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

I suppose the encouraging thing about the poetry written in the past ten years has been its diversity, the varieties of styles and modes that have managed to co-exist more or less amicably. What has certainly been a feature of the last decade in Britain has been the enormous increase in the number of public readings, though whether this is to be welcomed unreservedly or at all is another matter. On the one hand it does show that poetry is more popular than many people had previously believed and one might reasonably expect that these readings persuade some, if only a few, in each audience actually to go out and buy the stuff; on the other hand, public performances often encourage poets to read their weaker and perhaps less characteristic work under the impression that it is more accessible or entertaining or, in quite a few cases, deliberately to produce a kind of ersatz poetry for aural consumption, a mixture of light verse and vaudeville comic's patter or wet-mouthed sentimentality. This wouldn't matter so much were it not that a generation of young people—or a fair section of it—is being brought up to believe that this stuff is poetry and when they come up against the real thing they're quite unable to face the challenge it makes to intelligence, imagination and feeling.

Another thing I've noticed over the past ten years has been the vast proliferation of school anthologies. This might seem splendid except that it's obvious that most of the editors read nothing but other similar anthologies so the constant duplications are wasteful and boring. The same poems crop up in book after book and quite often they're pretty feeble poems at that. Many of the editors seem to suffer from a kind of half-baked neophilia so that they'll include work by living midgets but nothing by the mighty dead or dying. For instance I saw recently a schools anthology of 20th Century Poetry that included things by Paul Simon, Brian Patten, John Pudney, and Phoebe Hesketh but nothing by—to mention a few obvious names—Hardy, Edward Thomas, Yeats, Eliot or Auden. Many of these books are brightly produced with imaginative illustrations but I'm not at all sure that the kids wouldn't be better off with a dog-eared old Palgrave.

Among the younger British poets that I've read over the last decade I've been impressed by a few who show a concern with style, an unfussy elegance, wit and intelligence which don't admire themselves in a cold mirror but serve a real involvement with living experience. This combination of elegance with strength and attack is shown perhaps best in Tony Harrison's Loiners but there are other poets who, in their quite different ways, possess the same quality.