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

There is no reason why poetry should speak to everybody. There is no compulsion on people to listen to it. Writing it is an essentially private act: even if, as of old, it was not written but more 'put together'; even if its first and immediate use is to be given to an audience. It is private in its making, in that the welding together of its parts is whole only under the influence of a single, united mind.

So each individual may take it to himself, and feel whole as the poem becomes so. Now to jump the gun a bit, a piece of writing that starts this process of unification but does not carry it through—as the majority of poems published today—is not 'annoying' or 'unfortunate but a good attempt'. It is almost obscene in its interference with the person who reads it. And it may dull him, if he does not know better, to good writing.

Let me beg now to be heard not as a partisan speech-maker, but with the openness that one trying to make an accurate statement in a skirted-around and churned up hall of debate, must know he can command.

The act of creation, being something dependent on the single mind, and with an effect reaching the individual in its audience, is private. This is more easily to be realised if one thinks of the finished poem. The poem is done, perfect; the writer has said what he wanted to say. The poem lies in a drawer for thirty years, then is thrown out. Or it goes within months of its creation into a book and becomes widely known. In either case the task is achieved. A person has borne witness in words to something fine or emotionally real. He will naturally wish—sometimes very, very strongly—for other people, as many as possible, to have delight in what he has written. And the poem deserves publication, if it is a good poem, and those who would read it deserve its publication, if they would read a poem. But the real necessities of the matter are in the poem's creation.

I would be glad if no poems, by law, could be published till after their author's death. Because, to jump the gun again, there is at this time an immense amount of nonsense associated with poetry and poets. However, to forget the race of anger, not in any case right to be run in prose, let us take the three examples of a public event about which a poem is written, a personal poem, and a narrative, a story in poetry—and see where they lead us.

The first example brings up the question of immediate publication, and perhaps hauls most clearly into the open the public aspect of poetry. A ceremony, on occasion, may inspire a poem, may even require one, and if the poem is good it may enhance the occasion considerably, and also make it available in a way to the absent majority. There may be a case here for immediate publication, but I think it could be answered. And this question is not now central. The thing it considers is the eventual use made of the poem by the public.

If it is published, whether to do with a ceremonial or disastrous occasion, or a political state of affairs, or a war, the poem should do more than 'connect' the reader with the relevant situation. It should allow him a position as a thinking participant. If it tries for this, it will probably obtain a language and thought that is generally accessible, but that still requires to be read with attention (all poetry needs this). Then, whenever it is published it will be of public value, catalytic in the bringing together, by sympathy, of men.
This is the stage at which poetry is more than simply something that provides enjoyment for many individuals. And to reach this stage, considerations of immediate public impression should be discarded during the writing. They are not. It is assumed that poetry helps to bring down a totalitarian regime, to stop a war. If this is so, it will help the more in the long run, the less it is plausibly righteous, and the more emotional truth (not emotional glitter) it can find.

Take a personal poem: if it is not particularly 'a sign of the times' it is (worthy of becoming) public inasmuch as in itself it is generally available as a personal statement, actually in the reader's situation, or by his sympathy. If it is 'The Love-Song of J. Alfred Prufrock', it carries a temporal significance that is as likely as not historically misleading, and obstructive to the poetry of the poem—it partially defeats itself—because, however wonderful the poetry, such an aura gives off the atmosphere of an exclusive club. The example I give is such a wonderful poem that it scarcely deserves such criticism—yet who can say Eliot's poetry reaches true public status? Mind you, if it did, it would be as simple and magnificent as is the Bible.

The wealth and array of personal poems that are 'public property', adding in their way to the infinitely slow build-up of our common humanity—these are enough pleasure for those tired of the private wriggling joys that the semi-poems everywhere now published evince. For a personal poem, if really a poem and for the public, has something wholly for the separate private individual. Stevenson's epitaph, or one of Housman's poems, is sufficient example.

Which brings us to the nub : and to the best poetry. How should poetry impinge on us? 'Really a poem and for the public' . . . Have I, in my clumsy half-circling perambulation, made clear even to myself what I mean? I have not because I have left out what is nearest the root cause of poetry: the wish to tell a story.

There are novels in a society where there is no epic. Story-telling is at the heart of poetry, and probably of all continuous communication; take music.

Perhaps an incident or a scene in the mind, if interpreted and understood, must be held in a context, a story-net. Perhaps each poem, even if painfully real in its experience, is communicated with regard for the mind's interpretive mechanics in this respect. I submit that the story element is somewhere operative in every poem that does not jar (and a poem can shock or disturb without jarring) and that it is this element, fastened on to private experience, that first makes poetry public.

In this article I have tended to point a high-minded and disparaging finger at the present situation. It is because of the fuss and clatter attending poetry and poets, together with the continual mind-wandering and verbal neurotics of the writers themselves because of this preciousness, the gap between poetry and the public is widening. Talent is everywhere, but with rubbish enclosing it; and people are put off poetry, and do not find, because they do not care to look for, the few dozen good modern poems, a fair number, hidden in the scores of sensitive books, the scores of sensitive magazines.