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

My first exposure to poetry, as far as I can recall, came through my grandfather’s habit of reading things like the rhymed tales of the Rupert Bear annual to me as a child, and the nonsense verses in the books of Dr Seuss. The thought of One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish can still evoke the disturbing shiver caused in me by a picture showing a monster in a huge glass bottle being carried up a rickety flight of stairs at night. Then there was my father singing ‘Worms’ in the car on family outings, a song I assumed he’d made up himself until my early twenties, when I heard Shane MacGowan’s version at the end of a Pogues album, accompanied by a coffin-creak backing track:

The worms crawl in and the worms crawl out
The ones that crawl in are lean and thin
The ones that crawl out are fat and stout
Your eyes fall in and your teeth fall out
Your brains come tumbling down your snout
Be merry, my friends, be merry…

   With those precedents in mind, it’s not entirely surprising that when in my teens I picked up a book on Surrealist painters, attracted by the Magritte image of shoes metamorphosing into feet on the dust wrapper (a book club edition of Robert Short’s Dada & Surrealism, if memory serves) I was primed to be receptive not just to the illustrations, but the brief snippets and descriptions of poems, manifestos and writings by Paul Eluard, Louis Aragon and Andre Breton that punctuated the text.

   The collages of Max Ernst and the warped landscapes of prime Salvador Dali touched a nerve that tingles to this day, and the imagery of Victor Brauner or Dorothea Tanning (a painting by Tanning featured on the back cover of the same book, much to the discomfort of my mother) seemed entirely of a piece with the poems and automatic writings tantalisingly quoted from back issues of Surrealist periodicals.  That book, along with another popular introduction to the paintings became like pebbles splashing down into a pool, one after the other, sending out ripples in all directions at once. I was thirteen years old, and those books probably led directly to my present interest in writing and its possibilities.

   The surrealists prized Lewis Carroll, so the Children’s Library Of Classics hardback that featured his Alice books (in a series that also included Call Of The Wild, The Swiss Family Robinson and Little Women) was recovered from a dusty shelf and read for the first time. Max Ernst mentioned William Blake so I read, and mostly failed to understand, William Blake’s prophetic books. I began to buy the cheap Penguin anthologies that occasionally appeared at jumble sales for a few pence a time, and as the works of Benjamin Péret and André Breton I really wanted were not exactly accessible through the public libraries of West Wales in 1978, I began to devour whatever poetry I could find that gave off the same feeling, even if doing so amounted to wilful misreading much of the time.

   Penguin selections from the works of Gunter Grass, Hans Arp, Kurt Schwitters, Paul Klee and Vasko Popa turned up. A thick American collection of translated poetry from around the world, divided by country, had poems that I read so many times the book’s brittle spine fell apart, adding Mayakovsky, Rilke, Trakl, Gottfried Benn and many others to the list of writers I wanted to read more of. A copy of Edward Lucie Smith’s British Poetry Since 1945, published in 1970 and long outdated even in 1978, introduced me to Basil Bunting and Ted Hughes, Lee Harwood, Paul Evans and David Gascoyne. It came from a table at a church hall selling home-made jam, knitted toilet roll covers in the shape of Bo Peep and battered copies of Norah Lofts and Barbara Cartland novels. How it got there I’ll never know, but I’m glad it did.

   The discoveries were randomised, as though I were constructing the canon in the same way as a bingo caller might try to fathom the correct sequencing of numbers by drawing the balls from a machine and, well…guessing. This meant reputations were levelled, obscurities playing on a level field with acknowledged Greats, and the weight of tradition and literary history only made itself apparent much later in the process. For this reason, a Penguin Modern Poets volume featuring the work of D.M.Black could became a major influence, while W.H. Auden would go unread for many more years. An anthology in which poets like Wilfred Owen, TS Eliot and Geoffrey Hill were introduced with a couple of biographical paragraphs, a photograph and a handful of poems each helped to sketch in a few threads of order to the erratic reading I was doing, but that order never contained poetry.

   I should add that even as I read all this, I continued to indulge older habits too. I devoured my grandfather’s collection of Nick Carter paperbacks and copies of 2000AD comic. I was particularly taken by a story whose title I forget, but which concerned telepathic twins embroiled in an intergalactic war of some kind, a narrative that in hindsight I realise was probably lifted wholesale from the works of Philip K Dick and Kurt Vonnegut. I read James Joyce’s Ulysses, as much because I had a crush on a hippy-ish older girl at my school named Joyce than for any better reason, and it still strikes me that if any single work is tailored to attract a 14 year old boy to literature, the one that features Molly Bloom’s monologue, unexpurgated, is unlikely to be surpassed.

