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

It's utter fear, man. That's all I can say. I mean, fuck, the audience terrifies me (and I'm saying this whilst having read to no more than a dozen people). In Speed, William Burroughs Jr. wrote how he often warmed to nervous people, they being the ones who knew what they were up against. Well, yeah, I'd have to agree. It's just not a particularly nice place out there. I really don't know what's going on, and truth be told, I never did. Which I suppose is the reason I write. To reduce the few key words that, where stretched in tremulous lines across the page, create the greatest tensional pull.

I love old train yards, buildings which have been half torn down then left, the whiff of petrol on the sky, and the seats outside any given bus station where those with hardly anything to lose sit grinning at great things the rest of us can only dream about. I don't see politics, or ethics, or morals in the husk of ruined lives that cocoons me on a daily basis.

When writing this piece originally, I dragged the words out for a good three pages or so. What I have left are these few paragraphs due to realising that I had inadvertently written some form of justification for my poetry, that I had attempted to put depth to the perception of an audience in much the same way as stars malfunction in the depth of a lighted room.

Essentially, I write with no audience in mind. Or if I write for anyone at all then it is my fellow vermin: the outcasts and drop-outs, the losers and vagrants. It is in the company of these people that I feel most at home. Going to underground music gigs as a teenager in Sheffield, I was too shy to mingle with the crowds (the audience) so instead would converse with the prostitutes who lined the doorways and the streets at that time. Between the rows of girls, none much older than myself, I felt at ease in a way that the crowds could not provide. Thus, I have always preferred the streets. Those places where there is no audience.

Yet, undoubtedly, I write, and as such must write for an audience (no matter how small). Though, as already mentioned, when I picture an audience, I think of the outcasts and losers, the ones for whom politics and ethics and morals are merely bywords in a society which bears down on them like bleeding Christs. I give everything to them, regardless of whether they are a member of the audience, or friends who open up the night to laughter, or a lover for whom I have wandered miles by foot to see for less than fifteen minutes of talk. The audience is whoever reads/hears the work. Their relation to the work is of no importance to anyone but themselves. They interpret/misinterpret words in accordance with their own experiences.

I used to think that it was hypocritical of me to say that I didn't care who read my poetry. Now I realise that I have simply sent it out via whatever channels are available so that it might reach those who are not my friends, whose paths have not yet crossed mine in this bitter, ugly world, but who might perhaps be able to find some use for what I write; if only as new fuel to stem the cold a while. 'We know how to give our whole life each day.'