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

Of course poems in The Journal will be found wanting when compared with Eliot. Eliot's work has been sifted into a best of. Most poets writing now don't have that luxury. Try comparing The Journal's poems with Eliot's juvenile doggerel in his letters — which is found wanting then?

   Cory Harding makes points no one would argue with, eg "If [a personal descriptive poem] is written in an unoriginal way then it becomes dull and flat", "writing down thoughts and feelings in every day language does not make a poem.". But he postures as a publisher who expects a first and every subsequent novel from a new novelist to be a best seller and is disappointed when it doesn't happen. Literary agents will tell you, as Simon Trewin did in The Guardian, that the best novelists sell a few copies of first novels, a few more of second novels and take off on the third or fourth and then sell reasonably steadily for the remainder of their careers.

   The most common way for poets to find publication is to build up magazine publications, perhaps gain a few competition placements, until building up a sufficient body of work to submit a collection for publication. Poetry magazines therefore are necessary. But no one reading a magazine expects brilliance from every poem, although magazine editors would love to be able to provide this. However, they are usually up against two serious hindrances. The first is time. Magazine sales and subscriptions do not cover costs let alone pay the editor for their time so editing is frequently done around demands of a job, family, friends and even writing. The second hindrance is that editors can only select from work submitted. Selecting poems is like judging figure-skating: some poems score highly on technical merit but are actually very dull and safe artistically, other poems score highly on artistic impression but are poor technically. The best poems (and figure-skaters) do both. Orbis when edited by Mike Shields had a 98% rejection rate. Despite its generous page count, Envoi gets more poems in a week than can be published in a year. Not surprising then that editors say they publish what they like.

   To find an Eliot for the 21st century, Cory Harding will have to keep reading. Or he may have to accept that Eliot was a brilliant 20th century poet and 21st century poetry just isn't to his liking.