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

This autumn I made a long awaited visit to Nepal which necessitated spending nearly a month out of the country, followed by a few days getting over jet-lag. By then, I had an horrendous amount of poems submitted for the magazine. Having cleared this, I immediately embarked on judging the Open University Poetry Competition. Reading a lot of poems day after day, one realises how they read like social comment on our times. At the moment the main thrust of poems seems to be about elderly people (mainly parents but sometimes aunts/uncles/friends) being in care homes and the effect this dependency has on their self-respect, pride etc. Another theme is that of the single parent: and I am getting more poems from single dads (single mums were a couple of years ago) who find their ‘access time’ eroded and the fight, either openly or just mental and unspoken, with their ex-wives. Divorce used to feature heavily, but now I get more poems on how divorce (is/has) affects the children. Many of these poems don’t even get into the short-list let alone get published; they are often second choices by poets who do have poems in Acumen, who are competent poets but whose feelings within these more personal writings runs away with them and overcomes the craft of poetry-making. Which is a pity, really, for it is these poems which finally reach into the consciousness – and conscience – of the reader and stay there, making what are often bald non-judgemental statistics into real human situations.

   Another point about trends in poetry which came out of judging the competition was that I found many poems which could loosely be called ‘nature poems’. Yet they weren’t mere descriptions of nature: it was almost as if Nature (and I use the capital deliberately)was being investigated as an alternative to a god which seemed, for most of the writers of these poems, to have failed. Nature was being explored for a redemptive power, a meaning, an allegory of life; yet somehow devoid of a divine element which was present in, say, Wordsworth. An insight into human psychology? I wonder ...