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

Neil Astley has come up with a new concept for an anthology and has pursued it so clear-sightedly that Staying Alive is set fair to overtake the BBC's The Nation's Favourite Poems as the best-selling poetry anthology in Britain. He has realised that anthologies are often bought by people who are turning to poetry from a sense of lack in their lives and that most anthologies give these readers little help or encouragement. In particular, they assume a good deal of experience in reading poetry. Even Heaney's and Hughes' The Rattle Bag, which is closest to Staying Alive in range, is presented with the slightly magisterial air of two major poets addressing the poetry-reading public.

Astley has acquired help from a major American arts charity, the Lannan Foundation of Santa Fe, to fund a book of nearly 500 pages, a major undertaking by a small independent publisher. As compiler as well as publisher, he has complete control over every aspect of the book and, reading it, one has a strong sense of summation, of the beliefs that have enabled Astley to make Bloodaxe a major poetry publisher for 30 years.

The book shrewdly uses aspects of the American self-help tradition - not quite 30 Ways to Improve your Self-Confidence, but enough no doubt to convince J Patrick Lannan of the book's improving intentions. Thus the title, Staying Alive, tells us that poetry helps us to live our lives (and, as a useful echo, is the title of the Bee Gees' hit song in Saturday Night Fever) and the subtitle - Real poems for unreal times - offers solace for the alienation that unhappy people feel. The book is designed to give maximum help to the new reader of poetry. Each of the 12 sections has a short clear introduction, some giving help with particularly important or difficult poems: Frost's ‘Directive’, Mahon's ‘A Disused Shed in Co Wexford’, Jorie Graham's ‘Salmon’. The index of poets gives their year and place of birth , their country of adult residence if different, and the year of death if appropriate, enabling the reader to locate each poet in time and place. There is a short essay on poetic form, a glossary of forms and a list of other anthologies and critical works. The list naturally promotes some Bloodaxe publications and is prefaced by a comment which usefully declares Astley's distrust of academia: "avoid any book of literary criticism published by a university press, and any book which refers to poems as texts or which uses the expressions decode or foregrounding".

Slightly at odds with this, the book is full of quotations from writers, chiefly poets, about poetry. There are fourteen at the beginning of the book, starting with Kafka and Emily Dickinson, two at the head of each section and dozens more in the Introduction and section introductions. In the end this becomes tedious, as if Astley is unable to take a critical step without a quote or two to back him up, but one sees the strategic purpose: to show that poetry is important to a large number of writers and to provide a wide range of aphorisms from which, as from Stevens' Adagia, the reader can choose and remember those that appeal most.

The introduction itself is carefully written in inclusive language, usually "we" but sometimes "you": "You don't go to poetry for answers or absolutes, just as you shouldn't expect a psychotherapist to give you solutions to your problems, to make decisions for you". Much of this is vague in the time-honoured way of self-help books, but Astley does go on to make a crucial point: that the language of the mass media is manipulative and controlling, and "our continual exposure to this manipulative dulling force discourages openness, otherness, imagination, wonder, reaching out". Against this, "the strength and beauty of the well-wrought challenging poem... gives you back that private time and space which are so much under threat in our culture".

Astley does his best to reach out to the new reader's existing experience of poetry, citing the Auden and Neruda poems spoken in Four Weddings and a Funeral and Truly, Madly, Deeply, the poem "photocopied by a friend, now pinned to the kitchen noticeboard or kept in a wallet", the poem "as emotionally charged as a Greek drama or a powerfully written crime thriller" and the need to re-read poems: "Just as you listen to songs - or sing them - again and again, so poems need to be read, re-read, read out aloud and read again". It would be easy to be precious about the tendentiousness of some of this - few crime thrillers compare with Oedipus Rex and we sing favourite songs as much for the tune as the words - but this would miss the point. If the introduction helps to bring new readers to poetry, everything in it is justified.

After such a comprehensive attempt to hook new readers of poetry, what of the poems? There are 500, more than in any single-volume British anthology that I know (The Rattle Bag has 484) and they are brilliantly chosen for the anthology's purpose. First, there are as many women poets as men which is unprecedented in a large general anthology and sends a clear message to women readers (it also reflects Astley's practice as editor at Bloodaxe). Second, besides English English poets there is a very good selection of Irish and North American poets and a good range of Scottish and Australasian poets and European poets in translation. Staying Alive is genuinely international.

