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

Let me begin by taking exception to the phrasing of these questions. 'The poetry scene' is recognizably a phrase of our own time, and stands (especially when it appears in the Review) for something very discouraging indeed. A 'scene' is something transitory: it does not last because it is only part of a spectacle. A 'scene' must have 'developments', because there is nothing solid or stable about it. It is part of the great show of our times, and from the poetry 'scene' we demand, as we do from the political, ecological, sports and pop scenes, events and bustle, bustle, bustle. The fact is, though, that poets don't do very much to satisfy this demand in so far as they are poets : a new poem isn't much of an 'event' in the mass-media, consumer-culture sense, even if it is by Larkin or Lowell. The events required by the poetry 'scene' are of a different kind : suicides, for example, broken marriages, alcoholism, neglect of supposed genius, the bravado of self-interested attacks on the Establishment (and defences of it), the jamborees of Poetry International, and so on. It's not that such things have not existed before now, but that our heightened sense of the show that must go on encourages us to make more of them than ever; and since poets are human beings and fallible, and must write for the world they live in, it is not surprising that we have a poetry of sensations fortes which answers to the clamour for a poetry 'scene'. The evidence for this lies as much in the poetry printed by the Review as in the Collected Poems of Jeff Nuttall.

Poetry concerns itself with the permanently valuable: indeed, it seeks to be permanently valuable. This remains true despite changes in poetic idiom. The idiom must change, but the concern remains the same. The idiom changes because a poet must start from his own time in his movement towards values which transcend mere contemporaneity : the language he works in is given him by his contemporaries, and it is in their behalf that he works, to use the language of the present to the extent that it may be used in the expression of what has permanent value.
 
The poetry 'scene' slights this conception of poetry : it isn't interested in permanence. The truth of this can very easily be seen. The poetry 'scene' isn't interested in Wordsworth, only Basil Bunting reading Wordsworth in a Northumbrian accent; it isn't interested in Shakespeare, only in Ted Hughes's collection of sensations fortes from the works; it isn't interested in Blake, only in the Children of Albion and their travesty of his endeavour. No one needs telling that the poetry 'scene' is what's happening now in poetry.

Yet what is happening now in poetry ought to be what happened yesterday and what happens tomorrow : the (silent) reading of poetry, the (silent) reading of Robert Lowell with Yeats, Tennyson, Herbert, Beddoes, Dryden and the other poets of the past. A concern with the poetry of the present that excludes the poetry of the past is surely unnatural. But scenes are unnatural; they belong to artifice; and what we are moving towards is a poetry 'scene' that is entirely imaginary, a topos for gossip and wit which will bear no relation to reality whatsoever. It is not very far from the truth to say that the poetry of the past is no longer read, but merely studied. In such conditions it is hard to see how poetry can continue as a vital phenomenon in the present. And if our poetry in the present is defective, then one of the reasons for its defects is surely the unreality which accompanies the writing of a poem. How can a poet in our time believe in what he is doing? We are creating conditions in which to be a poet will shortly be to be either a fool, a knave, or both, but with nothing in between these categories.

To care about poetry is to care about the culture of which one is a part, and of which poetry is also part; it means caring about the continuing endeavour of poets, among others, to envisage and to actualize ways of living and thinking to which we may ascribe permanent value. In so far as the English universities and schools contain teachers to whom such propositions have real force, and who are capable of communicating this force to their students, I am encouraged to think that there are still some good English poems to be written. It is easy enough to object to the academic bias of this view, and I don't find it at all comforting myself to think that the continued reading, and hence writing, of poetry can only be secured by decent teaching : but it seems to me that this is the pass to which we have come. Two magazines started in the last ten years are signs of the continuing presence of the sort of teacher I have in mind: The Human World and The Cambridge Quarterly. Both derive from Scrutiny in indirect fashion, neither has yet revived its glories. Both are provocative: The Cambridge Quarterly can be positively silly. But both show the right kind of concern for literature as a whole—the only sort of concern that can keep poetry going as something one can seriously value.

As for a sign of positive poetic vigour: Geoffrey Hill's Mercian Hymns. To say this is not to endorse any claims on its behalf to epic stature. People who have complained of the smallness of Hill's book have missed its point: it has to do with the fragments of a past—not with some total evocation of a heroic age, but with its survival in broken form into our own time. It is not the subject-matter of Mercian Hymns that matters so much as the poet's sense of his medium. Here one may properly talk of largeness. Osip Mandelshtam wrote memorably :

    A small vocabulary is not a sin, and not a vicious circle.
    It may even enclose the speaker in a circle of flame. But
    it is a sign that the speaker does not trust his native soil,
    and dare not set foot wherever he likes.

We have one poet left who trusts his native soil.