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

The first poem I ever published was at school in the school magazine. I always liked poems, I had a wonderful book of One Thousand Poems. I used to learn them by heart. And then, when I did English A level, I read Gerard Manley Hopkins who excited me very much. I did write a little bit at college but I sort of stopped; I did a lot of music and I was studying Greek and Latin. I started writing poetry again when I had a travelling research fellowship and I went to Greece. I started writing properly then but I never tried to publish, I didn’t know people who were poets, I had no idea how all that worked at all.

You say you started writing, in adulthood, in Greece. Was there something about Greece that sparked you off?

It was the intensity, the sense of history. History’s quite important in my work, in my imagination: making sense of the present via the past and vice versa. There was this incredible sense that here’s a place where everything goes right back but there are still important things now. Also, the people I met there: I lived with someone in Crete who didn’t speak English at all, it was Crete really above all.

Your name, Padel, is that an English name? It strikes me that you write often about foreign countries, not only set in those countries, but from that perspective.

The name is a strange name, it is supposed to be Wendish. The Wends were a sort of Gypsy, nomadic, East European group. There are two reasons why I am interested in writing about foreign places. One is that I’ve lived quite a lot in Greece, Paris, Berlin and so on. I felt I found myself in doing that in a way.

You found yourself in doing that?

Yes. There were many years I felt that I was more at home by being away from home. I mean by trying to understand other people, particularly the people I was living with in Greece, it was a way of being more at home with myself. I don’t know why that should be. There are two reasons, one professional one personal, why most of my work does try and relate self and other. The first one is that, for a long time, I was doing research on Greek tragedy and ancient Greek culture. I wrote two books: one about the idea of mind, one about the idea of madness in ancient Greek culture. I had to read a lot of anthropology for that and I feel very deeply, it’s almost political, that you really do have to try to understand the other in the other’s terms and that, when you import you own terms you have to be aware of it. People go around saying that the ancient Greeks are just like us; that’s balls. When you say that you’re using the other culture as a mirror instead of trying to use all you have to try to understand them as they are. The other reason, the family reason, is that my father is a Freudian psychoanalyst. He taught me Greek actually, he used to read a lot with me, read to us when we were young, then later read classical texts with me. So I’ve been very influenced by him, talked a lot about ideas with him. There’s a great deal in psychoanalysis and of course it’s been a focus of feminist thought: the transactions between self and other in psychoanalytic theory and in psychoanalytic practice.

You have written a book called Whom the Gods Destroy subtitled Elements of Greek and Tragic Madness. There is this received idea that there is a relation between madness, of whatever kind, and creativity; in poetry in this century we think of people like Dylan Thomas, Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton. As a poet who also has a background in both Greek tragedy and psychoanalysis, what do you think about this?

It was a very Romantic idea that creativity is allied to madness and comes from the same place. It goes back to various things in the Renaissance, the idea of melancholy as kind of fine frenzy. But it doesn’t have to be true just because it’s an idea that has appealed to people at various times. When you think of someone like Seamus Heaney, his creativity gives it the complete lie as a truth: look at this wonderfully balanced and sane and actually very happy personality and the poems that come out of that. This a different thing, of course, from saying that he doesn’t have sadness, he does and he lives in tragedy as we know. I think that creativity comes out of vulnerability and being open to the world, being open to your own feelings perhaps abnormally, more than most people are most of the time. But that doesn’t mean it’s mad, vulnerability is not madness.

I wonder who you feel your influences are as a poet?

To start with when I was discovering poetry at school (apart from Shakespeare, of course, who is simply there and who I read all the time) I would start with Tennyson. I used to learn reams of him by heart just to get through 0’ level. That’s still with me and whenever I’m frightened, like when I had the amniocentesis when my daughter was born, I recite him out loud - I asked the doctors, they said that no-one else had ever done this but that it was all right! There’s something there about the wonderful music, the images, the smoothness of images and progression of thought, the restlessness of thought he’s got - I love that. Then later Gerard Manley Hopkins. Again, I learnt the whole of The Wreck of the Deutscheland off by heart. And those written-in-blood sonnets by heart. He was just a revelation to me that you could do such things with words. In a way, I think that the founding of what I do comes from Hopkins. Someone I used also to read a lot was Browning for those monologues and the funniness. Then I discovered Yeats all by myself, at least I thought I did: some collection stolen from my sister! Yeats is very much in me: I was in Galway recently and I went to Yeats’ Tower. It was extraordinary being up there and to think he wrote the Stare’s Nest and all those civil war poems there.

