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

Poetry in England today has a single negative ability: to resist change by modifying the conditions which threaten to reshape it. It is perhaps a faithful reflection of a day grown senile. Unaware of the structure it inhabits it nibbles like a woodworm at the techniques it sees before its nose, ensuring its own oblivion as the edifice starts to crumble. It is all the reader can do to prevent his own mind crumbling under the weight of qualifying clauses and minutiae. Luckily, it is not minds but cultures which disintegrate.

The sixties were supposed to have seen a revival of interest in poetry in England. But where is a poetic programme worth attending to? Nobody steps out of line. Nobody aims ahead. We grip the edge with prehensile toes. We do not know what it is the edge of. As Mr. Freedom said: 'fashion today is a backward glancing thing. Nobody wants space suits. We are afraid of space'. There was a revival of interest, certainly. But can it have been for poetry? And if so, how come, given the bill of fare?

No, there was no poetry revival in the U.K. The pleading voice with which one kind of person mentions Brian Patten and another kind Ted Hughes as indication of poetry's continuing virility has a cornered ring to it with undertones of suicide. The speakers begin to wonder whether they fancy one another after all and the conversation turns thankfully to take in Gilbert O'Sullivan.

One hesitates to drag in certain Americans as examples of virtue after what America itself has done with them, but one cannot deny that recently the only interesting changes have happened there. The trouble is we do deny it. Our cultural backlog is such a harsh old chaperone that poetry herself has learnt an over-zealous regard for her honour. Everything makes it with England last and with our poetry last of all. The opinionated in Britain still think poetry is something patient, explicatory and helpful; a mirror tilted to reflect the emotions in a sensible and solving light. If those with weight had been constitutionally able to learn something from the British Pop Art even, we might not now hold such a ridiculous position internationally.

What we must do is to start treating the mind as an abstract not a social thing, so that when we describe its workings we will be using our imagination and not our potty-training. Subjectivity! It is right to assume we are still in some kind of autumnal retreat, but this has been going on so long the snowed-under have forgotten what spring looked like. When it comes let us not be describing it with eccentrically evocative adjectives but with a special knowledge.

The brighter side of the coin is that we have not been duped. We have been too sluggish for that, and so we may yet, like Frankenstein, surprise someone.