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

I can think of nothing encouraging in the poetry scene of the past decade in Britain. Like whichever marquis it was in the French Revolution, poetry has survived but could give no more edifying answer than that to the question 'What did you do?' Good poets have gone on writing well. The usual proportion of new poets have emerged. Some people still read poetry. Nobody buys it. All much as in the fifties. And though survival is I suppose the largest cause for congratulation there can be, it is not something to which I would apply the word encouraging. In any case, mere survival implies deterioration.

There have been so many discouraging things, that on a bad day any poetry-lover must sink into powerless gloom, and, on the occasion of answering this questionnaire, either fall dumb or overrun his allotted thousand words. So I have selected two items.

The first is one that my experience as a teacher has rubbed my nose in, that it, the profound and unaffected admiration of today's students for the pop poets (and their equally unaffected indifference to other poets). It depresses me to have their praises sung at nearly every tutorial and still more to hear the grounds of the praise: that these poets are instantly understandable, warmly human and iconoclastically witty. As an example of the iconoclastic wit I am given Roger McGough's daringly original 'Time wounds all heels'. When I mention that Groucho Marx said it first I am considered academic. These students are taking Honours degrees in English and if ever in preparation for the modern paper they are invited to discuss any major poet of their own choice we are sure to get at least one of the Liverpool poets. Many of the tutors, especially the Marxists (Karl), welcome this: a few years ago a student, in the three-year teacher training course, who wanted to do his special study on Raymond Chandler, had his subject turned down on the grounds that Chandler was not good enough. But the Liverpool poets are considered perfectly acceptable. These attitudes go along with a refusal, on the part of both staff and students, to allow that a knowledge of poetic technique is at all important. And, of course, from a practical examination-passing point of view it isn't. It is quite possible to get a good Honours degree in English from London University without knowing an iambic pentameter from a bull's foot.

The other thing I find discouraging is the reviewers. In my time I have studied principles of literary criticism and read my George Watson like everybody else, and I do know some-thing of the loftier issues involved but I would confine myself to two simplistic questions. (a) Why do poetry reviewers write as though one was convinced one's work was absolutely marvellous? This is not necessarily so. (If anyone says that poets shouldn't publish anything unless they are convinced it's marvellous, there is, I think, a good answer, but it is outside the limits of this questionnaire). (b) Why are they so sure they know one's poetic intentions? I acknowledge their right to comment on one's poetic performance, and severity, even over-severity, is not malpractice, but they can only deduce one's aims, and perhaps wrongly. Quite recently a critic whose views I usually respect said that somebody's poem hadn't the effect that he, the poet, had hoped. If he meant the effect that he, the critic, would have admired, he should have said so.

This leads me to the second question: one of the developments I should like to see during the next decade is much more space devoted to poetry reviewing in the Sundays, and in the daily and weekly press, so that criticisms can be made at proper length with decent supporting arguments and quotations. It is not that it is any pleasanter to be abused for paragraphs on end than in one sentence, but length does preclude the sort of spiteful vulgarity that brevity seems to encourage, and expatiation doesn't lend itself to the sort of Delphic bitchery I mean, the utterance that consists entirely of a wounding pay-off line.

Other developments I should like to see: the implementation of PLR. I am glad there is no money in poetry. Though bribery, corruption and going to bed with the producer presumably happen in the world of poetry as they do in any other world, on the whole I suppose that in poetry there is not much inducement to act other than fairly straightforwardly. But all the same PLR would bring us all a little more money without ruining us.

I should like to see British poets becoming less insular. One way might be if we tried to read contemporary foreign poetry in the original and not so much in translation. Such odd reputations are made from country to country by means of translation, and so many foreign poets that we meet in the Penguin versions must be better in the original than they seem in English, that it does look as though we should work harder at languages. I think we should work harder at linguistics, too; there may be something in it as far as poetry is concerned. And I should like somebody to write a book on English poetic techniques that would help beginners, students and inexperienced readers of all kinds.