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

But I just want the effortless
mode - to sketch, scratch and
scrape idly using another layer
of attention.
But I don't want this just to be
about the self-consciousness of
writing. I want it to attempt to
inaugurate a new discourse that
flirts with and bends its strait
relations into something else.
To catch thought's pace at formed
Speed (Douglas Oliver). But allow the range in:
where it is sung where it is spoken.

Poetry is the memory of language (Jacques Roubaud).

It is a question of articulation, but
as has happened so much before, the changes
can't simply be forced, I can only go on
from where I am. Witold Gombrowicz:
'The task is not to solve problems, but
only to pose them so that they attract general
attention and find their way to people. There
they will be ordered and somehow civilised'.
John Wieners as a poet of the relationship between
self and other (lover): you can talk about your
relationship and talk about the world.
Gombrowicz on Zeromski (Polish C20th interwar poet):
'Love lyricism is only superficially individual,
this state of the soul results from submitting oneself
to the species: the species inflicts violence on
a person in love and there is no significant difference
between the soldier dying for his homeland
and the lover who risks his life to possess his beloved.
Both fulfil a call that is more important
than anything personal'.

1968

What I want is a patient acknowledgement
of immaturity. The things I assume are clear
are not necessarily. The things I assume
are simple are not necessarily. Writing against
loss of experience, memory, one's self.
Becoming what you read/write in order to understand it -
Assimilating it into your body. Writing is self.
Writing as mediating between self and world.
Writing as expression of self in world.
The dream where I was employed in censoring political
Poems by editing them. The edits actually improved
the poems but neutralised their political subtexts.
Body must become the thought or intention (Merleau-Ponty).
It's whether you feel the knowledge inside
you as part of your body - or does your sense of
self consist of other internal objects. Against
writing as simulacra, imitation of surface. Poetry
a shadow reality accentuating and counterpointing
reality - making parts of it more visible (Confucius).
The remaining ingredient is transformation.

Mini-statement (cash point advice slip):

THAT POETRY ENTERS THE BODY
AS LANGUAGE. THAT LANGUAGE
HELPS SHAPE AND FORM IDENTITY.
THAT THIS CONJUNCTION BETWEEN
BODY AND IDENTITY IS ENTRY INTO
THE POLITICAL. THAT THE POLITICAL
IS THAT WHICH RELATES INDIVIDUAL
TO INDIVIDUAL, ALWAYS ARRIVING
AT MORE THAN THE SUM
OF ITS PARTS. THE POET
AS PATTERNER OF LANGUAGE
BEYOND AND INCLUDING ITS
NORMATIVE PATTERNS OF
SUSTAINED USE EVINCES THE
TRANSFORMATION FROM BODY
INTO TEXT; IMPLICATING IDENTITY
AND POLITICS.

THE MOST EFFECTIVE MEANS OF
THIS PATTERNING CONTINUE TO BE
THOSE THAT GENERATE/ANIMATE A
TENSION WITHIN FORM-CONTENT
BETWEEN REPEATED ELEMENTS ON
VARIOUS LEVELS OF LANGUAGE:
SEMIOTIC, SEMANTIC, SYNTACTICAL,
PHONOLOGICAL, PHONETIC, MORPHEMIC.
THIS TENSION IS THE DEFINING
EMOTIONAL TONE OF BEING AS
IT STRUGGLES TO ORIENT ITSELF
IN THE FLUX BETWEEN PEOPLE AND WITHIN
ITSELF.
(Celan: 'already-no-more' versus the 'still here')

Geraldine Monk:
'Poetry can be seen as a way of confronting memory in order to actively control that continuity [of memory, of self]. With poetry, language is distorted or enhanced to create new memory fields. We produce something outside our given world, so for a duration we are not observing but creating - momentarily we become the 'performer' rather than the 'audience'.