   The way things were absorbed and rated was unpredictable and haphazard. Pete Winslow’s City Lights chapbook A Daisy In The Memory Of a Shark was bought solely because it had a Magritte painting on its cover, but the poems it contained came to occupy a hugely important place in my personal canon. Gerard Malanga’s book of ‘death poems’ based on Andy Warhol’s car crash and electric chair paintings was bought because it related to the Velvet Underground and the 60s pop-culture imagery I was increasingly attracted to, but proved to be another important influence. Studied thoroughly, its own clumsiness was clumsily imitated in some of my own earliest attempts to write.

   This reading was never taking place in isolation, of course. A large book of photographs of experimental Underground Architecture from the local library presented a world of colour-saturated, Verner Panton-furnished rooms that were presumably a logical next step for domestic buildings in 1967 but seemed inexplicably exotic a decade later. A book on experimental film and animation, Gene Youngblood’s 1968 Expanded Cinema, was full of gnomic pronouncements by thinkers like Marshall McLuhan and R. Buckminster Fuller, and my copy became so well thumbed that, like the translation anthology and many other paperbacks before it, the binding eventually fell apart. Quite by chance, I recently found a replacement and am pleased to report it remains as intriguingly of and ahead of its time as it seemed in 1979.

   A book about the West Coast music scene added records to my list of interests, the connections between poetry, Surrealism, Lewis Carroll, the music being played on the radio - by then, Ian Dury, Chic, The B52s - were being reinforced by songs like ‘White Rabbit’, or albums like Country Joe And The Fish’s Electric Music For Mind & Body, with its peculiar blend of imagery and sounds. The strange atmospheres created by Love’s Forever Changes and Pink Floyd’s Piper At The Gates Of Dawn, seemed continuous with the more challenging poetry I was reading, while the pop poets of The Mersey Sound and Children Of Albion anthologies seemed tame and one-dimensional next to the pop they claimed to be inspired by.

   Much of this strange merging of cultural reference points was due to the time lag effect of buying books and music largely from jumble sales and boxes in local hardware shops, a habit that continues even now. Just as literary history became mangled on my bookshelves, the hierarchies of youth culture were dissolved in the quest for new things to hear. Abba’s ‘Dancing Queen’ sat with Blondie’s ‘Rip Her To Shreds’, ‘Too Much Too Young’ with my Dad’s collection of crackly Shadows singles, my mum’s Motown records, comedy songs by The Goodies and Geoff Love playing orchestral versions of music from James Bond movies. All of it became grist for the mill of my evolving taste.

   These records sound-tracked my first attempts at writing. I distinctly recall a junk shop copy of Iron Butterfly’s Inna Gadda Da Vida playing on a hand-me-down Bush stereo while I laboriously numbered the key words in one of those lavish hardbacks published by the Hare Krishnas from 1 – 6, then threw dice to determine their order in a sentence, adding connecting words to make nonsensical poems using the surrealist chance procedures I’d read about elsewhere. As with chronology and literary history, this was the reverse of what I now understand to be the approved way of working, where learning traditional forms leads only later to the skills needed for experiment. It’s certainly true that those exercises (copies are thankfully long lost, but the memory can sometimes be cruelly vivid) were not impressive, but I suppose it’s fair to say that they led eventually to my own poems, and the editor’s chair at Staple. Indeed, it’s probably the case that I was still throwing dice and striving to achieve an image as arresting as Mayakovsky’s self portrait as “a cloud in trousers” when the first issue of Staple appeared, without my knowledge, back in 1982.

  The point of going into all this largely peripheral detail is to wonder how common this kind of entry to poetry is. Reports on reading habits and the promotion of literature seem rarely to acknowledge that readers’ interests may not neatly correspond to approved maps, and many of us simply wander blindly, absorbing anything that crosses our path, blundering along unknown, perhaps even illusory roads of our own making. In my case the starting point was random, working from there to the contemporary, then back again, with little sense of canon or reputation, drawing no distinction between poetry as an effect in other mediums - painting, film, photography and music, mostly – and as a medium with its own history and specific context. I read Basil Bunting and Edward Brathwaite before reaching Ezra Pound; Peter Redgrove and Geoffrey Hill before TS Eliot, and only arrived later still at the Metaphysicals, Romantics and Elizabethans. Many of the revered names on the University syllabus are still to lodge more than a single anthology piece in my personal memory bank.

