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

Three things preoccupied me as I was putting this issue together. I was firstly curious to note that I was more aware of the process of putting the poems into an order. Once I have what I think is sufficient poems I read through them, noticing as much size, shape and weight as subject matter, and as I do this I shuffle them into three sections – some are immediately beginning poems, and some are ending poems; the rest go in the middle. I was thinking as I did this about poems and their structure. That, possibly, successful poems have to open well and to end well and that there has to be a relationship between beginning and ending but that neither needs to explain itself to the other. And the middle, well, if the start and finish provide the box, then the middle is the sweets that therein compacted lie.

Secondly I was thinking of a remark made by Carol Ann Duffy after her appointment: she said poetry ‘is the place where everything that can be praised is praised, and where what needs to be called into question is so.’ I was weaving this remark around the third thing, the amazing editorial by David and Helen Constantine to the new issue of Modern Poetry in Translation, the Frontiers issue, written, as they say, amid the ‘wreckage of the global market’. They too give definition to what poetry is/does. Here are a few quotations. ‘Poetry is unselfish. It exceeds the poet, who may be as selfish as anyone else.’ ‘Poetry, like music, cannot be had. When we read a poem we live in it and it in us.’ ‘A poem’s beauty consists in and is engendered by the working together of all its parts.’ ‘A poem has autonomy.’ ‘The liveliness of a poem, and so its power to enliven the reader comes from its being rooted in real and particular circumstances.’

‘Much social and political life’ they state, ‘at present is a more or less violent insult to the humanity of the men and women living it. Poems intrinsically say so again and again. And translation spreads the word to the governors and the governed: this order of things in the world isn’t good enough.’

The present issue of The Rialto I felt, as I read and re-read the poems I’d selected, has turned out to be quite sombre. The magazine has an air about it as of a serious thinker, it’s got something of weight on its mind and it’s determined to work through it. Of course I’ve reflected ‘is it me?’ Am I going through a thoughtful patch and have accordingly chosen work that reflects my mood? The answer I get is ‘no more than anyone else.’And the fact of the matter is I don’t chose poems, primarily, for what they say – though that comes into it. I am first and foremost interested to see if they work as poems.

Subscribers to our ebulletin will know, but other readers may not, that Dean Parkin, who has worked hard for The Rialto for several years, has been, with help from the Arts Council and the Norwich Writers Centre, successfully developing his career as a performance poet. Look out for him. This means that, although he continues to work for The Poetry Trust he’s had to step back from the magazine.

I’ll miss him - he’s been a stalwart cheerer-on, and improved our fortunes on the grant front wonderfully.

We had a fiercely talented crowd of applicants to take over Dean’s role and from a brilliant shortlist Nathan Hamilton has joined the Rialto team. We welcome him.