Poetry as dialogue between self and world - visible and invisible aspects.
The veil - I knew one who lifted it (Shelley)
(the difference between being really aware of emotions in present and the norm of everyday life of chasing unreal things)

feelings as how we judge the significance of anything intellectual

Pound's melopoeia: 'inducing emotional correlations by the sound and rhythm of the speech'/form as intellectual-emotional complex

Wordsworth 'emotion recollected in tranquillity' - so can negotiate
extremes of feeling

Frank O'Hara 'In Memory of My Feelings'

The resistance of the world enters my body

Feeling as a kind of thinking

Descartes describing imagination as 'simply contemplating the shape or image of a corporeal thing'

Objects contain the infinite (Claude Royet-Journaud)

HISTORY OF ART

The tree that grew through
The railing has now been cut
A lump remains: suspended

DREAM POEM

Closely they riddled
Off the Albion leading
The four deceit the bar
Seven metres my wooden
Head to knock against

Looking at old photos, the mechanical eye is extraordinary for recording things I didn't see - a simple snap seems to contain the secret of the universe:

A view from a pension
Window; a patch of bare

Earth, some shrubs, a chain
Link fence, beyond things grow

In ordered rows, a gable to
The right branches spread out

Sheds to the left, a green
House, houses in the distance

but when its gaze is directed at me it feels that there is a dangerous
difference between how it has objectified my past self vis-à-vis my own memory - there is a kind of confusion between subjectivity and objectivity which seems to make my existence in the present disturbingly arbitrary

rhyme the same in the different - carried by sound

thinking with the things as they exist (Zukofsky)
reading other's work to get closer to my own

Gombrowicz: unmasking becomes a mask

When I hurt my knee on my first night in Poland I didn't know what
language I'd been hurt in

To have that spontaneity, freedom to take pleasure in creating
spontaneously and use it to bypass rational thought, but surely I need
both and at different times for different ends

"'Your trouble is that you're overeducated for your natural intelligence"' (Michael Haslam) 'I found myself dull self protectively' (John Wilkinson)

Defending I vs losing I
Higher sphere vs lower sphere
Honesty vs dishonesty
Unmasking vs masking (making)
Difficulty vs ease
Spontaneity vs persistence
Knowing vs not-knowing

Cultivating memory as civic duty (Geoffrey Hill)

How much can you discard in writing?

Keston Sutherland:
'to make the intrinsic bathos of ideas seem suddenly alien. I want poetry not to be like reality, but to be as impossible as reality'.

Mary Wollstonecraft: 'we reason deeply, when we forcibly feel' (but a history behind and around this statement - not easily applied to now. Keston on language as fabric of history itself)

'Innumerable evils still remain, it is true, to afflict the humane investigator, and hurry the benevolent reformer into a labyrinth of error, who aims at destroying prejudices quickly which only time can root out, as the public opinion becomes subject to reason. An ardent affection for the human race makes enthusiastic characters eager to produce alteration in laws and governments prematurely. To render them useful and permanent, they must be the growth of each particular soil, and the gradual fruit of the ripening understanding of the nation, matured by time, not forced by an unnatural fermentation.' (Wollstonecraft, A Short Residence in Sweden)

Wordsworth:

                          ... a register
Of permanent relations ...
manifold distinctions (difference
Perceived in things where to the common eye
No difference is)

(Two Part Prelude 11. 341-350)

Just before, I was creating a feeling in myself of relief of the ‘that wasn’t so bad’ order — as if recalling the feeling from memory by this trigger-statement. As I drew nearer, I felt hyper-aware of my fate, anxious of my proximity to the event in time and its inevitability as almost something I couldn’t avoid, inexorably drawn toward it. I had a sensation of the future so clearly foreseen, anticipated and close, that it somehow shaded into the present: a kind of suspension. Later 1 saw an old man standing on Church Street, very white
hair and pale face, staring open-mouthed at something — as if he was looking at a memory before him. I imagined that I might have seen a ghost of my future self looking back at my own past.

The memory of a poem versus the poem itself — an ideal version of it — perhaps the memory of the poem before it was written

from ‘Rescale’:

The longest possible take possible vision
Take tenses between rush to verbal take
Between rush to plastic take on whole
Reception hold against production hold
Impose will to tame holding near role
Or far from the hold made for each
Other made for another one to hold.

