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

Poetry is part of literature and literature is language in the service of art. It is clear then that the requirements of art, for instance invention, imagination, vitality and aesthetic form, take precedence over the requirements of language, which are, for instance, comprehensibility, truth, and the forms of orthodox syntax which ensure these qualities.

Whatever poetry has most amply demonstrated this precedence has been the only encouraging feature of the past decade. For me it has been the work of Whalen, McClure, Creeley, Ginsberg and Burroughs, amongst many others in America. In this country it has been the work of Tom Raworth, Bill Butler, Harry Fainlight and a few others amongst whom it would be silly not to count myself.

What is discouraging is the continued struggle on the part of a kind of literary temperance society led by Hamilton and Alvarez to reverse the creative process and to make art serve language. Their attempt to maintain the illusion of prestige which the members of this carefully isolated clique have bestowed on one another has been largely outflanked. It is anyway in the nature of art that something anti-creative should lack vitality and therefore be short-lived. Nevertheless, the mutually appointed elite continue to play dog-in-the manger, obstructing the course of art by a criticism which is finally a sort of etiquette, aimed, like all etiquette, at the alienation of the people. The clique is still there and is a nuisance.

I hope that in the future those terms are dropped which act as buttresses for the continuation of outdated disciplines. I hope people stop thinking of poetry, or painting, or music, so that the media merge and people can choose the sense-form that will be of most use for them in what they, individually, might choose to do.