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

“There can never be common ground for those who believe that you have to learn how to think and how to read before you can write and those who think that poetry is just a response to experience and that all responses are equal” (David Kennedy, Thumbscrew 13).

     “Most people”, as Adrian Mitchell once famously put it, “ignore most poetry because most poetry ignores most people”. This is of course regrettable, but at least it means that “most people” don’t realise the contempt with which they are regarded by so many poets. Contemporary British poetry is not so much a game which everyone can play, as an élite sport played by professionals to which the rest of us are invited as spectators. It is a stately-home nature-trail patrolled on every side by game-keepers. It is a night-club with more bouncers than dancers. It is a world in which, according to Jane Holland in Poetry Review, “there are too many people out there writing poetry” – an opinion which subsequent correspondence in the magazine suggests is “the private view of most serious poets” and editors “who have to wade through oceans of substandard verbiage on a regular basis to find anything worth publishing”.

     Although the new director of the Poetry Society, Christina Patterson, says in the latest issue of Poetry News that the society exists “for poets, poetry lovers and those whose experience of poetry consists largely of half-remembered poems at school”, the new issue of Poetry Review contains a rather different vision of “a premier league of best-selling poets and the rest probably selling somewhat fewer books than they did before the boom” (although we are reassured that “every now and then a poet will be promoted” into the premier league). These two versions of the “poetry revival” are clearly incompatible. Poetry is indivisible. It either belongs to everyone or it is not poetry but something else – show-business, self-advertising, big-business, fashion, marketing, retailing, self-display. Poetry may appear to be the most easily available literary form for most people (easier to write than a screen-play, easier to publish than a novel). But visitors are not always welcome in the Republic of Poetry, its citizens are treated as subjects and its borders are heavily policed.

     Between what might be called the BSkyB/Old Trafford vision of poetry and the poetic equivalent of the view from the terraces at Chester City, lie a number of contradictions, unresolved questions about the role of poetry in British cultural life. On the one hand, poetry is an utterly marginal economic activity (representing less than 1% of UK book sales); on the other it is a key component of “English Literature” (itself the bearer of a special cultural authority since the 1920s). It is an increasingly important means of delivering national policy agendas (literacy strategies, reluctant-readers, non-traditional learners, part-time degrees etc), and yet compared to journalism, fiction, copy-writing or screen-writing it is the least clamorous, the least glamorous and the least powerful of contemporary literary forms. It is a source of light-hearted news stories for the broadsheets (the exciting extra-marital affairs of Hugo Williams and Craig Raine, the Laureate sit-com, the Hughes/Plath mythopoeia etc) and yet it struggles to command attention in the review pages. Every year we celebrate National Poetry Day to the sound of literary magazines closing. In the Northern Arts region alone we have lately lost The Echo Room, Iron, The Page, Panurge, Poetry Durham, Red Herring, Scratch, Tees Valley Writer and Writing Women. The result is the dramatic return of poetry as spectacle, as an object of cultural consumption (World Book Day, National Poetry Day, the Whitbread, Forward, Eliot and National Poetry prizes, The Nation’s Favourite CDs etc.) where the popularity of poetry is measured by sales returns, and not by the number of people who are writing and publishing poetry. In this context, the demise of Slow Dancer represents a much more serious blow to the contemporary poetry scene than the decision of OUP to close its poetry list (although everyone’s list is now silting up with refugees from OUP). Promotions like Poetry Places and the Year of the Artist hardly compensate for the recent disappearance of so many provincial magazines, presses and alternative bookshops (as reprinting already-published poems in the Guardian and Independent does not make up for the loss of Adrian Mitchell’s weekly page of new verse in the NSS). Meanwhile, the triumphant restoration of metropolitan culture and the dumbing of commercial publishing and book-selling continue to narrow the points of entry to poetry.

     Curiously, the “poetry revival” has done little to increase access to the writing of poetry, for all the talk of heteroglossia, of “decentring cultural authority” and attending to other voices “at the margins”. The “New Gen” promotion now looks like an unsubtle attempt by London publishers to regain ground lost to Bloodaxe in the previous decade. The new Penguin Modern Poets feels increasingly like the establishment of a new canon, with all the implied sense of a settled argument, of a selection defined by what and whom it excludes. Poetry Review is now arguably more canonical and more partisan than at any time in its history. Editor Peter Forbes finds room in Scanning the Century for Wendy Cope but not for Hugh MacDiarmid, for Sophie Hannah but not for Edward Thomas, for Glyn Maxwell but not for John Masefield, for James Fenton but not for Robert Bridges, for Don Paterson but not for Edward Thompson.