* * *

It doesn’t hurt to play in
other fields a while for

a short heart rank shank
collects a mass at the end

whether you like it or not
— it’s the hill that’s all

the trick is flicking up a basket
lid of wicker racks

rather than despising every
song you sing

Intention vs non-intention
Control vs chance
Plan vs spontaneity
Reason/intelligence vs intuition
Unity/coherence vs fragmentation
Simplicity vs complexity

no remedy for all that trust (Gombrowicz)

Thinking about the issues raised negotiated by last poem (wicker basket) of language of sensual immersion vs direct communication. It specifies how to write but not what to write. However, the language of social (sic) ‘sensual immersion’ is directed towards the world/nature, descriptive of a response to it and descriptive of it. Also a sense in which ‘nature’ in broadest sense is the place in which all intellectual problems can be solved — the world is much more complex than anything that can be written — or at any rate given representation, symbolised, metaphorised. This as opposed to the language of direct address — that which is perhaps approaching an inner reality, emotional reality — in relation to other people that gives the work an ‘inside’. That both languages are in dialogue, contact, argument with each other — neither sufficient for the job on its own. I want both, I’m drawn to both. Setting up a dialectic between nature and language, outer and inner which is already false, collapsed, deconstructed (as dialectic is) but at any rate this distinction between meaning-foci of each discourse does suggest ways of continuing — reading might fuel the first and living the second — tho’ a crude impossible distinction. A language of the world a language of the self. Language of the world-in-the-self; language of the self-in-the-world.

Nature — language
     |                  |
Reason — emotions

When I’m walking in the forest I feel constantly compelled to look back over my shoulder, register, record, fix my position, as if in slow composition of a line. But does this miss some more direct, less controlled contact with the environment?

Formlessness seeking form seeking formlessness

Earlier on walk with C — a desire to be acknowledged, watched but not negotiated with [like performing poetry?]. When walking: meditating and finding symbols for inner states (cf. Wordsworth). C otherwise introspecting without symbols — suggests two different languages (and gendered ones at that). One projects inner reality onto outer, the other reflects on inner reality. One desires silent audience, the other privacy. In the first one disavows responsibility, in the latter responsibility is taken.

Link with maturity/immaturity: childish adult, adult child

Against the shapeless present (Miles Champion)
Caress shapeless moments (Lorna Sage)

Dream of leading someone who was blind and describing the world to her — was she also me? She was also me.

After Wieners’ ‘Desperation’

In what researched race, or market
the winner gives something
for what nothing defeated satisfaction?

sore loser slid
down what escape, fomenting resolution
spills lethal injection

for what lint-wrapped lover,
what short aspiration
released suitors in

hot pursuit, for the smug bust?
Vicious, hung-over, robbed
of sleep; lent divisions

unleash male violence

Poetry as a way of imagining revisiting the dead, if not reclaiming them
(Duncan Wu)

Is style something which emerges out of the materiality of the body’s
emotional functions as it interacts with the sound of language?

Douglas Oliver:
‘In verse organised by stress, this mental beat which we can tap with a finger, slips through our minds as the smallest, untrappable, experience of artistic form... a notional instant in our memory seems a present moment brimming over with a mental content... The trick makes the instant glide into duration... thought and emotion stand in relation to each other rather like the instant of stress and the flow of duration respectively. To hit the beat most exactly the poet follows the flow of aesthetic feeling: the way into the
experience of the gliding instant is to live the flow most vividly, for that is how the instant becomes filled with content, filled with duration... Emotion’s relation to time or to vision… emotions are both recognised and interfered with by thought... emotions in poetry differ from those in real life’

Robert Creeley quoted in Norma Cole:
‘Poems have always had this nature of revelation for me, becoming apparently objective manifestations of feelings and thoughts otherwise inaccessible.’

When we let the other speak we are listening to ourselves