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

We hoped it might be interesting for readers of Reader’s Corner to trace the course of two lives, both equally dominated by poetry, but coming to it in different ways, and with different needs, as Critic and Poet – though in fact the Critic’s first full collection is just coming out, and the Poet does dabble in criticism when it can’t be avoided.

   Both had much the same early childhood, though one was in the NE and one in the SE. Here’s the Poet, first.

   War truncated my life. Schools in Bromley were closed, so my parents had to send me off the cuff to boarding school, where I moped, because I’d lost all my friends at once (in fact I never saw them again). Here I fell into the arms of reading, that wonderful comforter. Poems about outsiders (‘The Forsaken Merman’, ‘The High Tide on the Coast of Lincolnshire’, ‘Goblin Market’, de la Mare’s ‘The Listeners’) and the longest novels I could find (Scott, Hardy, R D Blackmore, Dickens, Austen, Gaskell). All these created worlds, however tragic. The worst moment was always when the right hand pages dwindled, and the enchanted world was clearly going to end. Literature as drug. In my loneliness and misery, probably nothing else would have got me through. One drug that didn’t work was Wordsworth. He was taught in such a mathematical way that I rejected him entirely, as I did Virgil and Racine (I reverted to them afterwards). I also discovered Browning, but more of this later.

   Critics come second – and so they should. Critics can’t exist without poets (are probably, indeed, or so it’s said, failed poets...). But this critic’s early reading was exactly the same as the poet’s, with the only additional advantage of the fun of making up poems, inspired by a mother who loved poetry. So that when bombs were dropping all around I’d be more worried about a rhyme for the previous line we’d just made up than the possibility of extinction. I was unpoetically happy at school, so had no need to escape into books – though I did, of course: Jeffery Farnol, the William books, and P. G. Wodehouse (I have always had a regrettable weakness for funny writers) leading on to Hardy and Austen and Dickens and so on – good long books, that you hoped wouldn’t ever end. Then in the VI form, under an expert energetic enthusiastic teacher fresh from prison camp, the metaphysicals, and importantly, all the moderns, Woolf and Lawrence, Eliot and Auden and MacNeice. And Chaucer, of course, and Shakespeare. It was all heady stuff, the more so since Eliot and Co seemed too difficult to understand (and if you thought you did understand, you were quite sure you were brilliant).

   At Oxford I found myself in the magic world of Tolkien and C S Lewis, but more importantly, of Old English poetry. Critics point mockingly to the fact nothing was taught that was written after 1850 – we were supposed to do the rest for ourselves. This didn’t bother me. I was lucky in that Old English was taught in the Tolkien way (‘this is not philology, it is poetry’ ), and I spent much time wallowing in the heroes, dragons, masterless men, ruined cities, lost battles, stoic courage, mixture of pagan and Christian. Chaucer, Sir Gawayne and other medieval delights came too, and so did a better understanding of Virgil, Racine and Wordsworth (the poet as fool). Donne I disliked (like playing Chopin with the loud pedal on), but Marvell joined Browning among the stars. The other valuable thing Oxford gave me – it came with that noble thing, the OED – was an interest in individual words: how much they weighed, where they came from, where they wanted to be in a sentence.

   At Cambridge, the wind was taken out of my sails. None of this modernist stuff – I was told to write essays on Sir Thomas Browne and the letters of Lord Chesterfield. But Cambridge had libraries, and so many more things to discover: Dr Johnson; the lesser metaphysicals, Herbert and Vaughan (now of course I think they are finer than Donne, who seemed so glamorous and daring to sixth formers); sad Cowper. And more Chaucer, and Henryson and Dunbar. And Coleridge, who came alive to me through the fascinating Road to Xanadu. I didn’t care much for the Romantics, either, or for the CI8 poets, until I discovered them properly, having to teach them to students, years later.

   Teaching brought me relatively up to date. I came to grips with Eliot and Hopkins. D H Lawrence, Ted Hughes, Charles Causley, Stevie Smith, Geoffrey Hill, Kit Wright, Fleur Adcock ... I had a lot of catching up to do, and one immense blessing over and above all this was the Cheltenham Literary Festival, where I could hear the poets themselves match the words to the voices they belonged to. I like to think of the poets I first heard in this way: Carol Ann Duffy, Kathleen Jamie, Norman Nicholson, Norman MacCaig. When much later I started to write myself I suppose I had assimilated much that is useful for a poet without really noticing. From Eliot I got the idea of collage, of non-sequiturs, of not spelling things out for the reader; from Browning how to avoid ‘I’, the invention of other voices, the whole idea of the dramatic monologue; from Wordsworth (‘Anecdote for Fathers’ in particular) the idea of the poet as dogged half-wit. I also learnt whom not to copy: Pope, Hopkins and Stevie Smith, all completely inimitable. But the poet who really got me started was Vernon Scannell, to whom I owe a huge debt. I was accustomed to thinking of teaching as a subject one can’t write about. He showed me it could be done, though I never did it. And that, I suppose, opened my mind to other things I could write about, which turned out to be hospital patients.

   Teaching – first at school and then at university – made me take all sorts of writers seriously from a quite different point of view, not for my own enjoyment primarily, nor to satisfy examiners, but to sell, so to speak, to others. I was never much good at selling the novel in this way (in any case I felt that with the novel less salesmanship was needed), but I could bring poetry to life, and I found I enjoyed doing this. And students who thought there was nothing they could say about poetry, and who had a longrooted fear of the stuff anyway, decided they liked it. Better still, later on in this saga, students found they enjoyed writing it. (I have to confess: I’d desperately committed myself to ‘teaching Creative Writing’ at a job interview, and when I actually got the job, I had to get on with it. This went all right for a while: I could think up lots of ways to get people writing. Then the students became insubordinate, and said they wouldn’t do it unless I did too. So that led me to writing poetry myself.)

   Rosie gave me Kipling. Not the ‘If ’-man, or the ‘Glory of the Garden’, but the dry-eyed stoic of ‘Epitaphs of War’ and ‘The Storm Cone’. Other poets whose work became part of my life are Diana Hendry, Ann Drysdale, Alice Oswald and Lavinia Greenlaw. I see to my shame I’ve omitted Shakespeare. I suppose he’s so much part of my life that I don’t think to mention him. But he was there from the start. The rest of the story is of course a shared thing: the poets we have heard at Literary Festivals and Writers’ Circles, the poets we’ve each discovered and told each other about, the poets we’ve met and liked, the poets I’ve come across through writing reviews, the poets we’ve worked with in workshops, on courses, the poets we’ve read with...

   We’ve lived together so long that our tastes have merged. To begin with we thought in terms of your books and mine. Then the books themselves got together on the shelves, and made it obvious that this approach wouldn’t do – quite apart from the fact that we had so many duplicate copies. Yours and mine became ours. And what became clear was our shared love of reference books – not just the big obvious ones, like the twenty-four volumes of the OED, and the DNB (a job lot we discovered one successful book-hunting day), but maps (those beautiful things), and reference books of all kinds, dictionaries of slang and surnames and saints, of dialects and diseases and dates. Books of facts: facts about birds and trees and medieval churches and rivers. History, both fictional and true. Books about journeys, from Pilgrim’s Progress to the ascent of K2.

   Lastly, we want to mention three poet friends who died fairly recently. It’s easy to forget the newly-dead; we hope the work of these three will be kept alive not just in the minds of those who knew them, but in the minds and ears who don’t yet know them: Dorothy Nimmo; Pamela Gillilan; and the incomparable Elma Mitchell. May they not rest in peace.