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

Poetry 'scene', is it? At one level, and that perhaps the most important, there are only poets, Yeats and Auden, Larkin and Lowell, and to talk about their relationship to the 'scene' of the nineties, the thirties, fifties quietism and American protest, is only marginally relevant to the quality of their poems. Fine poets use their 'scenes', lesser ones are part of them, merge into the prevailing landscape. For the poets we most value, the scene doesn't matter much.

On another level though—and since you insist on using what wouldn't, I must say, be my word—the poetry scene is just one part of the artistic scene, and this is almost unrelievedly gloomy. We have been seeing during the past decade, or a bit longer, a sort of anti-intellectual crusade, aimed essentially at destroying any scale of values. This is most obvious pictorially, in work like that of Liechtenstein, Warhol and their dozens of imitators and adaptors, work based upon what is mechanical (the comic strip, the soup tin label) and also wholly mechanical in itself, so that it denies implicitly the importance of the artist's individual intellect. The idea behind something like cinema-verite is similar, that there is a kind of truth in the machine and that the holding hand for the camera should be as nearly as possible mechanical too.
 
In poetry the crusade is directed against any depth or subtlety of meaning, in favour of a simplicity which debases poetic currency by appealing to the lowest possible common denominator of taste and feeling. It is believed that poetry should not present any intellectual difficulty either for writer or reader (more often listener), a surge of feeling is the only kind of 'value' admissible. By this emotional criterion Bob Dylan is a poet, and so is Tom Jones. Indeed, it would be hard to deny that they are just as much poets as many British and American beat or pop poets producing what they might well admit or assert to be disposable verse. With vulgarity of feeling goes naturally a more or less conscious rejection of any subtlety or complication in language. Infantile simplicity is all.

This is only one sort of poetry, although it is the most popular kind both here and in America. I don't myself take much comfort from the other prevalent kinds—from the private, confessional, yet insistently exhibitionist character of much American work, the strained images of violence in humanity and nature that attract several British poets. These attitudes again seem reflections at one remove of the anti-intellectual crusade. And the Review, which certainly doesn't err in favouring exhibitionism or self-indulgent violence, seems so cautious that most of the pieces it prints are no more than raw nuggets of awareness and observation (small nuggets too, most of them) that have never quite been shaped into poems.

What encouragements, what developments? Again, the question seems to imply that poetry is corporate, not individual. What's encouraging is good poets emerging, improving, often in resistance to fashion or ignoring it. (Robert Graves and Roy Fuller are two examples.) At the same time, I wouldn't deny that the prevailing tone has its effect upon all but the strongest talents. In the fifties the Movement helped to create an atmosphere in which many respectable, agreeable poems were written. What we most need at the moment is a recognition that the writing of a serious poem is an act that should involve the poet's deepest emotional and intellectual resources, and that up to a point poetry is a craft that can and for almost all writers must be learned. Poems are made of Craft and Instinct. Too much and too obvious Craft can be boring, but it is nothing like so unrelievedly awful as the pure Instinct we are often offered nowadays. I realize that this distinction is artificial, and that in a poem like The Waste Land craft and instinct (both carefully controlled) blend. Nevertheless, the division does seem useful in considering what has been happening the last few years. More intellect, less exhibitionist feeling, would be a recipe for better minor poetry. The major poets, as I said at the beginning, can and do look after themselves.