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

A poet should be able to find inspiration anywhere,’ said the tutor, ‘even in…’ - thrashing around for the most unlikely place possible – ‘a supermarket!’ I can’t remember who said it or where but I did wonder, at the time, why supermarkets should be thus singled out. Poets probably visit superstores more frequently than they do poetry circles: maybe once a week i.e. 52 times a year. Cf. Cannon Poets 12; literary festivals, say 4; Arvon course once in a lifetime. Surely, sometime, somewhere, something must rub off, even if only in the subconscious.

I was reminded of this while reading the Autumn 2004 edition of Poetry Wales, where I came across a wonderful poem by Samantha Wynne-Rydderch called ‘Final Fling’ on the subject of wedding present lists and set in Debenhams. All right, not strictly a supermarket but surely the location can be stretched to any high street multiple (they all look alike anyway). I then recalled preparing earlier in the year for a NPD programme on ‘Food’. The group (which included two fellow Cannon Poets) came across a number of poems on named outlets but decided we did not want to advertise – or reveal too much about our shopping/eating-out habits.

So, for better or worse, here are a few pickings to show that poets, while leading ordinary lives, are always on the lookout. That the writers are mainly urbanites is inevitable and who better to represent the genre than Birmingham poets laureate? Whether dancing ‘under the canopy / of Allied Carpets’ or standing ‘at the long mirror in C&A’, Roz Goddard is happy to recall the stores that were part of her growing up. Julie Boden tackles the Big One head on: ‘Tesco 911’ and ‘A Tesco Villanelle’, while a ‘Card from the Coffee Republic’ is not postmarked Kenya or Brazil.

Further afield, we find Maura Dooley happily snacking ‘Apple Pie in Pizzaland’ and Kathleen Jamie looking vainly for artesian wells ‘fathoms under Man at C&A’ (‘Fountain’). Elsewhere, Sophie Hannah – in one of my favourite poems - is vainly trying to buy her bloke a belated Christmas present ‘In Wokingham on Boxing Day at the Edinburgh Woollen Mill’ (title and refrain). By now, the discerning reader may have spotted something that, even in the 21stC, tells us about our shopping culture: where are the men? I have found it very difficult to balance up the gender contribution and have even had to call on such an old stager as John Betjeman (who managed to sneak a reference to Selfridge’s into Summoned By Bells).

Fortunately, Poetry Wales offers some redress: Markus Lloyd spots a fellow drinker: ‘the arse on him biteable in those Ciro Citterio trousers,’ in the bar where they are co-celebrating ‘The Big Four O’. Meanwhile, the subject of Philip Gross’s ‘Tryst’ is no lover of fast food but an apparent hit-man, enduring: ‘Five children, fissile from McDonald’s,’ as he awaits his victim. But, once again, is it left to the Birmingham laureates to come to the rescue? Yes, surely, for here comes Don Barnard, sunk deep in ‘Supermarket Blues.’ Which one? Why, all of them. And that should be that, except - what is it about C&A? Like Roz Goddard, Don Barnard can never pass a C&A; like Kathleen Jamie, even more, it has to be ‘Man at C&A’, though no well-seeking here, just trawling through the usual suspects - Klein, Benetton, Dior, Gucci and Hilfiger;  - in search of ‘The Emperor’s New Clothes’. The irony is, of course, that there is no longer a C&A in Birmingham or anywhere else in the UK. Which perhaps explains my experience, just before Christmas, in Trier, amid the twinkling lights and the glüewein, when a Saga busload of GB oldies was disgorged into Germany’s most ancient city and hopped-limped-and-slumped hell-bent for the C&A store behind me. I don’t know who they were but I can now guess what: they were poets.