Third, the selection is highly original. Many anthologies feed off previous ones and/or are selected for a particular purpose. Generally they are produced by editors on short term contracts. In Staying Alive I have a strong sense of a poetry editor's personal choice from 30 years' engagement with new poetry. There are many poems that I haven't seen elsewhere. Fourth, nothing muffles the poems' impact on the reader. There are almost no 'versions' of foreign poets, only accredited translations; no poems based on pictures or other works of art; no linguistic games; no free-floating Ashberyesque musings. If a poem relates to another poem, the original is given, so that every poem is accessible to the attentive new reader. And fifth, as one would expect from an editor of Astley's experience, all the poems read with perfect clarity. There isn't a muddy line anywhere.

As to the selection, there are a large number of quiet meditative poems, often in a rural setting. They remind me of Edward Thomas who, with five poems, is clearly Astley's favourite from the early 20th century, followed by Robert Frost with four. (Yeats, Eliot and Pound have one each.) On the other hand, Astley has a taste for 'alternate realism': Charles Simic and Jo Shapcott have the largest number of poems, nine and eight respectively, though the grimmer Matthew Sweeney has only two. But there is much else that is neither meditative or fantastic and I am grateful to Astley for introducing me to at least twenty poems which will stay with me always. Some are mentioned later, but I return with delight and amazement to poems like the two by Peter Didsbury, Kerry Hardie's ‘Avatar’ and Galway Kinnell's ‘Oatmeal’.

Any other reader, however experienced, is likely to find new treasures in Staying Alive and, for a reader finding their way in poetry, it is by far the best anthology they could buy or be given. It has a range and richness only approached by The Rattle Bag which is now twenty years old. The qualifications that follow have to be seen against this recommendation. Staying Alive deserves to become the best-selling anthology in Britain.

The problem is that, reading the book, I am aware of huge areas of experience which the poems address scarcely or not at all. The first is great emotional suffering. There are poems of genuine suffering like Philip Gross's on his daughter's anorexia, Carole Satyamurti on her cancer, Thom Gunn's on his mother's suicide, but they are steady, controlled, stoical. There is nothing approaching the intensity of Lowell's ‘Skunk Hour’, for example, or Plath's ‘Daddy’ or ‘Lady Lazarus’, or Anne Sexton's ‘Sylvia's Death’ or ‘You, Doctor Martin’. One sees Astley's problem. Having claimed on the book's cover that it contains "500 life-affirming poems", he can hardly include poems that defiantly, even exuberantly, record depression and madness.

Astley's treatment of the great American confessional poets, most of whom committed suicide, is instructive. He notes their proclivity to mental disorder, then marginalises them. Anne Sexton is represented by a single poem, ‘Her Kind’, whose effect is reduced by the section introduction ("she gave flamboyant readings, sometimes appearing on stage with a rock band as Anne Sexton and Her Kind") and by the Tracey Herd poem that follows it as if to say, see, a visibly sane English poet can be safely inspired by her. John Berryman has one Dream Song, again followed by a Tracey Herd response. Plath has three poems, somewhat distanced from her own turmoil – ‘Poppies in October’, ‘Mirror’ and ‘Mushrooms’. Lowell has one atypical late poem, ‘Epilogue’, lamenting his inability to write imaginatively. Jarrell has three poems, plangent rather than intense, about his childhood.

Astley has evidently decided for his new readers of poetry that they can't cope with the full blast of misery powerfully expressed. He is certainly mistaken. I have been leading a poetry writing group in Central London for as long as Astley has been at Bloodaxe and have always found that people emphatically do not want to be shielded from strong emotion. If anything, they thirst for it.

This avoidance of poems of strong emotion affects most of the book. Admittedly there are some powerfully emotional poems in the section on love where strong feeling is avowedly "life-affirming", including Sujata Bhatt's ‘White Asparagus’ which is the most erotic poem about pregnancy that I now know. But in general Astley excludes strong feelings, ecstatic and violent, and the means - extreme image, symbol, rhetorical flourish - by which they are expressed.

