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

I started out like all the rest - in the bedroom
with a couple of decks, a Hawaiian shirt, a pair of headphones
and the collected works of Wallace Stevens.
I bleached my hair, practiced my sestinas
and tried mixing Bukowski with Emily Bronte.
There were some early failures.
I trawled the sound archives, loaded up
some Frost on the ipod and remixed some Armitage.
By this time, I was playing parties for free
warming them up with a sonnet or two
before unleashing some Fenton; I put Howl on a loop
and made moonlight of their minds.
When I hit the clubs I was already a name
spinning Past Lives Therapy and Ezra Pound;
I played T. S.Eliot at the Ministry of Sound.
Most of them were out of it, coming up
on Gary Snyder, whispering lines
of Migration of Birds in the washrooms.
Girls with flushed cheeks passed me their numbers
high on Plath and with grins as wide as Hungarian clowns.
At the bar they’d barely sell a drink all night.
Afterwards, we’d meet up in midnight cafes
spark up some Muldoon and wait for the buzzing to stop.
We’d swipe the new Sweeney from each other’s laptops.
By the time I played Brighton Beach
a quarter of a million showed up, calling for Ginsburg
in one voice; I fooled them with a verse of Kaddish
then played Ted Hughes reading from Crow.
The air shook like an earthquake inside a mountain.
That night the moon was like honey; the sea
as calm as Elizabeth Bishop’s Club Classics Volume 3.