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

This is the eleventh issue of the FROGMORE PAPERS. It has received little attention from the press. This is, after all, Britain, where mammary glands pass for news and where the Mitfords, Orwell and who-your-Sunday-paper’s-editor-went-to-Cambridge-with-in-the-50’s passes for a cultural heritage. An opinion poll testing British approval ratings for peace, black poetry and sex education in schools is likely to produce depressing results, while hanging dole scroungers, videos and page three would no doubt be enthusiastically endorsed, along with anything else perceived as neither too foreign nor too clever.

This rudimentary caricature of the national tendency towards philistinism and xenophobia is, of course, a conventional one — a cliché — though you may feel there is much truth in it. Certainly the opposing liberalism of the literary intelligentsia is also a conventional cliché though that does not necessarily make its views wrong. In any event, Frogmore doesn’t see its role as being self-consciously cross about Britain in the 8O’s in the sense that the ediitor wants to’ fill the pages of the FROGMORE PAPERS with poems about the concrete cows outside Milton Keynes or a lot of guilt about being middle class or growing up in Croydon. On the other hand, angry political work is welcomed quite as much as any other kind of contribution.

Frogmore is about creativity. Everyone who has written for us, whether you, the reader, happen to enjoy their work or not, has taken time off from working, watching T.V., reading advertising and consuming to write something of their own, to create something. In that sense, the writers whose work has been rejected really do make as important a contribution to what Frogmore is about as those whose work has been accepted. For when you’re writing, no-one else is controlling the process: you are in charge, and if you allow yourself to be influenced by books and films and advertising, it is because you’ve selectively chosen to be.