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

     What poetry mustn’t do is talk to itself. Nothing is easier than to get a gathering of poets to extol the value and insight of poetry and to lament its marginalisation. Apart from the warm glow that this confers, it doesn’t achieve very much. A convention of beer-drinkers or foxhunters would claim as much. But the danger of introversion is particularly acute in the case of poetry, a verbal art which uses as its medium the terms that people employ in all their acts of communication. The poet borrows the currency of general exchange and must spend it productively; otherwise the loan is abused. The users of the language as a whole are entitled to an opinion on how it is used in poetry. As it happens, despite a lot of complaining by poets about the slighting of poetry, people in general are curiously respectful of it: more than it deserves, I often think. If someone makes out they are a poet, then they have to answer to the responsibilities as well as claiming the considerable privileges and kudos. The fact is that poetry mostly manages to maintain its social status without making much social return.

     This is a delicate business, of course. It has to be decided what society the poet writes out of, and to. When Antoine Raftery wrote his great lament for ‘Anach Chuan’ about a multiple drowning in Lough Corrib in the 1820s, the constituency was clear enough. As proof of its aptness, his poem is still sung in the locality two centuries later, in Irish and English. But when Andrew Motion, with commendable generosity of spirit, wrote a poem for the TUC Conference, it was not so clear that he was writing for a constituency he belonged to. There is something satisfyingly profound about the twist by which the singer of ‘I belong to Glasgow’ finds that when he has “a couple of pints on a Saturday, Glasgow belongs to” him. It is true; you can tell by the accent he sings in.

     The point here, I suppose, is that it is much easier to be a local poet than a national one. That is, it is much clearer what poetry is for locally than nationally. What is the national poet to do, to repay the debt to the society which recognies him/her? The least they can do, it might be thought, is to take society and its politics seriously. But the problem is that there is a strong bias against political poetry in English, at least on the home front. We are much more ready to admire political poetry in the distance: distance either of place – like Eastern Europe – or time – like World War I. This was interestingly borne out by the coldness which greeted Tony Harrison’s Guardian poems during the Gulf War. It was striking that the objection mostly took a familiar disingenuous form: a pretence that what was being objected to was the formal quality of the political poem. Harrison’s powerful and bitterly vivid poems were said to fall short in prosody. Likewise, Seamus Heaney’s more declaredly political poems were greeted with more unease than most of his writing, even it sometimes seemed by the poet himself. The obvious case was Heaney’s light-hearted murmur of protest against his inclusion under the heading “British” in the Motion–Morrison Penguin anthology in 1982. People kept saying: “he can say what he likes. But it’s not very well written, is it?”

     In these cases, it is clear that those objecting to public pronouncement in poetry – what Yeats deplored as ‘opinion’ – are reluctant to descend to public statement themselves, even in criticism. They want the debate to proceed in mannerly formal terms, in commentary as in poetry. The issue in Heaney’s case arose again last year when much of the public comment in England failed to see that he couldn’t possibly become the Poet Laureate even if his Northern Irish birth entitled him to British citizenship. How on earth could a Dublin-based poet of Northern Irish Catholic origins, however well-disposed, take on a role that implied that he should write paeans for the British Royal family? And how on earth could some parts of the English poetic world have thought that he might? It was another example of failing to locate poetry in a public context.

     Heaney, as it happens, is a complex case. He has always spoken for a very wide constituency, and he takes his responsibilities towards poetry at least as seriously as those towards the public world. One of his most important books is The Government of the Tongue where he says “poetry can be as potentially redemptive and possibly as illusory as love”. But what he yearns is that the poet’s tongue should be liberated from the tyranny of having been “governed for so long in the social sphere by considerations of tact and fidelity, by nice obeisances to one’s origin within the minority or the majority”. Repeatedly he has said “poetry has its own jurisdiction” (or words to that effect), not in itself governed by the laws of “the minority or the majority”, the local or the national.

     I am not so sure. Wilfred Owen is much quoted for saying: “Above all, I am not concerned with poetry”. The conditions in which Owen was writing were especially terrible ones in which a primary concern for poetry might seem crass. But we could do worse than keep Owen’s dictum in mind in all circumstances. It is tempting to say that anybody who thinks poetry is the most serious thing will not be capable of writing serious poetry because they cannot see what things are really serious.

     This will all sound very churlish, coming from someone who has, I think, had more recognition from the poetic world than I have earned. In an age of mindless materialism (which is of course how writers have always characterised their own, unappreciative times), it will seem to be weighing in on the wrong side of the scale. But of course it is not that I am against poetry or writing or art. They are the things that mean most to me professionally, by definition; indeed I have no remaining aspirations beyond involvement with literature and the arts. Everyone, however slight their practice of poetry, understands the observation of Patrick Kavanagh: that he started to toy with verse and woke one day to find that it had become his life. But that doesn’t exempt us from trying to say anew in every generation why poetry is important: why it warrants the exalted status accorded to it. We no longer, I trust, claim anything as grand as vatic insight or as insignificant as private solace (“I write for myself”). In the end, the answer is that poetry means something different in every generation and an important part of the poet’s duty is to find out what its meaning is for their own time. The Northern Irish critic Edna Longley says that every poem worth its salt is in part about poetry. I think this is absolutely right. Moreover, poetry has to be redefined not only in time but also in place. We can’t rest on shared laurels and say: “Poetry is what Dante and Shakespeare wrote; I am a poet, so let’s have a bit of respect”.

     As it happens, I find myself writing repeatedly about the same place, the part of Ireland I come from, which is a still a relatively hermetically sealed community with active interest in language, history and archaeology, and a musical tradition which can only be called classical. It is a very easy community to write out of. The most obvious form to write back to it in is elegy. But that is all local, writing for the minority. Like Auden’s valley cheese, “local, but prized elsewhere”, such writing is very fortunate if it appeals to any kind of appetite in a wider world. It is a kind of talking to yourself which must try to be alert to the context in which it is overheard. And it must be equally grateful to the world that provides its material and the busy world of communication that pauses to listen.