alone it becomes a utility: not poetry but propaganda, and we can’t issue the pure at heart with propaganda.

(c) When I feel like writing a long non-lyric poem, I shall begin a novel. Poems are short as far as I am concerned.

(d) I am influenced by every poet I read. I am easily influenced, and as easily warned. (A few minutes ago I heard a girl on Radio Luxemburg confess that she had 500 pictures of Billy Fury and every disc he’d ever cut and yet she’d never liked him.) But to recognize influences in the finished product and to make a deliberate attempt to reproduce the tensions of another poet are two quite separate things: one involves style, the other does not. How gladly would I accept blood transfusions from W. H. Auden, C. Day Lewis, Robert Graves, Roy Fuller, Thom Gunn and Ted Hughes. I have always greatly admired Dorothy Wellesley.

(e) I cannot answer this question as I feel myself to be in the dock rather than among the jury. Naturally I plead innocent.

(f) All periods are equally good, equally tough, because of the compensating differences. You gain a sharpness through the loss of each successive element; but the epoch has little to do with the quality of poetry. It all depends on what sort of mood the poet’s in.