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

The Mound at Lords is a very long hit indeed from the Bleachers at Yankee Stadium, but watching the opening overs of the Second Test Match only a few weeks after seeing the Senators thrash the Yankees I couldn’t help reflecting how national sports reveal national characteristics. The ruminative nature of a Test Match helped, too. A baseball game usually lasts a little under three hours, and after such brevity it was a little bewildering to notice how much time in cricket is spent doing absolutely nothing. The bowler walks endlessly back to his mark, the batsmen look at the crowd, the fielders scratch themselves, the umpires rock gently on their heels, and then drinks are brought on or it’s the end of an over. So when something does happen, everyone looks pleased. In baseball almost as little actually occurs in the way of hitting, missing, fielding and so on, but at least it happens quickly and the crowd, unlike its English equivalent, does expect something to happen, and announces its boredom when it doesn’t.

     And then there’s the whole question of playing to win. In almost all American games there are more members of the team off the field than there are on, and in some unlimited substitution is permitted. If a pitcher isn’t doing too well, then he’s taken out of the game and another goes in, and there are lots more if he’s no good, either. In American football, a technological game if ever there was one, a player may come on for a single play and not appear at all in the rest of the game. One has a sense of vast reserves which can always be called on in an emergency, of unlimited squads of Martian-helmeted men ready to move smoothly into position, their white knee-pants and bulging padded shoulders almost obscenely sexual, yet their movement dictated by an omniscient super-ego on the touch-line. All of which is very un-English, England being, in a sense, typified by ten men in baggy shorts gallantly struggling against eleven. There is nothing in the least sexy about English sportswear: nor is a team controlled from the touch-line: and the idea of substituting for an injured player is considered frankly unsporting. All of which makes one wonder whether the English don’t actually prefer losing to winning. Because, after all, a game’s only a game, and it’s the spirit which counts, and that spirit is essentially gentlemanly, aggressively amateur. The salaries received by star baseball players and footballers in America would shock the FA and the MCC. One has only to look at the number of amateurs in the Test team to conclude that there must be a predisposition for men who are not specialists, who do not depend for their living on their ability: and there must, surely, be some significance in the fact that there are far more amateur batsmen than there are bowlers. Trying to explain English games to an American quickly involves one in sociology: why, after all, are there so few amateurs in first-class soccer? Why do public schools play rugger? Before one knows where one is, one is explaining the arguments against paying MPs a reasonable wage and for the retention of the House of Lords, and the American is confirmed in his opinion that Englishmen are obsessed with class.

     If differences in sports do represent different national characteristics, these ought to show in literature, too. The English writer should be doggedly amateur, the American technically professional. Luckily, writers are usually indiviuals, but it is true that the general standard of literary craftsmanship seems higher in America than it is here. ‘Oh,’ says the Englishman, ‘they have creative writing courses at American universities, don’t they? How vastly amusing. How typically American to think that writing can be taught!’

     Well, now, it may be a good idea, before scoffing, to bear in mind that there was, once, a pretty generally accepted notion that art and craft went hand in hand, and that if you wanted to be a painter it wasn’t at all a bad idea to start by working in a master’s studio. No one has ever thought that a poet can be taught to write a masterpiece: but at least he can be taught to scan. The romantic cult of the amateur, carried to its extreme, would probably disapprove even of this much, but surely it can have few defenders now. Anyway, the point of a creative writing course is not to deny inspiration but to teach craft, and it should be judged on its results. At the moment the young American poet is about as dull as his English counterpart, which is to say pretty dull, but incomparably the better craftsman. The failures of simple technique which strike one on reading the English poetry magazines are a good deal less obvious over there, and at times one is dazzled by sheer skill. Of course sheer skill isn’t enough, and even if you have a wonderful technical mastery you’ve still got to have something to write about, and Americans, like the English, are Dullsville itself when it comes to subject matter or original thought. But when these assured versifiers do find a subject, at least they have the technique to deal with it, while one feels a good deal less certain that the amateurs will ever be able to write as well as they could.

     When one looks at the notes about the most promising young American writers, one almost always finds that they have been through the hands of some competent teacher. This is about all they have in common. It has long been well known that America has no literary life comparable to the English, and that some of the most famous writers make a point of keeping as far away as possible from literati of any kind. There is thus no ‘literary scene’ to speak of, though there are far more literary magazines of a high order than we have. There’s a poet or two and the odd novelist in almost every sizeable town in the country, and they meet only between the well-paid pages of The New Yorker, The Kenyon Review, and half a dozen others. In spite of this geographical distribution there are one or two well-defined literary areas. There are the Beats, for instance, and the South, the New Yorker school and there’s said to be a New York school, though I never actually found it while living in New York. Of these, the Beats are not yet, alas, forgotten, but they attract a good deal less of the publicity which they sought so hard and complained of so bitterly a few years ago. The first wave is still around, but there is a second one coming on, and it may be read in Paul Carroll’s Big Table. The poets seem to me as bad as ever, but there is a brilliant prose writer called John Rechy who may yet make the whole thing worthwhile. The South, more firmly established, goes on its way, continually recruiting some of the best writers in the English language today. With William Faulkner still in Oxford, Mississippi, the recent re-issue of Allen Tate’s The Fathers, Eudora Welty, Carson McCullers, and the younger Peter Taylor and Reynolds Price, with the Civil War being re-fought and Governor Patterson still in Montgomery, Alabama, there
seems no likelihood of this school ever closing.

     Newer, and perhaps livelier (by which I don’t necessarily mean better), are the young Jewish writers, such as Philip Roth, Ivan Gold and Tillie Olsen. A recent collection of stories from Esquire was really very remarkable indeed in quality and contained two minor masterpieces — by Roth and Gold. Why there should be a sudden resurgence in Jewish writing it is hard to say. New York has a large Jewish population, but the writers come, as usual, from all over, and I doubt very much whether they even know each other.

     The short story is more exciting, at the moment, than the novel, but one can expect novels in time from all the younger writers I have mentioned. It is, perhaps, strange to an English reader to find the story and the novella, reputedly difficult and uncommercial forms, so popular with the younger writers. But it’s not so strange, really. American weeklies are dreary indeed compared to ours (The New Yorker being, as always, an exception), but what have we to offer against Esquire, New World Writing, The Noble Savage, The Kenyon Review, The Partisan Review, even against Madamoiselle and Playboy, to say nothing of the annual prizes and collections, such as the O. Henry? Argosy? Where the market exists, surely, the writer will go. And it’s not only a question of high payment, though that no doubt helps to make the quality high, too. There is a definite advantage to a younger writer in having less pressure on him to produce a novel before he’s ready. Instead of being cajoled and insulted into that first novel, he can feel his way through stories, knowing that they have a good chance of being published and read. It enables him to concentrate on developing himself, gives him a chance to experiment, to test his abilities. George P. Elliott, for instance, has just published a brilliant collection, Among the Dangs. There is Roth’s Goodbye, Columbus, for another. Elliott, it may be observed, has taught at Cornell and Barnard and is now at the Writers’ Workshop of the State University of Iowa, a background which most English critics would find frankly humorous. But as an example of professional writing at its best, writing, that is, based on great technical skill and assurance as well as ‘inspiration’, his book makes the amateurs look pretty silly. Of course, America has just as many young men and women of twenty writing novels as England, but it does also have, what we on the whole don’t, an impressive number of extremely talented people in their late twenties and thirties writing brilliantly within the limits of their ability and experience. Not all of them will be Great Novelists, but none of them can ever be accused of not living up to his promise. They have all achieved something already.