For example, very few poems express anger, presumably because Astley sees anger as destructive, not "life-affirming" or justified, the right response to injustice. I am grateful to be introduced to Katrina Porteous's ‘Seven Silences’ (on the foot-and-mouth epidemic), Fred Voss's ‘Making America Strong’ (a fiercely undermining take on the US military aircraft industry), Paul Durcan's ‘The Bloomsday Murders’ (for which he received death threats) and Derek Mahon's ‘As it should be’ (also on political murder), but these are exceptions. Apart from a few others set in Northern Ireland, these are also virtually the only poems that show any kind of political engagement. There are three chunks of clotted rant by Peter Reading whom Astley sells to his readers as a brilliant verse technician. Beyond this there is "the complicated shame of Englishness" in Jo Shapcott's ‘A Letter to Dennis Potter’, Kit Wright's outburst of self-loathing in ‘Everyone Hates the English’, ee cummings' mockery of American cant in ‘next to of course god america I’ and Langston Hughes declaring his future as a black American (‘I, too, sing America’). And that's it. As a subset of experiences that might provoke anger, the whole experience of racial migration and alienation is limited to the Langston Hughes and three consecutive poems by Imtiaz Dharker, Jackie Kay and Shirley Geok-Lin Lim. One senses Astley ticking off race as 'done', then moving back to what really interests him

In fact, for a self-consciously inclusive editor Astley shows remarkably little interest in the various minorities. Alden Nowlan's ‘He sits down on the floor of a school for the retarded’ and Anne Carson's ‘Father's Old Blue Cardigan’, about the onset of senile dementia, are the only poems that respond to mental disability. None reflect physical disability. For those who turn to poetry from anxiety about their sexuality, Staying Alive provides little solace. Astley helpfully explains that Elizabeth Bishop's ‘Chemin de fer’ is "a cry for love which speaks to her own struggle to accept her homosexuality when she wrote this poem in 1946", but makes no comment on ‘The Shampoo’, a more direct poem and the only one Bishop published about her long affair with Lota de Machado Soares. Otherwise the reader needs to know from elsewhere that Auden's ‘Lullaby’ and Thom Gunn's ‘The Hug’ describe gay experience; nothing in the book will tell them.

There are two other major areas of lack. The first is poetry set in cities, even though these are where most people live. I counted only four in the 500 which recognisably relate to a city: Auden's ‘1st September 1939’ (New York), Les Murray's ‘An Absolutely Ordinary Rainbow’ (Sydney), Matthew Sweeney's ‘Tube Ride to Martha's’ (London) and Anne Rouse's ‘England Nil’ (Hamburg). Otherwise when poems have an ascertainable setting, it's house or garden, rural or seashore.

Second, almost none of the poems express a sense of community, the sense of a particular people living in a place at a particular time which, for example, the younger Heaney expressed in poems like ‘A Constable Calls’, ‘Funeral Rites’ and ‘The Tollund Man’. Almost all the poems in Staying Alive present the poet alone or in contact with one other person - lover, parent, child, acquaintance, passer-by. The only exceptions seem to be two of the city poems mentioned above, and they express community in very attenuated forms - in ‘An Absolutely Ordinary Rainbow’ the embarrassment of passers-by faced with a man weeping in public and in ‘England Nil’ the camaraderie of football hooligans.

From Staying Alive, it seems that for Neil Astley poetry reflects a world rather different from that in which most of us live. It is a world in which almost exclusively white heterosexual people have experiences, often in rural settings, which they express in quiet meditative poems or slightly zany fantasies. Despite Astley's apparent belief in the transforming power of poetry, his selection in Staying Alive is conservative, conformist, untransforming. Does this matter? Only in the sense that the new readers whom he addresses won't see the full potentiality of poetry in Staying Alive and, unless they look elsewhere, will be less likely to write transforming poetry themselves. The history of poetry is dotted with individuals who have transformed how subsequent readers see the possibilities of poetry: Lowell, Plath and Sexton on the intimate emotional life; the young Ted Hughes on describing the natural world; Frank O'Hara on the meaning of a lunchtime walk in the city; Wilfred Owen on the experience of war. Very little of these poets' relevant work appears in Staying Alive.

However, compared with The Best American Poetry 2002, Staying Alive is full of vibrant language and emotional richness. In the Best American Poetry series, a distinguished poet selects 60 to 80 poems, no more than one per poet, published in poetry magazines over the previous twelve months. The book appears in September of the designated year and, given the publication lead time, many of the poems will have first appeared in the previous year.

As the series editor, David Lehman, points out, 11 September 2001 was "a revolutionary event in American consciousness... In their shock and grief, people everywhere looked instinctively to poetry". In this respect, The Best American Poetry 2002 is a huge embarrassment. The guest editor is Robert Creeley who in 1954 founded the Black Mountain Review which was influential in leading American poetry away from the European cultural complexities of Eliot and the East Coast to a simpler, more direct style deriving variously from William Carlos Williams, Whitman, Japanese poetry and Pound at his most accessible. Creeley's own work is an open-weave of simple observations and artless philosophising, often with unpredictable line breaks: "As I sd to my / friend, because I am / always talking - John, I / sd, which was not his / name, the darkness sur- / rounds us, what / can we do against it..."

