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

It’s early in the year, and a slew of competition forms hit the doormat, each offering prize money with varying levels of attractiveness, and some of them even allow the chance to be published. Whoopeedoo. This then is how one becomes a poet: I pay to submit work to a number of these and, if I’m lucky, a judge might select mine. Yes: this is what it’s all about. Job done.

Or, I could take up the option of attending the regional festivals, sitting for days in assorted auditoria and paying top-rate prices for a bit of chat from a fellow poet and a sweetly intoned programme of deathless verse. I could spend the whole year going from po-fest to lit-fest and back again. I’m obviously part of the writing community now, an artist of the floating world.

I’m a poet. Yes! I do comps, and I go to fests. I spend all my spare money funding other people's careers. I do their workshops, I consume tickets, writing courses, retreat weeks, conferences, adult-ed sessions like a thing possessed. Poetry is my life. I’m halfway through a creative writing MA now, and the next step is obviously working as a creative writing tutor, teaching other middle-aged ladies how to write nice little poems and win competitions. That means I’ve really arrived.

It’s so much livelier than keeping the magazine scene alive. It’s so much easier than sending out poems in envelopes and having nearly all of them come back. That’s so discouraging, and so slow. Fitting the zeitgeist and hitting the comps is – well, it’s somehow more concrete and valid. And when I’m in an audience paying to watch a poet, I know I’m the real thing. It’s a lot more immediate than writing in my notebooks and worrying about titles and punctuation.

Writing, in fact, is only a small part of being a poet. What I need to do is spend as much as possible on festival attendance and workshop tickets, and become that desirable thing: a consumer of poetry culture, necessary to the industry as a whole. Poems (and poets) aren’t actually necessary in the poetry industry – they’re the by-products, like leftover pastry. What matters is the act of comsumption and the acquiring of credits: courses done, facilitators known, bells rung, and buttons pressed.

If I’m a consumer, I’m the real thing without having to do any of it. I just pay, and consume. Administrators like this, because it helps to keep their salaries flowing in. Famous poets like it, because it means there’s more than two people in the audience. College directors like it because it means there’s bums on seats. Not-so-famous poets like it because they can scratch a living doing ‘sessions.’ Publishers like it because they can shift ten copies at events, when they couldn’t shift any before. Arts outfits like it because they can run part of their years’ programme on the proceeds of a heavy comps pile. Everyone wins. What’s not to like?

It’s hard to see how this situation can change. People all over the country are writing out their cheques to competitions and taking out mortgages to pay for yet another course, another week in a literary forcing-shed, and a set of tickets for the hottest new names. The last thing they’re going to do is just get a notebook and write some poems and send them out. Because that’s not real anymore. It’s not part of the life, the industry, being on the scene with the guys.

You see, real poetry is what happens on the writing course and in the prize-winner list. It isn’t what happens in the human heart and mind, between you and the page, and the books you discover. It’s not a spiritual thing, or something heroic. It’s not something you can believe in or find or realise or feel. It can’t be experienced. All that stuff takes time and effort and concentration – even intelligence and engagement. But it can be parcelled up and sold by arts entrepreneurs, and the quickest and surest way in to this shiny world of poetry is if you buy. And the more you pay, the more you can play – until you reach the final square and a publisher decides that yes, you too are the next really real poet.

In the meantime you have to be mentored, guided, talked-at, assessed, judged, taught every last nuance and approach, and it doesn’t come cheap. You need advisors, tutors, officers and co-ordinators; a whole raft of literated hangers-on whose income depends on the number of people buying into the world of writing. No, your life as a poet is something you have to pay for, because we all know that poetry doesn’t pay you. Instead, you must give and keep on giving to lots of other agencies for the privilege of belonging to ‘the poetry scene.’ Because if you don’t, these other people won’t regard you as a poet.

Worst of all, you won’t feel part of the writing community and you won’t gain access to its varying levels. You simply won’t know what buttons to press anymore. These right-minded facilitators and gatekeepers won’t have heard of you when you apply for things, and their colleagues won’t have heard of you either. And who wants to be locked out of the playroom when so many jolly people are in it?

Therefore buy, buy, buy my friends; you know it makes sense. But are you just a cinder in the raging fire of The Poetry Industry, or are you a poet? Are you in charge of your life as a writer, or is someone else ‘facilitating’ your access – for a price?

Are you happy about it?

Ker-chingg!