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

The best thing about good poetry today is that it resembles the good poetry of the past. Hardly surprising, though some theorists suppose it should be quite different. In fact the assumptions about the nature of poetry first mooted around 1800 are still taken for granted. For example: two that have always formed a fruitful paradox—that the poetic imagination works from below and is a shaping spirit, and that the poet opens his mouth and says poetry as 'a man speaking to men'. The first is always true and was merely rephrased and reemphasized by the romantics. The second is dangerously ambivalent—it may be true in some ways and at some times, but it always calls for reservation and qualification.

Coleridge's shaping spirit wrote Kubla Khan and The Ancient Mariner; his blank verse was written off the top of his head, as a man speaking to men. (Thank God he never got around to writing The Brook, which was to have been longer than The Excursion and to have given his views on every subject that interested him, from methodism to political economy.) For all their formalistic apparatus Pound's Cantos seem to me much the same, as does Paterson and a great deal else written in the last fifty years. Open-ended poetry, that lies all about us as it were, has its points, but it makes it difficult to tell whether the writer is a poet or not. Another snag about holding forth like this is that you cultivate what might be called a manufactured voice, for speaking to men requires the appearance of speech. Frost and Graves, admirable craftsmen, cultivated this with great nicety, but in the last resort the precision they achieve in the uniformity of speech tone is wearisome, even claustrophobic. How much more so with speakers of poetry who are less talented, and have less interesting minds, John Berryman for example.

If the shaping spirit, as Coleridge called it, comes from the unconscious, then the unconscious has a remarkable knowledge of rhythm and metre. 'Who can explain', says the improvvisatore in a tale of Pushkin's, 'how the lines that rise spontaneously to my lips are rhymed and stressed in four feet?' Pushkin's irony here is directed towards a profound truth: that the poet, like his improviser, may be composing on a set subject, but his imagination will none the less do its work in its own way within the conditioning implied by a poetic culture. The secret treaty between inspiration and form is allied with another paradox here : that in poetry the words—Graves's 'cool web of language'—are always—if they are to have the maximum effect on us—in tonal opposition to what they signify, e.g.

    Canst thou not minister to a mind diseas'd,
    Pluck from the memory a rooted sorrow, 
    Raze out the written troubles of the brain,
    And with some sweet oblivious antidote
    Cleanse the stuft bosom of that perilous stuff 
    That weighs upon the heart?

Or, if that is an unfair example as being beyond question—

   And I Tiresias have foresuffered all
   Enacted on this same divan or bed ...

A poet today might well feel his mystery demanded the attempted and forced identification of word and rhythm with the mind in anguish or the physical encounter. Nothing is so tedious as the effort of poetry today to be poetry in some absolute sense, the struggle to make words coincide with experience and feeling. The effort at surrealistic language itself comes off the top of the head, for it ignores the fact that the powers below are in perfect accord with—indeed are actually an aspect of—the discipline and organisation of language.

The language of Lowell's and Plath's poems, for this reason, is about as far as could be from the presumed nature of their experiences, a fact noted by Sylvia Plath herself. The poems 'are not pigs, they are not even fish, though they have a piggy and a fishy air'.

    It would be better if they were alive, and that's what they were.
    But they are dead, and their mother near dead with distraction.
    And they stupidly stare and do not speak of her.

The distraction is in the poet, not the poems, which do not speak of her. Like Life Studies they have only the appearance of natural life. Neither Lowell nor Plath wants the language of their poems to oppose with such relentless serenity their own life worlds (they are not theorists like Hulme or Yeats) but their talent makes this happen. As it must and should.

If the freedom of art means anything it means this. And the really revolting thing about much modern poetic theory and practice is the attempt to destroy this freedom, in the name of 'alternative art', or some such modish cant. Even pop songs usually have more of this freedom than contemporary poetry and the attempt to force art into coexistence with life is a kind of Maoism. Nothing could be further from it, which is why it is so necessary to us. I would hope that poetry would continue to preserve this distance and this freedom, and if it does so this would amount to all the 'development' I can envisage, or would wish to see.