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

Since Rupert receives hundreds of review copies of pamphlets, collections and anthologies, but can fit only 20–30 into each issue, how about getting to know a little about him, and his tastes . . .

I’m of the school that wants opinions – and accepts them as such. I like reviewers one trusts – even if you always buy the books they hate, they are consistent and opinionated over time. Reviewers and critics fall down when they think you can somehow prove a book is good or bad; reviews are dull when they simply ‘report’: ‘this is a book of sonnets, 200 pages, off white paper and nice author photo’. I think reviews should be provocative, interesting, informed and entertaining; they are as much a form of creative writing as poetry itself.

I think the ‘anyone can do it’ school of workshops (and I’m all for creativity by the way, but informed creativity) has encouraged a ‘we’re all one big happy family’ mentality where criticising is somehow seen as wrong. And as for suggesting we might concern ourselves with the language and how something is written rather than what it says, well, outrage! I’ve no time for the unread amateur who defends their end-of-line-rhyme doggerel and doesn’t have a clue about how poetry works. I like people to work hard at poetry and poetics.

It’s the same in painting; people don’t see beyond the ‘picture’. They don’t understand that a picture of something, if it’s good, works the same way (form/tone/color/line etc) as an abstract painting. Poems are primarily language, words on the page being manipulated; truth, epiphany, jokes and images come after, and there’s nothing that says they must be the focus of the work. I lost interest in most narrative squibs of poetry five years ago. The stuff which grabs me now tends to be work that I don’t immediately understand, because I love being bemused, baffled, surprised and delighted by bizarre shifts of language or syntax and other devices. For me, content and some shared revelation is not what poetry is about.

I regard my editing the ORBIS reviews section partly as a chance to review some experimental writing and bring it to the attention of an audience which I don’t believe mainly engages with it. Patricia Oxley (Editor of Acumen) and I have discussed before now how it doesn’t matter if magazines don’t publish experimental poetry, but they must show some knowledge of its existence; otherwise it looks like ignorance. So an occasional review of something, sometimes including what is an unusual piece of writing for a particular magazine, is useful. It may also help break down the divide between experimental and mainstream poetry, something which I know quite a lot of people want. Interestingly enough, many of the people like myself now appear to be drifting into university teaching, reviewing and what you may describe as positions of influence. Let’s hope some of the fake divides between ‘schools’ of poetry can be demolished.

One of the things I’ve found with my own work is that however much I use experimental processes, my own voice still comes through; I still get readers and listeners, and it doesn’t occur to most of them how something is written. It’s only when the avant-garde make a point of the process that people turn off. But treat it as a tool, a scaffold that is later removed, no-one has a problem. I feel that writers have to think very hard about how and why we write poetry in the 21st century. Like it or not, things have changed, and these changes – social, psychological, scientific, geographical, political and artistic – do have a bearing on poetry.

Some favourite poems and poets

How weird, to consider individual poems! If a poet doesn’t sustain my interest throughout for a collection, then out it goes. I’m not one for someone writing two or three good poems; they must be consistent. And as someone who likes books, I like big texts, puzzles, conundrums, sustained effect over a hundred or more pages. So: Ted Hughes’ ‘Crow’, Ken Smith’s ‘Fox Running’, the circling of a subject by R.S. Thomas throughout his career, Robert Lax’s long meditative/prose-poems. I always struggle with Stride authors who don’t see how to shape a manuscript and used to have dreadful rows with one poet who simply wrote individual/occasional poems, then tried to make books of them afterwards.

Ultimately, I’d rather have huge books that fail than pamphlets that don’t attempt anything. Rachel Blau DuPlessis’ book, Drafts 1–38, Toll, is the ‘big one’ I’m struggling with/through at the moment. It has lots of interesting things going on within it, such as self-referential asides, a number of processes, mirror images between poems in the sequence, and others I haven’t yet discovered or noticed.

My all time favourite poem is Here, by Robert Creeley; I have a copy typed up beside my desk in the study. I like how much is said by being left unsaid, how much is said in so few words. I like the music of the piece, and what is said as well as how it is said.

Other current and long-term favourites include

‘Snow’, by Louis Macneice
‘A Morning’, Mark Strand, Selected Poems (Carcanet)
‘A Prayer’, Jorie Graham, Swarm (Carcanet)
‘Liv’s View of Landscape 1’, Claudia Rankin, Plot (Grove Press)
‘Canticle of the Waterbirds’, William Everson
‘Brigglflatts’, Basil Bunting
‘Dream Songs’, John Berryman
‘Three Elegaic Poems’, Wendell Berry, Collected Poems (North Point)

I haven’t even mentioned Auden, Charles Wright, Robert Duncan, Rae Armantrout, Sheila Murphy, Gavin Selerie’s Azimuth book/long poem sequence, Kenneth Patchen, Mark Doty, Peter Redgrove, John Yau, Barret Watten, William Carlos Williams, Montale, Stephen Dobyns, Yannis Ritsos or Anne Sexton yet. And that’s just a quick scan of the shelves. I’m still very much excited by all sorts of poetry.