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

Though our world burn, the small dim words
Stand here in steadfast grace,
And sing, like the indifferent birds
About a ruined place.
                                   Ruth Pitter 'On An Old Poem'

We live in a golden age of poetry—and of tin poems. 'Golden', in so far as the interest in poetry, and especially in the writing of it, is live and growing, 'tin' (or, to be more accurate, 'tinplate'), because much of what is written in the name of poetry today is empty, flashy and vapid, destined to be soon forgotten, and even ridiculed, as soon as fashion veers again. In one of the Charles Eliot Norton lectures given by Edwin Muir in 1955-1966, he spoke of the relationship between poet and public, of the neglect of poetry, and of 'political and economic and social changes, intellectual discoveries, and the inventions of applied science which have altered the outward lives of people.' But a dozen years later there is evidence to show that poetry is not so neglected as it once was; at least on the surface, our age seems to have absorbed the many changes and influences. At the present time, more poetry is being written, and by more people; neither the Elizabethans, nor the mid-Victorian versifiers, produced more. More books and pamphlets of poetry are published (whatever their merits), there are more little magazines and little presses, more poems available in translation, more poetry readings, festivals and competitions. More, in fact, of everything.

The reasons for such proliferation, such an increase in the numbers of singing birds, are not far to seek. In general, they belong to the great socialisation which has been taking place both in this country, and abroad, during the past fifty years, and, in particular, to the extraordinary growth of creative work in the schools, and the philosophical and psychological teaching at training college and university level. It is almost taken for granted that all people are artists, of some order or other, and that all children, given the proper conditions, are able to express themselves freely in words, as well as in movement, painting, and music. The progressive philosophers of primary education of thirty years ago are now seeing the results, both good and bad, of their teaching and propaganda. The word has gone round that everybody can write. So everybody does. In an over-organised, over-sentimental, materialistic and largely supine society, it is essential that the individual should assert himself more than ever if he is not to be engulfed. He must stand out from the mob. So why not, among other things, write poetry and so achieve notoriety, if not lasting fame? It is a way of hanging on. Poets have become publicists and television characters, as familiar to their public as Clare, Tennyson and Hardy were unfamiliar to theirs.

The trends in poetry today reveal the strong influences of contemporary American poetry, and these have also made themselves felt almost as much on other poetry of the western world. Much more free verse is being written. A great deal of this is no more than chopped up prose, sprawling and undisciplined, with the accent almost entirely on content, rather than on technique. It is, of course, much easier to write like this and produce something, than it is to tackle the difficulties of rhyme, metre, and the other traditional technical devices. So much of what is written has only its own private world. It is often obscure and remote and seems to ignore all readers except those who happen to be 'in the know'. What the Abbe Brenton once had to say about animus and anima seems to have been forgotten, that is if some writers today have ever heard of what this scholar considered to be the proper marriage in poetry of content and form. Much poetry today deals with what Laurence Binyon called 'the offal and clutter of man's hurrying civilization' in that it concentrates on sex, violence, rebellion, warfare, and disgust with the existing social order. These themes are considered to be 'real', down-to-earth, unsentimental, and the only honest expressions of man's thoughts and feelings. Wordsworth knew something about all this. In his preface to the second edition of the Lyrical Ballads, in 1800, he reminded his readers that 'the human mind is capable of being excited without the application of gross and violent stimulants . . . a multitude of causes, unknown to former times, are now acting with a combined force to blunt the discriminating powers of the mind, and, unfitting it for all voluntary exertion, to reduce it to a state of almost savage torpor.' Wordsworth was well aware of what he called 'this degrading thirst after outrageous stimulation'. It is hardly surprising that Wordsworth's poetry is now out of fashion.

In every age there has been a great deal of experimentation in poetry, of trying to discover new ways of communication in words. But experimentation, and what is mistaken for originality and novelty, has now run wild. Some of the more recent Concrete Poetry shows how far we have gone in this way. Such compression and telescoping as Concrete Poetry demands is admirable provided that what is written about is of significance. So much of the work in this genre is trivial, arch and incoherent. There is also a mistaken idea that nature poetry is dead. Certainly nature is not. And there are signs that nature poetry is gaining ground with poets, not as nature poetry meant in the past, but more concerned with what Jon Silkin has called 'man with nature'. More and more poets are finding inspiration, release, and success, in this kind of poetry, the more so as they recoil from the standardisation and anonymity of the great conurbations. When poets tire of their lack-lustre worlds, they will turn more and more to nature, to the countryside, and to romantic poetry. They may even find that some of the now despised Victorian and Georgian poets have more to say to them than many critics are honest enough to admit.

The older poets in the contemporary scene include Edmund Blunden, Robert Graves, Auden, John Betjeman, Andrew Young, Kathleen Raine, Stephen Spender, Day-Lewis and Philip Larkin. Not all of these are now writing poetry. Having established themselves they are content to rest on their laurels, but, above all, not to be seduced by the more modish of the present-day trends. Those of them that are still writing continue to give pleasure to the general reader. They try to serve mankind as a whole and keep their allegiance to imaginative truth. As Muir wrote, they resist the temptation 'to lock themselves into a hygienic prison where they speak only to one another, and to the critics, their stern warders'. They despise the analytical criticism which cuts poetry off from the air it ought to breathe.

