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

I don't want to answer your questions directly because I feel I have, in one way or another, been doing little except sounding off about the state and future of poetry for more than a decade. Moreover, regular readers of the Review will have had their bellyfull of my theories, since Clive James argued against them at enormous length in the last issue. I admit I had some difficulty in recognizing the wild-eyed, flailing creatures he described as my own brood, but God forbid I should go through the whole performance again. Instead, I would like to offer a brief personal explanation of my critical bias, although I know this is not what the editor had in mind when he sent out his questions.

When the Review began ten years ago, the poetry scene was ripe for a change. The Stevensesque campus dandies of America and our own Movement poets were getting nowhere; pace James, one Larkin didn't make a Summa. Nor did the then fashionable alternatives promise much. For example, there was a vague but oddly tenacious belief that one could be modern simply by resurrecting the experiments which Pound and Williams had milked dry fifty years before. This style of belated aestheticism seemed to me then, and still does, nothing more than a mildly intriguing academic game, only marginally more absorbing than The Times crossword puzzle. As Gulley Jimson said, 'It's like farting "Annie Laurie" through a keyhole. All very clever, but is it worth the effort?' In that context it seemed necessary to insist that poetry should be at least as uncomplacent as life itself; that is, that poetry, too, should be concerned with self-knowledge and self-exploration.

That was the real impetus behind the critical line I took then and subsequently developed into the theory of Extremism. This latter was, I know, tendentious, often deliberately so, and it left out a lot, also deliberately. But I think it served a polemical purpose and also described some of the most interesting and vital poetry then being written. But Extremism is a style of verse which does, as Clive James pointed out, lay itself open to its own special rhetoric. And knowing now how two of the poets whom I most admired have died, I am not sure that it was worth the cost.
 
But Extremism is less important than something I think it is a sign of, something which I described in The Savage God, but which no one, not even the exhaustive Clive James, has taken up. I mean a revolution in the relationship between the poet and his material. It seems to me that the old Arnold-Flaubert-Eliot belief in the impersonality of the work has given way to the radically different concept of art in a continual, cross-fertilizing relationship with the artist's life. On these terms, the existence of a work of art is contingent, provisional. It emerges from autobiography, fixes the energy and confusions of experience in the most lucid possible terms so as to create a temporary clearing of calm, and then moves on, or back, into autobiography. Classical objectivity has been replaced by another kind of control : the tentative, flowing, continually improvised balance of life itself. In other words, we now have a genuinely existential art but we do not yet have an existential criticism to go with it. Whether or not we will eventually get it, I can't say.

I, anyway, have been in the prophecy business too long. Ten years ago I was involved with what were then new voices getting their first hearing in this country. But not any more. And I suspect this is inevitable. The useful life of the poetry critic is limited, like that of the lyric poet. His business is to help create taste not by following behind the artists but, in his own way, by joining them, by being aware of the stresses they work under, and by trying to clarify these and to present a coherent case for what might, at that point, not yet be wholly clear. That, I think, has always been the purpose and strength of the Review, which has been nothing if not partisan and polemical. Thank God. But this automatically means that one commits oneself to a particular emphasis and a particular moment. I doubt if it is possible to do it all over again for a different time and a different nexus of forces. I, certainly, no longer wish to.

So the only prediction I would make for the poetry of the next decade is a simple one : the odds are I won't be reading much of it.