Then for me, because I was teaching it and I worked for a hell of a long time on it, ancient Greek. What I particularly liked in the ancient Greek was the lyric poetry and not just the early lyric, Sappho, but also the tragic lyric which is what I lived with longest. People think of Greek tragedy and think of Antigone and moral dilemmas and so on, and that is there. What I really liked, however, was the way that those things are worked out in the lyrics which are stunning. Euripides perhaps most though. He did these intricate metaphors curling upon metaphor: formal, where each stanza would be mirrored in the following stanza. They had to get them right because they were dances as well; so the gesture you did on one side of the orchestra had to be exactly reflected in the gestures of the other. So every single syllable, long or short, had to be mirrored in the next stanza. Yet it’s so free and so passionate and so very musical; I loved all that. Then there’s modern Greek and I think Cavafy is one of the great poets of all time. That wonderful spareness and dryness with the passion all behind it; also the wry self awareness and the going out into history. I think that Cavafy had learnt from Browning. In fact, Cavafy used to write his poems out in English before he put them into Greek - extraordinary man! Then Seferis and his debt to Homer. I feel particularly close to him and a particular poem he wrote called Thrush after the occupation of Greece and just when the civil war was breaking out there - a very important poem.

Then there are the great modern classic poems which I discovered sort of higgledy-piggledy. Auden, Pound and Eliot. The great Americans: Plath I discovered by accident in Hughes’ edition. I remember I was going to Greece and I bought this very expensive hardback of her poems and first read them on the aeroplane and then read them over and over in Greece. The same thing happened about ten years later when the collected poems of Elizabeth Bishop came out, I thought, this is the most wonderful things I have seen. Those two, Plath and Bishop, were very important. These days I read a lot of, and been very influenced by, my contemporaries, people like Mike Donaghy and Ian Duhig. They are fighting for some balance between the world of ideas and history, and trying to get that into their music and earth it in the passion and the vulnerabilities of living. Because, for a long time, I’d felt very held up by the fact that I’d come from an academic background. I was so used to telling people things and of course that’ s the last thing you want a poem to do, tell people things. Now, when I am doing academic work, I think of it more as sharing things and I think that that’s what poems do, but they share a perception rather that a thought. I think that’s what Mike and Ian do. Then of course I’ve been very influenced by Carol Ann Duffy, her wonderful wryness and directness, her never letting anyone get away with anything. And having all the passion behind it. Matthew Sweeney will never let a dishonest word stand in a poem: he’ll put a sword point on it and say do you really need that word? I’ve really learnt from that and you can see it in his own work - the wonderful music he’s got. Also Selima Hill I admire very much.

Then the Irish poets. I’ve learnt so much in completely different ways from Paul Durcan and Paul Muldoon. Paul Durcan with his absolutely fearless going both into his own persona and out into the world at the same time. Both are strong influences on me. Heaney I love but I’m frightened of because he’s got such a strong music and there’s so much of him that I find he can take you over. What I really found in Paul Durcan was the way in which he makes his confidentiality so public. The way that he sees how far you can go in your voice, with humour, with different registers of tone, above all that being funny and making you laugh. But also being perhaps very formal, trying to get as many tonalities of voice in, some being almost archaic, some polite and tender and funny and at the same time very much of the street. I found that wonderful, very releasing.

It can be the case that an individual poem is a great influence on a writer. Do you find that so in your case? Which would they be?

I’m not sure I can talk about influences, I can just talk about poems I particularly love and will go on loving. There’s a wonderful one by Elizabeth Bishop called Manuelzinho about an old man who’s slightly dependant on a friend of Bishop’s who owns an estate. Its just so funny and so tender and so being able to keep her own voice while being able to imagine what life is like for him. One poem I learnt when I taught on a course with Matthew Sweeney was Blue Roses by Anne Sexton. A very painful poem, but a very free flung, free falling sort of poem, formally. At the same time it has this very controlled movement, so that at the end you’ve got this terrible surprise about how the little boy was abused by his mother: love’s the blue roses he gives her. It could be the other way round, after all she inflicts the bruises on him; but they’re his present to her. There’s a terrible emotional truth there, done so gracefully and economically. If you go further back, Binsey Poplars by Hopkins was very important to me. I love his fearless repetition: All felled, felled are all felled. And the assonances the internal rhymes, just the baroqueness of it, the risks he takes. I think more than anything I like poems that take risks, risks with the voice, risks with nakedness and risks with form.

