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

Dear Peter

     Thanks for the last The North, the most interesting so far, if only due to the ‘debate’ germinating, like one of this summer’s grassfires, burning at the roots as it were, in the essays you featured. A magazine genuinely takes off with the critical debate that it allows to take place, and I hope The North will do so openly. Apart from writing good poems, it is stimulating when poets contribute good criticism.

     So, I particularly enjoyed David Morley’s versions of Mandelstam, followed by his interesting remarks on choices faced by a poet writing in any language. Of course, Mandelstam chose to criticize Stalin whereas Mayakovsky developed a social realist style which put them at different poles. But both of their choices came from specific situations. (Mayakovsky was, after all, driven to suicide, and shouldn’t simply be seen as ‘irrelevant’.)

     It should also be remembered that Mayakovsky liked and appreciated Mandelstam’s early Acmeist verse. He was responsible for publishing the younger man’s work before 1917.

     Although Mayakovsky was a social realist (and would have claimed his working practice involved, above all, relevant choice of precise detail), he should not be dismissed automatically as a dogmatist:

     Poetry - all of it! -
          is a voyage into the unknown.
     Poetry
          is like mining for radium.
     The output of an ounce
          the labour of a year.
     For the sake of a single word
                            you must process
     Thousands of tons
          of verbal ore…

He wished for verse to be populist (heard not so much as read), and performed to audiences larger than any other poet has read 10 in human history. He has influenced Neruda, Holub, and many other ‘committed writers’, in their choice of subject matter and style.

     Of course, it is becoming fashionable to say that this scheme was Utopian, and foundered on its own state-sponsored dogma. However, it was an important historical moment with lasting effects.

     It is clear too, from Morley’s versions of Mandeslstam’s Voronezh poems (and also, surely from Ratushinskaya’s), that they were born from extreme, particular, historical situations which heightened their commitment to a particular method. The ironic contrast of this £tyle with Mandelstam’s past writing is the subject matter of these lines:

     I would sing like Dante, exhausted
     by the night before, the night to come.
     Say I’m the ghost of what I am.

To record the ‘essential truth’ requires a different approach to a reality which is increasingly hard to believe:

     I watched a log-pile turn into a village
     with the morning’s first ember.
     Nobody’s here to tell me it’s illusion.

A new reality is being built. He is the first, historical witness. The poetic fact is created directly from the situation he is in and conflicts with previous conceptions he may have had of his Dantesque, poetic role. He might have even admitted a spry smile at Brecht’s words, in his ‘Hollywood Elegies’, about the function of art in that place during the holocaust:

     Beneath the green pepper trees
     The musicians play the whore, two by two
     With the writers. Bach
     has written a Strumpet Voluntary. Dante wriggles
     His shrivelled bottom.

Or, is this dogma, or is it ‘essential truth’? All these words are borne on the coldest wind of course, but it is easy for us to forget that Adorno had written: ‘After Auschwitz there can’t be any poetry.’

     Poetry can no longer comfort, or be merely beautiful, Its impact is to wake us to those essential truths of our existence, those important, permanent themes. Very few poets have written sparely and unsentimentally about the Thatcherist holocaust of 1981 - 2, already forgotten, so well as one Welsh poet:

     On every corner there’s a bank
     where people file up outside
     to stick plastic cards into a wall.
     Vandalised churches gape, their assemblies
     dissolving into secular supermarkets.

     On Monday my father draws his pension
     to consume as little as possible.

Again, a new reality, witnessed with shuddering directness. Surely, verse at its very best claims its attention through waking its audience to a contemporary reality which can be shared because it is undoubtedly, essentially and urgently true? The best poets continue (as one writer has recently put it) ‘re-stating, in language that plays no coy, self-admiring games with literary artifice, but is cuttingly direct, the cliches re-pointed, the silences resonant…’ (Nigel Jenkins on John Tripp, pl0l in his book on the poet in the ‘Writers of Wales’ series, published by University of Wales Press)…

Very best regards

Andy