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

First it was oil tankers
spokeshaving their ironic rainbows
over the channel.
Then the silly season
when the oil rigs blew

like bottles in a crate
of excited stout. In time
they were topped.
The seals took it badly, belly up
in the mouth of The Wash.

or Carol Ann-Duffy’s ‘Human Interest’:

Fifteen years minimum, banged up inside
for what took thirty seconds to complete.
She turned away. I stabbed. I felt this heat
burn through my skull until reason had died.

     The welding together of poetry and politics becomes the art of recognising an appropriate level of language. For instance, factional politics (Party or issue-based politics) is infamous for mishandling and degrading the language. Those who place Mayakovsky above Mendelstam fall into the trap of mistaking Mayakovsky’s dogmatism for certainty. Mandelstam was far more certain — the purpose and precision of his imagery shows his mind was locked onto the world like a laser:

You and I will sit for a while in the kitchen,
the rude stench of keresene,

sharp knife, plump round loaf -
We’ll make the stove go all the way.

And have some string handy
to make a basket which, before daylight,

we will take to the station
where no one can come after us.

     Mandelstam didn’t just get the details right, he was well aware of the dangers engendered by precision. Like Ratushinkaya, this marks him out as a more vital poet than Yevtushenko or Voznesensky.

     It all comes back to how well you can write. Mandelstam’s message is: I won’t get carried away by the need to explain, just use craft to carry and illuminate the poet’s momentum. Being precise about a tiny detail will carry the politics of a circumstance, however insignificant the detail may seem to be.

     What about the James Fenton approach - in which the poet-adventurer-journalist actually sets out looking for material, especially political material? Well, I’ve three merry tales to tell.

     In March 1989, I was sent to Ireland by Northern Arts to write children’s poems. I rapidly tired of the project and ended up footslogging the Falls road in West Belfast. It was a week of tit-for-tat killings. On the evening I arrived, a man was shot dead in the public bar below my room. Several adventures followed. I started writing poems about Ireland, including the sequence A Belfast Kiss. These poems consist of images drawn from simple observation counterpointed against reported speech (real speech, quotes from the front-line of ordinary lives within an extraordinary political situation). The poems went down very well among Irish audiences, both North and South of the border. The general view was that it was about time one of these bloody English poets put their writing where their mouth was. Not so on my return to England. After all, what the Hell was an English poet doing, writing about (a) politics, (b) another nation’s struggle?

     The following June I received a Gregory Award from The Society of Authors. Douglas Hurd was presenting the cheques at the London shindig. He was Home Secretary in those far-off days, and I didn’t take kindly to his silence over the Rushdie affair. We weren’t too keen about his raid on Duncan Campbell during the Zircon controversy either. So we complained about it in the Guardian, on the BBC World Service and a host of other outlets. There were over one hundred writers present at the awards ceremony. We received backing from less than ten of them. Barry’s still worried his phone’s being tapped. We also received some aggro from literary hacks. After all, what were we doing, writing about (a) politics, (b) other people’s struggle?

     In November of the same year I went to Berlin and Prague for three weeks. This time, I wasn’t mincing words: I was there to find material for poems. But most of the time I stood with the crowds at The Wall and went at it with hammer and chisel. I removed about two hundred and sent them through the post to various poet-friends in England. I started writing Berlin-poems, Prague-poems. I was hunting for details - in snack bars, alleyways, press conferences, faces … I haven’t received a verdict on these pieces yet. Most of them aren’t written. After all, it’s notoriously difficult writing about (a) politics, (b) etcetera, etcetera …

     To put it bluntly, the critical consensus goes like this. Larkin created extraordinary English poems from ordinary English detail. Larkin is ‘the representative English poet of the post-Hardy generations’. Larkin’s working method was a system through which subsequent English poets should operate. And, if those subsequent poets feel they have to go abroad to find ordinary details (especially if those details carry political under/overtones), then something must be awry with their skill. They are denying their heritage; they are disenfranchising themselves from the consensus.

     Novice-writers labour under this hubris. What this article is saying is that when poets choose to focus on a particular detail they shouldn’t feel hidebound by its latent political nature. Ideas are, inescapably, in things, wherever the poet chooses to find them.

     Conclusions? If you’re rolling your own soliloquies, write a reply to this article. If you’re alive to the argument that poetry and politics are much of a muchness, then you might want to go walkabout, whether to Belfast, Berlin, Prague or Huddersfield Bus Station. Try describing things accurately without losing your nerve. But why am I telling you when you’ve already guessed that all I’m concerned with is that second etcetera?