In your poem Desire Paths of Sarajevo (Fusewire), in one place there’s a comment on imagination:

Maybe I’ve got it wrong
None of us are...
And who’s inventing who?
Imagining, all the same -

I wonder what you feel the role of imagination is in poetry?

I’m very interested you picked that up. That particular passage in the poem came out of the sense of the terrible hubris of writing from a position of complete safety that we have about the tragedies that are happening there. And indeed that got aired in the press when the Bosnia collection that was edited by Ken Smith came out. I was also trying to do something rather like John Fowles does in The French Lieutenant’s Woman, sort of commenting on the fact that at the end of the novel this is a twentieth century author writing about a nineteenth century sensibility. And here am I, a western European, talking about unimaginably awful things happening within a society which, although I have been in some parts of, I really don’t know very well. I was very touched that, at some of the readings we did for that Bosnia collection, quite a lot of Bosnian people came up and said you must have lived there, that was just how it was. So that passage was both a political thing, that I may have got it wrong, but also we still have to try. I remember I read that poem at a reading with Carol Rumens in Belfast between the fish shop massacre and just before the grey steel massacre, when everybody knew that some terrible loyalist reprisal was going to happen. Belfast was like a ghost city, very few people in the audience and Medbh McGuckian was supposed to be reading but had taken her children to Dublin. It was very hard to get into the city, because there were bomb scares both on the motorways and the railways. Carol, who had been living in Belfast, read several poems about Belfast. She got heckled by someone saying how could she write about Belfast when she was English. So I said: what sort of poet would she be if she were living in Belfast and not writing about Belfast! And I then asked him where he was born and it turned out to be Manchester! So I think that if you are moved to write, to use your imagination in this way, your only duty is to use it to the full ounce of your ability and truthfulness and also to say that you are using it. So in a way, that passage is commenting on the fact that I’m using my imagination to take me somewhere else. I think the role for imagination is to go out into the other person, into another world. The book I’m writing now, which is a book of love poems mainly, uses love to go out into all sorts of things about what is the role of the imagination, what is art; to take you away into another place.

Taking up that point, whilst your poems are in one sense about very different topics set in different places, on the other hand, a number of them, especially the more well-known ones, are love poems. Do you start off thinking you are going to write a love poem?

No, I never think I’m going to write any poem at all, let alone a love poem! A lot of the poems in Angel are not love poems. I wrote that when I was writing the book about madness and those are very important to me, although they’re not as glamorous and direct as the later ones. But I suppose love is one of the most intense experiences or states of being that we have and it tends to make you experience everything more intensely and more vulnerably. Paul Muldoon said to me once that you can write a poem about anything. Yes you can, certainly he can. But it’s rather like yoghurt: it has to be live in order for it to get going. It seems that, at the moment, as far as I’m concerned, being in love is a way of being live, giving things that energy from which you’re writing.

The title of your latest collection is Fusewire. You were just speaking about the creative energy for writing poetry and how that can be love. A piece of fuse wire is something that links two sources of energy and, as a fail-safe, breaks if the energy becomes too intense. Could you say something about that?

That’s extremely interesting. You’ve gone into it technologically much more than I had. I chose that title because I wanted to link energy, the sense of fusion and danger in the erotic context. Also to link that to the bombs and terrorism: the fall-out of the history of Ireland, its wounds and so on that I was talking about in the book. So it was a way of fusing the two themes. But I hadn’t thought of it as sources of energy because, in fact, I can see that what I am now doing is related to it, that the next book is very much about that: there’s a lot of lightning and fire, that kind of thing.

Talking about your new collection, you say that it has images of lightning in it. The poem Icicles Round a Tree in Dumfriesshire with which you won the National Poetry Competition has such images in it. How did it feel to have your poem win?

