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

The bookshop is gone now, where I once bought translations of
                                                                         Edmond Jabes,
the letters of William Carlos Williams to his publisher and a biography
                                                                      of Robert Graves
which purported to tell the truth about Laura Riding. It has been
replaced by a JOPP! sun-parlour, that is to say a place
where people recline nude upon glass beds while a brilliant counterpane
lowers itself with a whirr to within inches of their exposed navels
and proceeds to bombard them with iridescent rays which may or may not
                                                                                  be harmful
but will have the certain effect of rendering their skin rubicund, not to say,
                                                                         leather-coloured,
and make them look healthy to the outside world, no matter what
cankers lurk in their brains. Thus it is, say,
that thirteen-year-old girls will prostrate themselves before Old Father
                                                                                     Sunlamp
in exactly the same spot where previously Hölderlin and Goethe were
                                                                                   displayed,
and equally nude middle-aged men will lie dreaming
of thirteen-year-old girls stretched out compliantly beneath them
where once the many remaindered publications of Middle-western
                                                                                 universities,
dealing with problems of structure in language, aesthetics
and ‘the unreadable poem’, in prose as numinous as it was obscure,
were piled in bargain discount profusion for the eager intellectual browser.
Or, but this is quite another scenario, those former browsers passing by,
angry and saddened at the thought of intellectual humankind
now reduced to the status of the filling in an illuminated sandwich,
will suddenly fume with a profound and ethically-inspired indignation
while remembering a sentence such as this: ‘We must now abandon the idea
that a poem is a window onto the truth, we must evict the ‘deeply-sensing I’
who examines its soul for the benefit of its deeply-sensing readers
and substitute the multi-layered, coming-at-you-from-all-angles gabble
 which is the inescapably witless kernel of all communication...’
And oho, think the former browsers, well, how right it is that bookshop has
                                                                       been demolished,
how appropriate it is those would-be readers now lie stacked,
like the illustrious dead, in prone coffins of luminescence,
absorbing electrical discharges for as long as their coins hold out,
NOT dreaming with closed eyes of aesthetics or life’s wee epiphanies,
NOT swooned upon a bright beach of glass, grieving for the absence of
                                                                                   literature,
but lying there, simply, trapped between abysmal humming of the bulbs,
like butter-coloured lotus eaters spinning to withdrawal,
until with a snap their cabin goes dark and the top half of their radioactive
                                                                                            bun
pulls slowly away, leaving them to glow faintly and ludicrously
in the darkness through which they must now stumble to find their
                                                                                         clothes...