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

Christopher James has won The Bridport and Ledbury poetry prizes and in 2002 was the recipient of an Eric Gregory Award. Born in Paisley in 1975, he is a graduate of the Creative Writing MA at the University of East Anglia. His first collection, The Invention of Butterfly, was published in 2006 by Ragged Raven Press. He won this year’s National Poetry Competition.

Firstly many congratulations on winning the National Poetry Competition 2008. You’ve won other poetry prizes, so I’m curious to know what impact you think winning a single poem competition may have, or has in the past had, in terms of the exposure of your work to a broader audience?

No matter what the impact, winning a big competition is certainly a lot of fun - there’s adrenaline rush when you find out; the sudden affirmation it brings to what you are doing - all those late nights suddenly add up to something very worthwhile. The presentations are always a buzz too - they’re a great chance to network (the famous Bridport prize winning banquet is handsome reward in itself) as well as giving you the chance to have your Oscar moment, if you’re into such things. When I won my first couple of prizes, I rather naively thought doors would start swinging open for me - but you still have to the consistently high quality of work to back it up. Shortly after winning my Gregory, I sent off to a couple of publishers, but just wasn’t ready for a first collection - I didn’t have enough good poems. It took another two or three years to assemble this. Probably the best thing of winning a single poem competition is that you do receive invites to read at festivals and events. I got the chance to read at Aldeburgh, Cheltenham and Ledbury which gave me a chance to perform for a highly discerning audience, including a masterclass with Paul Muldoon. And I’ve forgotten to mention the money (which always comes in handy for someone like me who always lives beyond their means...)

What are your thoughts, in general, about the widespread nature of competition in Poetry? I was thinking more about the difference this makes, in terms of re-engaging, connecting the majority of people with poetry, and in some way convincing them that poetry still has significance, and a relevance in the contemporary and real world we live in?

I think competitions give people a good snapshot of what’s happening in poetry, in as much as that is possible. However I would be careful not to overstate the case for the amount of fame a single poem can win - it takes years for even a prize winning poem to make an impression in the popular consciousness, as opposed to say, a big hit single, which the public embrace collectively and immediately. You hear stories about 18th century poems making such an impression, but it’s difficult to imagine again. Perhaps it was last achieved by Larkin or Heaney in both the popular and literary sense? I think for the most part, competition websites and anthologies are read more by other poets than the public. Perhaps the National Poetry Competition and the Arvon competition are the exceptions because of national newspaper coverage. On the whole, while competitions are good ways to draw attention to current work, I think probably radio has a bigger part to play in keeping contemporary poetry alive. While the public is much smarter now, and will be familiar with Simon Armitage, Andrew Motion, Carol Anne Duffy and Jo Shapcott, there are still preconceptions about poetry having to rhyme, act and perform in a certain way - it’s rather like expecting a modern day schoolboy to doff his hat, play with a spinning top and run off down the street with a quarter of humbugs.

What role do you think poetry magazines and journals play in aiding eventual publication? Or do you think that pamphlets are becoming a more significant signpost?

Poetry magazines are vitally important.The best ones are like marvellous presents when they drop through the letterbox, because you know there will be new, judiciously chosen, luminous, and challenging material inside. You can practically hear the thoughts and words buzzing away inside the envelope like some bee that got trapped when it was stuck down. What amazes me more than anything (and without a hint of brown-nosing!) is the generosity of the editors. Bob Mee and Janet Murch, former Iota incumbents spent days sifting through mountains of submissions and molehills of subscriptions. No money is made and money is frequently lost in returning poems without the correct postage and so on. And yet without them, the transaction of contemporary poetry couldn’t really happen. You may have thought with small audiences and high costs that the Internet is the simple answer, but it doesn’t seem to have panned out like that. The Internet doesn’t satisfy most poets' desire to ‘get into print’ and the page still has a much higher currency. The best magazines, however are cottoning on to the fact that readers and poets like a lively web presence as well - a place where readers can meet each other and share opinions about the latest issue. A magazine subscription base is also a community - with the magazine as its common interest. Pamphlets are also important - especially to get a sense of a poets wider body of work. There is still the problem of selling pamphlets of course, but coming to a reading armed with some will mean you are taken more seriously and have something to press into the palms of an impressed audience. It didn’t happen to me this way, but pamphlets are increasingly seen as an established stepping stone to a full collection.

Could you tell me something about the themes and preoccupations in your writing and how they inform your work? And an ancillary question - which you may or may not wish to conflate with the first - would you say that your winning poem was similar to or diverges from these?

Most of my poems are small rebellions against the mundane. They are usually crammed with unusual detail - like a motorcyclist with a skeleton riding pillion behind her, or a photograph of Frank Sinatra stuck to the inside back window of a VW Beetle. It’s usually stuff that I’ve observed and stuck into my notebook and saved for a rainy day - or at least until an idea to hang the poem on comes along. In the case of the motorcyclist, it became a rather macabre poem about a second honeymoon, a road trip featuring a woman and her late husband that ends with them both driving off the end of Southwold Pier. The usual preoccupations come up - death, love and religion, but I rarely tackle them head on - rather through an unusual story I’ve heard or imagined. Some poems are pure slights of fancy, like Norfolk is Heading out to Sea, in which the county breaks off from the rest of England and starts floating out towards Holland. Others are much closer to home - about a new born son, or rowing on an empty lake. These poems have a simplicity and honesty to them that can sometimes be just as engaging as the Technicolor narratives. I think Farewell to the Earth falls somewhere between the two, which is perhaps why it succeeds. It has a credible personal narrative, but is still laced with unusual material: the first line reads: ‘We buried him with a potato in each hand.’