Well, of course, I was bowled over, delighted, but also awe struck and quite terrified. It was a very naked poem and for that to have that amount of attention in that sort of way was quite difficult. Also I just didn’t think that poem would do anything. I’d written it in great haste and only sent it in on the last day because there was a deadline. Sending a poem to a magazine or to a competition you have really have feel you’re behind something in order to do that. You look at it in a different way and I find that way useful. Also, I’d done a lot of formal things with it that I hadn’t done before and a lot of voice things. Then of course I was overwhelmed with delight but also frightened, because now it ups the ante with anything else you write. Any time you take a word in your hand it’s got to be good.

You say that you wrote it in great haste. Was it one that was very much donné, that came out very quickly?

No, it took me a month to write it. I was going away with my parents and family, we went to France in October. My father had just discovered that he has a very bad illness and we wanted to go away with them at half term. I took the poem with me in a sort of raw state. I kept on adding bits and I didn’t know what form it was going to take. I remember when I came back and it was nearly the deadline. The final bit of it was written but I didn’t really feel I’d finished it, I felt it was quite mad, a waste of the five pounds to send it in, but I had to do it.

You say you had to send it in, I wonder why that is? Are you competitive, what do you think about competitions in poetry?

I had to send it in because I wanted to see what I felt about it and you can only do that by action, by the action of sending it off. It’s this risk thing, wanting to see how far you can go and then go somewhere further. I don’t think I am competitive. People talk about poets being competitive but actually I think that poets are very generous to each other. I love showing people my work and being shown their work and talking about it. There are several friends I have and we read poems to each other down the phone or send faxes. I think there is a great spirit of generosity, of co-operation which I really am very grateful to be writing in at this time. As far as the National Poetry Competition is concerned, I like that because it’s judged anonymously and so a poem is there on its own. You said that sometimes it’s not the whole oeuvre of a poet that can influence you but one particular poem. That’s how we work, we work with small units of poems. One poem of a writer’s may be very good; you may not like the rest of their work, but that one is somehow important to you. But the competitions where the writers are known I find difficult. I was judging the TS Eliot prize. I found that extremely painful. You are dealing with the work of course, it’s the work that is the important thing. But you also know the people and I find it very painful indeed. At the moment I’m a Poetry Book Society selector with Sean O’Brien who’s wonderful. But I find this painful too, the poets are your friends quite often and you know just how it will affect their lives. I’m glad I’m going to stop quite soon.

You have from time to time taught Arvon courses. I wonder what you feel people get from going on those and what you, as tutor, get from them?

I think there’s a wonderful sense of excitement and sharing. There’s reading lots and lots of different work and there’s doing the exercises. It depends very much who you give the courses with and I’ve only done it with Selima Hill and Matthew Sweeney, both of whom I admire very much and both of whom teach a lot more than I do. I remember once Selima sprung an exercise on me. It’s one where you write out certain words, here the verbs, and see what people might write in. In this case she’d taken a poem of mine! It was very interesting for me to listen in, to see what the students did. And another exercise that Matthew did on another course that I did with the students (I always think you should do the exercise along with the students) gave me the title poem for Angel. Those are some things that I have got out of it. On the other side, it can be extremely rewarding when you see people developing and changing. On the course I taught with Selima in Scotland we had a wonderful collection of people. I still see their poems, see them. It’s marvellous to feel you’ve been present at something where they were finding their own voices, their own selves. It is very exhausting though, I couldn’t do it all the time. But I do love that sense of just, from time to time, putting yourself completely at the disposal of somebody else’s work and offering them what you can do to help their voice: I love that.

I wonder what we can expect from you in the near future?

Well, I have just sent off to Chatto the next book which I think will come out in April and Icicles Round a Tree in Dumfriesshire will be the title poem of the book. And also I’m doing this poetry column or diary in The Independent. I wanted to do that not on the literary pages. It goes in the comment pages. What I really want to do is give poetry a profile in the Independent readership so that it’s not ghettoised, not a special little tiny part of literature, so that’s it’s part of going out. It’s like jazz or theatre and something that everyone’s got a right to. So I want to relate poetry to everything and I’m putting a few listings at the bottom. The Independent is also very keen on me not only doing it in London so the people who run readings from outside London I’d be very grateful if they send me things, we don’t want to be London-centric. I enjoy doing it, making jokes and annoying people like Anthony Thwaite. I also want to try to help make poetry a natural part of civilised life.