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

The publication of Williams's poetry in England (his criticism is still unavailable here) seems a good reason for rejoicing over the past decade. But whether this is the most encouraging feature is surely hard to say. Furthermore, poetry being a wind that will blow where it listeth and reassuringly beyond our foresight or control, it is pointless to air preferences that may well be unexpectedly and enrichingly overtaken by actual events, or indulge in regrets at situations that, lived through, might infinitely benefit one as a writer. I cannot, then, reply to your two questions tout court, but can perhaps come at them obliquely.

I do not know that I find any one feature of 'the poetry scene' discouraging (I have very little to do with it)—suffice it to say that there are certain things one would like to see an end of: the invitation to prolonged adolescence from Liverpool; the suicide mania (already fading, perhaps, now that radio, television and the Sunday press have worn it out); Francis Bacon-like screamings about the absurdity of the universe; the 'Look, I am ruining my life' type of poetry (Requiescat in pace, John Berryman). But in the midst of it all, some wholly surprising witness to poetic integrity comes forward—as, for example, Geoffrey Hill's admirable Mercian Hymns, humorous, self-possessed, unselfregarding and quite unlooked-for. In the midst of it all, too, unforeseen coalescences take place and discouragement finds itself confronted by new hopes.

Thus, for a long time, I had found myself preoccupied by two apparently unrelated causes for discouragement—the breakdown, in the face of literary extremism, of relations with the world of Wordsworth (by 'world' I mean that essential 'thinking into the human heart' which, allied with the insights of the phenomenologists, might have given us back a human universe), and, side by side with this, I had grown increasingly aware of the breakdown of relations with modern French poetry.

Suddenly, this very year, two books by the same author, Phillipe Jaccottet—Paysages avec Figures Absentes and La Semaison—simultaneously announced the existence of a poetry that could be readily available to an English reader—that is, a poetry not written in code like so much contemporary French verse—and also a poetry where humanity and landscape are held in imaginative rapport. The rapport is one of difficulty and hope. It is religious in a very Wordsworthian sense, its insights being the fruit both of deprivation and an awareness of plenitude. La Semaison begins with the image of snowflakes seen as maple seeds and the moon as a single white seed above bare branches, it ends with the two old women at a death bed. Between the haiku-like precision of the first image and the finality of the latter, the whole gamut of human hopes, pains and reconciliations opens out from the roots of imaginative perception intricated, so to speak, among the stones and humus of words.

At a time when our own poetry has too often the appearance of being in the hands of moral grotesques, Jaccottet's exploration of what we mean by a landscape, a place, a centre, takes on present and future relevance for us: 'Quand le centre s'eparpille, se &robe ou s'efface, une tension se produit chez les meilleurs, et les plus grandes oeuvres, jetties dans le tumulte, ou le vide, prennent quelque chose de grimacant, d'atroce ou simplement d'excessif. Les monstres surgissent aux confins, jamais au centre.' (Paysages avec Figures Absentes).

I do not hope to see any particular developments during the next decade. One cannot make five-year plans for poetry.