Among the younger, though firmly established, poets of our day are Ted Hughes, Charles Causley, Seamus Heaney, Thomas Blackburn, and George MacBeth; it can hardly be said of these that they are in any way similar or that they do not belong to our own times. In their individual ways they speak for most of us; they still have one foot in Eden, and have neither lost their sense of wonder nor their belief in poetry which results from a consideration of the great and permanent things of life. There are also many younger poets who are ploughing their particular furrow, but who often find it difficult to gain the recognition they deserve because they know that they are at the mercy of journalist critics, and of fashionable mores which, unfortunately, have the power to make or mar their reputations overnight.

This raises the whole question of reviewing. It is in a bad way. It is never very easy to get a book of poetry reviewed at all, but many of the reviews which are written today come from the pens of failed poets who hope to gain some modicum of fame for themselves. Few of the provincial newspapers carry regular reviews of poetry and the more important national journals and papers appear to be in the hands of a few 'popular' reviewers. Some of these reviewers are not critics at all. They seem to be much more interested in themselves than in the books they write about. They tear to tatters what they do not like. They are often careless, over-clever with their statements, and, what is most damaging of all, inaccurate in their judgment. Because so little space is given to their notices, they tend to concentrate on the pithy, amusing, and journalistic phrases. Many of them are masters of vindictiveness and spite. They overpraise when it is convenient for them to do so and often find it difficult to keep personalities out of it. Edith Sitwell, not altogether a foolish woman, used to say that bad critics make for bad poems. But all this is a sign of the times. That which is not of the times is automatically considered to be bad. But the genuine poets of today can always take comfort from the fact that many of the reviewers, having earned their guineas, will soon be forgotten, and the books of poetry they so vehemently manhandled, still delighting future generations. This is one of the lessons of history.

The poets today can hardly claim that they no longer have a platform. Whatever type of poem they write, there will always be some place where their work can be given wider circulation. The B.B.C. continues to have its poetry programmes, though even here, there is a suspicion that these programmes publicise the novel and fashionable rather than broadcast poems of all types. It is a sad fact that there is only one Region of the B.B.C. which continues to have a regular poetry programme. Midland Poets is now the oldest broadcast poetry programme; from the beginning it has always included the best poems submitted by fifty poets or so on four occasions during the year. This programme is a catholic one, it is not swayed by 'big names', nor turns a cold shoulder to any writer who has something of value to say and knows how to say it. There are innumerable little magazines to which poets today can contribute, as diverse as the Poetry Review, Ambit, English, Agenda, Stand, The London Magazine, Outposts and Priapus, to name but a few. These magazines are doing an excellent job for poetry, for if a poet cannot be successful with one editor, he has a score of others to turn to. The little presses, too, do their share, often against great odds and on a shoe string, in spite of the help which some of them receive from the State. Long may these little magazines and presses flourish. They give great satisfaction, at least to the poets and editors, if not always to their readers.

Any poet worth his salt, and whatever the nature of the content of his poems, is always eligible for financial help from the Arts Council, and from other bodies which are prepared to recognise promise and achievement. He can also receive support and encouragement, from The Poetry Society (which also has its awards) and from the various poetry workshops and writers' circles up and down the country, and be given an opportunity to read his own poems, or hear his poems read, at the increasing number of poetry readings which are now taking place not only at the Royal Festival Hall but in much humbler surroundings.

There are an increasing number of poetry festivals and competitions organised for adults and children. The annual Daily Mirror Literary Competition is a supremely-organised and well-established competition which attracts thousands of entries. A child may send in any poem he has written, and in any style; each poem is judged on its merits by a preliminary committee which sends forward to the final judges all poems which are worth further consideration. These panels of judges include teachers, poets and others familiar with both poetry and children's work. The standard is so high that every year there are many outstanding poems which do not gain prizes at all. In recent years similar competitions have been held for adults and children in Peterborough, Stroud, Northampton, Hampstead, Dorset, Cheltenham, to name but half-a-dozen regions which spring to mind.

Most schools now encourage children to write poems. Many of these are reproduced in magazines and miscellanies, and the very best of them in published books of children's verse. But while many of these poems have all the best attributes of children's writing, there are far many more which are trite, inept, dull, and lacking both in technique and significant content. It is not an unnatural thing for a child to compose poetry but it is doing him no good to bow down in awe at his efforts if they are, in fact, failures. Far too many children are still expected to produce poems on traditional verse models, difficult enough for any poet, or to write about things which they receive at second-hand. The hope for children's poetry for the future is to stop regarding the writing of it as a phenomenon but to think of it instead as part of children's growing up and to concentrate upon extending its range and improving its quality.

The gap between poet and public is slowly being closed. The pop and 'beat' songs may well point the way to restoring poetry once again to the people, so that all classes of society may enjoy those poems which best appeal to them. But the millenium is not round the corner and there will always be hobby horses for propagandists to ride. If there are to be larger audiences for it, then formal criticism of poetry must be better informed, more objective and coherent. We must return to the true sources of poetry, to simple, but profound, language, to the kingdom of true imagination (that ancient warmer of the intellect), to genuine feeling, and to poetry which deals with human life in all its variety. Poetry is something more than mere naturalness. It is both an art and a craft, and the craft has to be painfully learned, through trial and error. And the themes it chooses must be great and eternal ones, belonging more to man's maturity than to the littleness of his day-to-day business.