What was the initial impulse that kick started the writing of your winning poem?

I walked over to my friend Nick’s house with my daughter one Saturday morning - the first visit of the new year. I knew his father was ill and naturally enough , asked ‘how’s your dad?’ ‘Dead’, was the very short reply. After a moment’s mortifying silence, we got chatting about the unusual circumstances of his funeral and about the fact that he had been a keen gardener. I was intrigued about the natural burial and the fact that they had dropped in some of his personal effects. Later that day, I jotted down some notes and wrote a draft of what I initially called ‘Gardener’s Farewell’ within the week. I shared a copy with him and he was quite pleased - although of course I was a little nervous it was so soon after his loss. When I found out it had won, of course I let him know straight away. The family are actually quite touched and honoured. I should say at this point, the gardener’s name was Paul Newman Keeble - dying in the same year as the other Paul Newman. I should also thank Nick for the being so candid and allowing the poem to be published.

With the proliferation at so many literature festivals of ‘Celebrities’ and some Poetry Festivals that seem to concentrate on ‘The Tried and Tested’ and ‘Chosen By A Select Few’, I’d like to ask you about the Politics’of readings. How difficult, or not, have you found it to access opportunities to read from your work? Considering all the hoops, in terms of time-lines, representation, vetting – through peer review you have to go through?

I read sporadically at festivals, arts centres and pubs and I do generally enjoy giving performances of my work. I’ve mentioned that I’ve had invites on the back of competition wins as well as being in anthologies and magazines and whenever I can, I accept them. It’s the single best way to sell copies of my book - people generally only buy a newcomer’s work in the warm, fuzzy afterglow of a reading. I normally write a setlist and think about a little bit of patter to introduce the poems. Even if you give just a few establishing remarks, I find the audience much more likely to go with you. Otherwise, they’re wondering what on earth the poem is about and trying to work out an appropriate response. Having said that, I find poetry audiences very finely tuned to mood and able to take on quite complex conceits and imagery - I suppose it helps that most people who listen are also poets, so there’s usually an element of professional interest. To be honest, I haven’t felt encumbered by any politics or felt like I’ve had to jump through any hoops. I once made the appalling error of reading a poem in a Northern Irish accent . . . not something to be repeated. Too often I trot out my ‘greatest hits’ - poems I know always go down well, but it's much more rewarding reading something new. Time allowing, I’m always happy to accept an invitation to read or do a workshop.

Would you agree that it’s essential for a poet to be heard as well as read, when you consider the tradition and its oral origins?

I wouldn’t say it was essential - most people have a good aural imagination , but some peculier magic happens when good poetry is read aloud. It’s a reminder that poetry is rooted in sound; melody and rhythm. Whenever I write I always read what I’ve written aloud to make sure it’s hanging together. It can read fine on the page, but translated in soundwaves can be leaden and flat. Most poetry ‘from the tradition’ was meant to be heard, remembered and repeated, which I suppose is why Gawain and Beowulf have distinctive alliteration patterns as well as thumping good narratives. Certainly four hours of Shakespeare’s iambic lines in performance can do something to you it doesn’t do on the page. The one thing I’m not into is declaiming or excessive formality. I was actually disappointed to hear an MP3 of MacNeice reading his work - his formal, clipped, dispassionate delivery seems at odds with the human sympathy and acute feeling in the work. And Robert Frost sounds like a dying king at the end of a dynasty - lighten up, you feel like saying - it’s only a bit of snow! The best contemporary poets give a naturalistic readings that somehow also project a confidence of purpose. You’ve got to sound convinced by your poem or it will drift into the air and vanish before your eyes. I’m one of those people who believe that bad poetry isn’t poetry. I wish I could remember who said that?

Who are your major influences in writing and why? (It does not have to be poetry)

I started out reading Gerard Manley Hopkins and Elizabeth Jennings which reflected the tastes of my school English Teachers, and my early writing efforts were over complicated and quite classically ‘undergraduate’ - everything was hyphenated! As I read wider, my poetry became simpler and clearer. At university I was exposed to all manner of things: Blake, Eliot, Harrison, the second world war poets, notably Alun Lewis and Keith Douglas whose stylish confidence really appealed to me. His line ‘Shall I get drunk or cut myself a piece of cake,’ struck me as a fabulous opener. (The cake reference I later found out referred to going with a prostitute, rather than a nice slice of Madeira). I enjoyed his painterly sensibility - using light as well as sound as an effect. I also enjoyed the American influence of Wallace Stevens, Frank O’Hara and Ginsberg. I enjoyed Ginsberg’s late work where he wanders the midnight dime stores of New York unable to sleep, feeling old, irrascible and vaguely aroused. Of course, Heaney, Hughes, Armitage, Matthew Sweeney, Jo Shapcott, Jean Sprackland, W. N. Herbert are all there in the background. I also liked Henry Shukman’s book In Dr No’s Garden and Betjeman is a bit of a guilty pleasure! My most recent discovery is a Scots poet called Alisdair Maclean who wrote comparatively little but whose collection From the Wilderness is a collection of dry, darkly comic and frequently surreal musings from the desolate crofts. It is very much in the vein of Hughes’ 60’s and 70’s work. Outside poetry, I like a lot of Billy Bragg, Bruce Springsteen, Bob Dylan . . . anyone beginning with B, really. I’m also a huge admirer of the late environmental writer Roger Deacon. His two books Waterlog and Wildwood are always the ones I press into people’s hands at the end of a dinner party. Which probably explains why I no longer have copies of his books in the house. I read less fiction, and I’m quite a slow reader, but would happily admit to enjoying D. H. Lawrence, Thomas Hardy, John Irving and Ian McEwan.