     This is a culture happy to reproduce itself, effortlessly recycling the self-confirming judgements of publishers and the London prize-giving circuit, as it establishes the criteria which sets “professional” poets apart from their audience. Consider, for example, Forward Prize-winner Carol Ann Duffy’s ‘Dear Writer-in-Residence’:

Dear Writer-in-Residence, I enclose my verse
(94 poems) it’s three weeks’ work. 
I’ll call in next week, which is time enough 
for you to read, digest and admire the stuff...

... I don’t know your work – I haven’t much time 
to read modern poets and I bet it doesn’t rhyme.
But I hope, as a professional, you won’t plagiarize
any of my best lines. (A word to the wise!!)

The hapless would-be poet doesn’t have a clue. He also doesn’t have a chance. How could we not sympathise with the professional writer-in-residence who has to deal with so many tiresome amateurs? Compare ‘In Residence: A Worst Case View’ by another Forward Prize-winner, Sean O”Brien. Included in HMS Glasshouse (which earned its author an E.M. Forster Award), it is another hymn to the relationship between poets-in-residence and their students:

Here is the notice you put on the board
And these are the students beating a path
From their latest adventures in learning to spell
To a common obsession with Sylvia Plath.

Soon there are Tuesdays, long afternoons,
Letting them tell you what’s good about Pound.
You smile and you nod and you offer them tea
And not one knows his arse from a hole in the ground.

O’Brien’s Ghost Train includes another end-of-residency valediction, ‘Never Can Say Goodbye’, which salutes all those who “send ad infinitum/ Truckloads of your latest works./ I wonder why you write ‘em –”:

Because you write but never read, 
Because you never listen, 
Because you are the porcelain 
The caught-short Muses piss in.

Peter Reading goes one better in Stet, providing examples of the poetry written by all these hopeless amateur poets who write but never read and never listen. His “Poem of the Week slot (10 quid prize)” is won by either dour “McDonald (Mrs). Aberdeen” (“£10 to you, Mrs McDonald, for your very good poem”) or “Contented of Telford, Mrs”. Unsurprisingly, they are not Reading’s most memorable work:

All this terrible rape and murder
      And mugging and violence galore
And poor little children beaten
      Oh! my heart can stand no more.
There is always someone on strike
      For better pay and terms,
Is there no end to this misery?
      No one ever learns.
But before despair descends
      Upon my sad head
A name crops up in the paper
      And I no longer wish I was dead!
I’m filled with fresh, new hope,
      I’m certain that Billy Graham,
With words of Truth and Love,
      Will bring an end to this horrid mayhem.

It is a highly effective strategy, an ironic take on Reading’s own inability to see the wood from the trees, one of the sentimental, amateur, self-condemning (and crucially demotic) voices with which he justifies the book’s misanthropic clichés (“Doesn’t he ever write about happiness?”). But it is also an extraordinarily revealing moment of misogyny and old-fashioned snobbery.

     As it happens, I edit a regular, weekly column of readers’ poems in Middlesbrough’s Evening Gazette. Since 1989 I have published well over a thousand poems in the paper, by readers young and old. Because the column is so popular, and because I receive so many poems each week, the paper also publishes a twice-yearly magazine of readers’ poems. Much of the material comes from local schools, from creative-writing courses, writers’ groups and refugees from accredited adult education. Several contributors have since been published by Teesside poetry publishers Mudfog Press, and many of the region’s best-known poets have also appeared in the Gazette (notably Mark Robinson, Norah Hill, Maureen Almond, Gordon Hodgeon, Bob Beagrie and Pauline Plummer). But the vast majority live well beyond the institutions of education, poetry and publishing. Most submissions are untyped; they are sometimes badly-spelled and often ungrammatical; many rely on second-hand phrases and second-hand ideas; few suggest any familiarity with contemporary poetry. They are generally notable for what they do not say and do not know how to say, and are characterised by a limited range of poetic models. They are intensely personal but curiously anonymous at the same time, what Roland Barthes called “writerly” texts. And of the tens of thousands of poems submitted over the last eleven years I cannot say there have been no sentimental, weak or poorly articulated poems.

