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

This time I make no apology for saying it - even the Poet Laureate is saying it, the Arts Council recommending it: we have created too many poets and not enough readers! Shut down the creative writing classes, open the creative reading sessions. Acumen was right all along! Yippee! Hurray! So why don’t I feel elated, over the moon, vindicated, satisfied? Why do I feel sad?

   I’m thinking of all those people who have sent me unpublishable poems which have been a sincere attempt at putting deeply felt emotions into words. Sure, many have culled from Keats, Wordsworth and Shakespeare, from Eliot, Pound, Carol Ann Duffy, even Andrew Motion! But this doesn’t invalidate their feelings. It doesn’t stop their need to try and put on paper something of themselves, to use the written word creatively. Yet I didn’t publish them so why do I support them here?

    Because these people are fulfilling a deep need within themselves. I think most of us have written things down at some point in our life. Even I, at moments of emotional stress (starting with my teenage years, love, birth of children, grandchildren, death of parents, close friends), I have taken pen to paper and poured words out on the page.

   But why are these still at the back of the drawer or, mostly, in the waste paper basket? I wonder if it was because I was brought up to believe that anyone can write ‘poetry’; but the real stuff is written by people with a gift for words, writing the memorable line, for image making, for expressing emotions in a universal way, so that readers can identify with it during deeply emotional times, be they joyous or sad.

   We shouldn’t stop anyone from writing poetry, we should encourage it. But we should also encourage reading and wider appreciation of the art so we can all be self critical about our own work and decide with a greater certainty if it’s to be submitted for publication, or just circulated amongst friends and relatives who, knowing the personal situation, will appreciate the honest emotion even if so much else is lacking. A lack they won’t comment upon; a dream they will not tread on.