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

I find it encouraging that the amount of good poetry written during the past decade should be so considerable, and very much greater than in the previous one. Immediately I say that, I am aware that it seems complacent, and that any diagnosis of the state of poetry will be more convincing if it's despairing. Yet I think my first statement is true. It's a question of plateaus and peaks. If Larkin is a peak of the fifties, then it's also true that he isn't surrounded by many others. The sixties, which brought with them the instant avant-garde and much sloppy writing, also encouraged more traditional figures to try harder. There is a University orthodoxy which says that Hughes, Plath and Gunn are the ones to care for, but less conditioned tastes esteem the poems of Redgrove, MacBeth, Geoffrey Hill, Christopher Middleton and Alan Brownjohn in roughly the same catchment area. The avant-garde is not all bad (and this isn't quite so risible a statement as it may seem). The popularity of poetry is a matter of indifference to me—the production of good poetry is something of great importance. So I base my optimism on the variety of good work being written—not on sales of Penguins, popularity of readings, the market for translation or the establishment of myths to rival Dylan Thomas's. The English imagination has always tended towards poetry, and consequently poetry only occasionally passes through dry periods. But such a period was the one between 1939 and 1956, just as another was between the turn of the century and 1918. I could not point to any one poet who established himself in the sixties as the equal of Auden, Dylan Thomas and Larkin, but I would rather read the collected poems from that time than those from any other decade since the thirties. I find it encouraging that despite the profit critics can make from announcing the death of poetry, it is more alive than it has been for many years.

The discouraging aspect of poetry today is our colonial status, and rule from America. Donald Davie ascribes this to people like myself, who allegedly cower beneath American audacity and snipe from points of safety. But it is Davie, with his soliciting of posterity and his desire to keep up, who is the maker of the myth of American invincibility. Lowell, Berryman, Galway Kinnell and many others are excellent poets, and are read by all men of good will. But when native experimenters, such as Tom Raworth and Lee Harwood, only trust themselves if they are given the Good Housekeeping seal by their American mentors, then we are in an unhealthily subservient state. I see the Modernist versus Traditionalist dispute in class terms in England. Our best poets are classified as Establishment figures, and, of course, stylistic reactionaries. So, out they go, and in comes the sort of stuff that got into Children of Albion. It is particularly discouraging when a simple-minded protest verse joins cosmological Neo-Poundianism in a Popular Front against the Establishment. It's about time everyone learned that there are many different Establishments. Meanwhile Time Out refers to 'famous' Brian Patten, and academic poets like John Heath-Stubbs and F. T. Prince become heroes of the Underground because they believe they have been neglected by officialdom.

As to your second question, I'd hope first for a waning of the power of fashion and of the Universities. The Man of Letters, despite his vanity and frivolity, is a better ideal than the Marxist Don. Poetry should be more in the world, and not necessarily the world of engagement and politics. I suppose the one word I would propose as an ideal is Imagination, though I am aware that it means many things to many people. All any poet can be concerned with properly is his own salvation—the working-out of his destiny in the time that remains to him. But this is a public questionnaire, and I presume I am to put my own hopes to one side. I'd like to see fewer bubble reputations, and, at the same time, fewer good poets wrecked by the disturbances of their lives; more magazines publishing poetry, and more subsidies offered to them. There are half a dozen very talented poets in England at present: I'd like to see them produce their best work in the next decade, which will be the time of their perihelion.