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

Geoffrey Hill is the best poet in England. It is discouraging that some people do not seem aware of his work. English poetry is a million particles spinning apart from each other. Little groups gather like gnats, but a wind disperses them. So much anger, so much bitchery, so much attention to reviews, to the Arts Council, to allegiances and betrayals. When I visit England I feel as if I had wandered into the Balkans of light opera or the Marx Brothers. Everyone is at war, nobody gets hurt.

Diversity ought to be encouraging. But I get the impression that the object of writing poems, in England, is to become eligible to enter a national contest in which one receives points for: (1) kicking another poet in the stomach after he has passed out after a literary party; (2) inventing a nasty term which four reviewers plagiarize within eighteen days; (3) going on a reading tour of the United States; (4) acquiring a reputation for extreme cruelty such as to strike terror into the hearts of aspirant poets; (5) publishing twelve books a year; (6) never publishing at all.

In the United States, there is a spirit of détente, and people speak to each other who refused to know each other's names a decade ago. For the most part people meet and gossip and argue, and even translate together, who are supposed to oppose each other. I find it useful that Gary Snyder and Galway Kinnell talk about 'biestings'. At a farmer's bar west of Grand Rapids, two miles from the college that gathered everybody, Ted Berrigan and Robert Creeley are shooting pool. John Logan is drinking martinis. Philip Whalen and I talk poetry. Bly is coming tomorrow. Everybody talks all night. But some of the poets wear their shirt sleeves down because they are shooting up. One of them will die of cancer in two months and everyone knows it. Another threatens to get a gun and shoot everybody but doesn't. Is it too cosy? Perhaps. Some of the poets are no good. We don't make an issue of it.

Encouragement. Two poets, Snyder and Bly, are making in their poems irrational systems which integrate everything. Intelligence and learning and the dance! Also encouraging: the ambitiousness of Kinnell's The Book of Nightmares, trying to bring together everything that has happened to one man; and Adrienne Rich's separate ambition, in her new poems; and the willingness of some writers, like W. D. Snodgrass, like Richard Wilbur, to walk their own ways even when the way is lonely; and the tough-minded conceptualism of Tom Clark; and the moon-clarity of a very young poet, Gregory Orr. Encouraging also, in a commonplace way: the increasingly oral idea of publication.

Discouraging, in a commonplace way: the proliferation of writers' workshops, and of the products of these classrooms downwards and outwards into an industry of writing classes all of which tend to elevate junk into 'professionalism'. But really, this phenomenon is no more threatening to poetry than Rod McKuen is.

Discouraging—and perhaps a reason for the cosiness: the deaths, the suicides, the madness, alcoholism, methedrine, heroin; the swift vanishing of the older generation, Roethke, Jarrell, Berryman, Lowell; the last most discouraging of all—the author of Lord Weary's Castle (and nine subsequent good poems) dissipating into the seedy grandiloquence, the self-serving journalism, of Notebook.