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

I have been dragged kicking and screaming into the twenty-first century by my colleagues, who insisted we should have a Millennium issue.  You may think this idea is completely naff.  After all, you’ve probably already heard quite as much as you want about the year 2000, and it could be argued that the date has no more significance than a beetle crawling over a mark on a totem pole.  I’ve also heard that various other little magazines are doing exactly the same thing!
      
Yet as we look back at the ‘century’s corpse’, like Thomas Hardy writing ‘The Darkling Thrush’ on 31st December 1900, we are awed by the vast changes which have taken place in the last hundred years.  The wars, the technological miracles, the advances in human rights. Literature has changed too - just compare the poetry scene now with the scene in 1900 - and it is fascinating to see how literature mirrors history.
      
So it was a delightful task to sort through a vast heap of poems and stories in search of the good ones which had to do with centuries, clocks and change.  Most pieces here reflect this theme in some way (others have had to be held over).  Hardy is present, as are Jesus, Marx, Napoleon and a few other prominent figures from the last two thousand years.
      
The theme of the June issue will be the emotions - that is, love, hate, despair and any other feelings which are extreme, ‘way out’, or on the edge.  I’ve already got some remarkable poems and would like to see more, as well as any other good work you may have.