     But they are not all like that, not all of the time. The majority are well-crafted, understated little poems about the things that poems need to be written about – friendship, love, loss, hope, death, dismay, loneliness, disappointment. They are variously serious, silly, fierce, witty, uptight, solemn, funny, disbelieving, direct, sarcastic sad, vehement and tender. Some set out to celebrate, others to question, to denounce, praise, remember, challenge, entertain, scare, glorify, shock, criticise, ridicule, hint, complain, shout, whisper and giggle. In other words, for all their limitations, these poems do what all poetry must do. And how could it be otherwise? Their authors are human; language is one of the ways we share and identify our experiences as human; poetry is a function of human society; we inhabit the same island, the same language, the same history. The poems published in the Gazette do not require a different kind of reader or a different kind of critical response. The issue, as always, is whether a poem is good enough, whether it is as close to what it is trying to say as it can be.

     The impulses that lead people to write this kind of poem, to write it down and send it out, are no different, no worse, no less interesting or less admirable than the impulses that lead better-educated and better-read poets to sit down to write. Considering the huge barriers between “most people” and poetry, the fact that so many still write it should be a source of amazement and admiration (how deep a common human impulse it must be) rather than disgust. For if there are technical and intellectual limits to this kind of poetry, they are simply an expression of the educational, political, economic and cultural processes for which Class is a clumsy but still necessary short-hand. For this is working-class poetry at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Of course it is neither class-conscious nor politically militant. But then English working-class poetry has rarely been either (and at the beginning of the century the ex-industrial working-class is certainly neither class-conscious nor politically militant). The great virtue of working-class poetry is that it is unacquainted with postmodernity and unbound by the obligations of irony. Poets who live so far from the centres of cultural authority can thus address plainly subjects – war in Rwanda, Bosnia and Kossovo, the impact of heroin on local estates, ecological disaster in the North Sea, the treatment of pensioners by the present government – which “better” poets can only approach via the most oblique and ironic routes. No event ever brought so many poems into the Gazette as the fall of Thatcher.

     Poetry is popular. It always has been. It is just the buying of poetry books that’s not so popular. Anyway, the Evening Gazette sells 70,000 copies a night, giving these working-class poets a rather larger readership than most poets ever dream of reaching. “Most people” do not ignore poetry, no matter how much it ignores them. Most of us find ourselves at some time in our lives reaching for the heightened language and memorable phrasing, the economy of expression and patterned music that we call poetry. If we are in the middle of a genuine poetry revival, it is taking place in schools, community-centres and libraries, in writers’ groups and creative-writing classes. It is sometimes written in private and often in secret. It is published on web-sites and on hospital waiting-room notice-boards, by small presses, in school magazines and in unhealthily slim volumes, in valentine-cards and in memoriam columns, in fanzines, in vanity-anthologies, parish magazines, local newspapers and trade union journals. It is performed at slams and open-mike slots, at leaving parties, wedding receptions and christenings, and sung to guitars and drum machines.

     Contemporary poetry has clearly been enriched by listening to kinds of writing which, for reasons of ethnicity, race and gender, struggled until recently to find an audience. A “polycentred” literary culture must attend to the writing of working-class people too, to the poorly educated and the not so articulate, to the sometimes derivative, and the not always original. If we do not, then (like devolution or the London mayoral election) the “poetry revival” will look increasingly like an exercise in disenfranchisement disguised as a widening of the franchise.

     Poetry is a community, inhabited by everyone who has ever tried to write it. Forget Premier League football. If you want to promote poetry in terms of sport, I suggest that half-marathon running is a rather more useful metaphor. Every year over 40,000 people take part in the Great North Run. At the front there are a handful of élite athletes competing for a place at the Olympics. But not far behind them are tens of thousands of people who are running for almost as many reasons – to beat their personal best time, to improve on last year’s time, to support a mate, to win a bet, to prove something to themselves, to impress friends or family, to lose weight, to raise money for charity, to get fit, to be as good as they can be. For most it is enough just to take part. You don’t have to be fast or fit or clever or good-looking or well-educated to have a go, just as you don’t have to want to win the Nobel Prize to start writing. Half-marathon running, like writing poetry, is a naturally democratic activity. It is about participating, not just watching. You don’t need any qualifications to enter, no one is bothered about the medals, and the Olympians at the front don’t mind sharing the day with the rest of us. Maybe it’s time more professional poets joined in.