And Creeley will have nothing to do with 9/11. He doesn't mention it in his introduction and only one of the poems, Fanny Howe's, refers to it very obliquely. The introduction consists of a rambling series of reminiscences - his sister's death, the chicken shows he attended as a boy - interspersed with quotations from Keats, Pound and others, none of it relating to the state of American poetry in 2001/2. Creeley represents the point where individualism becomes solipsism. There is something breathtaking in his self-absorption at a time when, according to David Lehman, there is a widespread longing for an expression of shared values in verse. Creeley is certain, as he has always been, that nothing compares in importance to his own personal experience, however narrowly defined.

As one would expect, there are a fair number of Creeleyesque poems in the book ("how can I help it / good moonlight, bad rain / Carl, dusk, picture / of Carl at dusk with / Mona in the background / partially thumbed out...") and several that owe a good deal to Pound including the longest at fifteen pages, Duncan Mcnaughton's ‘The quarry (1 - 13)’. There is a brilliant Borgesian conceit in Jenny Boully's ‘The Body’ which consists of footnotes to a poem that is not provided and a neat squib from Anne Carson in a poem where the title and epigraphs are longer than the poem itself. The other names - Ashbery, Donald Hall, Merwin, Olds, Rich - are represented by unmemorable poems and Louise Gluck's is so flat and overexplicit that I thought there must be a mistake.

Most of the poems seem to have been chosen because they share the same self-absorption as the editor. Very few express a relationship or describe the world of the senses; none responds to the notion of society; very few seek to engage the reader's emotions. At the technical level, there is no vivid imagery, little surprising use of language, little use of strong or varied rhythm. The most common technique is an uneasy veering between abstract language and concrete image which plays at the edge of sense but is too earnest to be witty. Fair examples are the openings of Elaine Equi's ‘O Patriarchy’: "Inaccessible / and remote / behind the drawbridge / of the penis. / Who knows / how your contracts / sprang up / without a word / natural as rain..." and Bill Kushner's ‘Great’

            We cross into the great & there goes
             you know. There's a voice stream, she
            & I can fly up, holding on to air, I
             blue, queer as folk, get the best home
             cooking there...

It would be easy to dismiss the book as a product of Creeley's idiosyncrasy, but I wonder whether it represents not too unfairly the mass of poetry published in American magazines and slim volumes, which is very different from the American poetry selected by British publishers for the British market. I have the strong impression of reading people who adopt post-modernist devices in their work not out of intellectual conviction but for other reasons. This point is made by Simon Armitage, reflecting on his work with university students in Iowa:

    My take on poetry in the States is that it's very much, well, this    
    phrase has been used before, imploded into the universities, and
    you can take that any way you want, retreated, consolidated,
    found a niche there, whatever. I'm not speaking about the whole
    of poetry across the States, but literary poetry, the way it's
    become a highly specialised language... the course was vocational
    in the sense that many of the students were hoping to get jobs as a
    consequence. Their manuscripts were applications, of a sort, and
    the qualification they received a kind of teaching qualification.

This seems to suggest an awareness that poetry isn't valued as poetry in the society in which it is written, but for some other social or career reason. This may account for the unvarying earnestness of tone that one finds in much American poetry, the conscious display of literary artifice, the lack of strong feeling. It is the work of people who know, deep down, that they are writing for a few like-minded people to whom rage or passion would be vulgar. Hence too the envious contempt with which, as David Lehman reports, Billy Collins, a genuinely popular poet, is widely regarded by American poets.

I am reminded of Robert Putnam's Bowling Alone, a detailed analysis of how, on every measure, social contact - the very wish to be with others - has substantially declined in the USA since the 1960s. At bottom, poetry is a rather specialised way of talking intimately to others and if the wish to share experience declines, poetry will become merely artful, abstract, a passionless display for a coterie.

As Putnam indicates, the retreat from social contact, from community, is a result of economic developments in which the USA is more advanced than Britain. Against this background, The Best American Poetry 2002 represents an advanced, and Staying Alive for all its strengths an interim, marginalisation of poetry. One has to turn to a country like Ireland where the concept of community is still meaningful and where, in relation to the population, an extraordinary amount of vivid, emotionally engaging poetry is written. But the Celtic Tiger roars, of course, eager to catch up. The survival of such poetry, in Britain at least, is clearly going to need greater radicalism - in education, publishing and funding - than anyone has yet proposed.