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

In some ways a fairly gloomy reply. The polarization of formal and formless writers has continued, and the territory in between that might have been fruitfully explored is often left vacant. On the face of it, there are more people reading poetry, but this fragmentation of the community of writers has split the readers into what too often amounts to supporters cheering their favourite team. This kind of inflexibility is, it seems, slightly worse than a critical bureaucracy dispensing its dicta, the poets and readers waiting, in the provinces, for the latest bull. This kind of pronouncement has in fact lost much of its authority, and this reduction of centralized authority is partly reflected in the variousness of the poets writing now. There are no schools, and the existing groups are at least various, however rigidified they may have become. This variousness, this extending of the total spectrum of attitudes, has meant that a few poets have felt less idiosyncratic than they might have done, say, ten years ago. So that the variousness has, catalystically, had a good effect. On the other hand, this variousness often implies (as I suggested) uncritical partisanship, and this ultimately has the effect of further isolating and driving inwards the poet, who is already isolated through the very nature of his or her creativity and its demands. This inability of the poets and readers to respond critically to others further removes the possibility of an eventual voluntary coherence—of a community of writers and readers—of a common territory of presuppositions within which one might or might not find some agreement. It is not disagreement we have now but deafness. The community, it seems, is no longer (if it ever was) a desirable thing.