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

Don’t Forget your Gaviscon

     Always keen to prove its intellectual credentials, the Poetry Society has devised a new gimmick. For just £17.50, you can book a meal in their café, cooked by a “seriously good poet”. Michael Donaghy cooks Mexican, Sarah Maguire cooks French, Mimi Khalvati cooks Iranian. There is an additional charge for stopping the chefs reading their poems.

Antique Chestnuts

     Introducing his translation of Euripides, Mister Heracles, Simon Armitage puts on his best Yorkshire (Mytholmroyd more than Huddersfield) accent to announce that: “In the modern Western world we race towards the future. Logical, economical, sophisticated, comfortable, virtual sometimes, double-glazed, air-conditioned, centrally heated ... the real and the vital gets [sic] left behind.” Amidst these trappings of civilisation, Armitage maintains, violence is one of the most potent reminders of our true nature. The next collection by our Millennium Dome poet is rumoured to consist of a series of grunts, transcribed onto standing stones, celebrating how one tribe of cavemen clubbed another to death. That would be really real.

Roddy Lumsden compared to Goethe!

     Armitage also appears in an anonymous (that is, genuinely anonymous) verse contribution to Thumbscrew. The libel laws prevent us from revealing what Armitage was doing in the poem. The mysterious versifier goes on to ask several pertinent questions: “Roddy Dumbdown, Carol Ann Fluffy... are these your Goethes and Rimbauds?/ Who exalts such second-raters?” The answer is, all of us: “All Britain wants is whimsy, naff rhymes, vacuous word-games.” Yes please. Send them to Thumbscrew, but don’t forget to include an SAE.

Blurble

     “Like many in the modern world, [Jane Griffiths] is estranged within her own country, wherever that is [...] The exile comes home in the act of writing the poem, finding it was always there, where she imagined it, not where she thought it was.” Blurb for Jane Griffiths’s A Grip on Thin Air (Bloodaxe).

Say No to Strangers

     The Poetry Society Website offers good advice for inviting poets to your school. (The best advice, you’d have thought, would be not to invite them at all.) Poets, it proclaims, “are not to be left alone with groups of children”. “Ask if your poet is insured”. “Our advice to poets would be to refuse to take any unsupervised session, as we would not be able to support them adequately if a case were brought against them for anything that took place in that situation”. The risks are obvious: if left unsupervised, the poets might start reading their “poems” to impressionable youngsters.