   Of course, there were poems taught at school, but it was a close run thing as to whether this wasn’t more of a hindrance than a help in bringing me round to reading in later life. The plays of Shakespeare were studied, but despite my already voracious appetite for words, I can safely say that it wasn’t until I visited a friend, who decided we should go and see a performance of Webster’s The Duchess Of Malfi in the early eighties, that anything managed to crack the deafness that endless nit-picking afternoons in English classes with Macbeth and Romeo & Juliet had left in their wake. Not the occasional BBC TV or afternoon theatre production shown when I did A-levels, not the constant insistence of everyone that Shakespeare was the greatest writer ever to have lived, and not staring blankly at the twin columns of insurance-form small print in the library’s doorstop-sized Complete Works.

   But Webster’s play was a revelation that night, a circus of the macabre driven by an alien language that seemed entirely alive – the only thing left living as the curtain fell over the mountains of bodies onstage. Seeing it led me back to Shakespeare by way of Marlowe, putting his language back into three dimensions and leaving me puzzled that we had never been told about this on those tedious afternoons plodding through iambic pentameter and the difference between metaphor and simile, blank verse and heroic couplets. Wherever the language threatened to stir - in Mercutio’s lewdly erotic ‘Queen Mab’ speech, for example, or the darkest, goriest parts of Macbeth - the prudish teacher insisted the passage would not come up in the exam and quickly turned the page. No wonder, then, that many stop at Quentin Tarantino’s recent Jacobean reinvention, Reservoir Dogs, or learn Martin Scorsese’s Goodfellas and Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather by heart instead of their literary models.

   I felt the same when I discovered Richard Crashaw’s extraordinary ‘The Weeper’ many years later, when I read Aime Cesaire’s Notebook Of A Return To The Native Land, Christopher Okigbo’s poems in The Penguin Book of Modern African Poetry, Thomas Lovell Beddoes’ Death’s Jest Book and James Thomson (BV)’s City Of Dreadful Night in whatever source those peculiar works were first found. Each in its time reinforced my belief that poetry is, for those who can access it, something of genuine but elusive value: a mind-expanding substance – and yes, more literal versions of those figure in the above story too. But perhaps it is the question of access that I hope the above ramblings bring into focus. The books that influenced me were not studied or promoted, but simply around, circulating in unlikely places, awaiting the receptive mind I eventually brought to them.

   Which brings me, by the same circuitous route I took to get here, to this, my first issue of Staple. It’s inevitable that the magazine will reflect the character of its editor, so it seems only fair to offer some account of how that character, such as it is, has been formed. The main aim over the next few years is to build on the magazine’s solid foundations, and above all get it out into the world, where receptive minds can find it, and decide for themselves whether to read or move on. As critics of Adrian Mitchell’s famous dictum point out, ‘most people ignore most poetry because most poetry ignores most people’ assumes that readers have made a conscious decision. In truth, you might as well add that the poor clearly don’t like money and desert nomads can’t be doing with grass.

   The £9 poetry paperback in some cramped corner of a multi-floor bookshop, with little or no advertising and promotion, and no reviews likely to be seen by readers outside the existing poetry audience, is now a norm. Magazines like Staple survive primarily because of subscribers and subsidy, much as visual art survived only on a tiny core audience and Arts Council funding as recently as the 1980s. I remember going to the Tate Gallery and having a Jean Tinguely or Max Ernst retrospective pretty much to myself, and we should remember that the situation of today’s crowded contemporary art galleries in 1981 wasn’t so different to that of poetry and short story events today.

   The wisdom of marketing remains that nobody wants poetry, literary fiction, folk music, jazz or old-fashioned stories about boy wizards until they do, at which point such things are heavily promoted, widely reviewed and stocked in all the places from where they were previously absent. In short, it becomes easier to find and hear them, thus initiating a positive rather than negative spiral of demand. The curtailment of backlist fiction stock in shops and libraries, and price inflation on books that fall outside the bestseller lists and ‘three for two’ tables makes it increasingly unlikely that readers will find their way to unfamiliar titles without big advertising budgets behind them. As predicted, the scrapping of the Net Book Agreement has led to savage cuts and low margins on bestsellers as backlist prices rise to plug the gap, leaving little or no space on the browsing shelves for magazines like the one you hold in your hands.

   Accessibility has come, in all the arts, to mean ‘making palatable’, an idea that assumes readers and audiences can only appreciate work that reinforces existing tastes and prejudices, and reflects experiences already understood and known. It’s always seemed to me that this, intentionally or otherwise, is a recipe for the removal of the purpose of art from the arts, the value of which is that art immerses readers and audiences in other worlds, new perspectives, accounts of experience that open portals into unknown territory. A work of art is not a mirror, but a door. Accessibility as an issue about content and style has been much debated, but less is said about accessibility as an issue of the mere physical presence of books in places where readers might find them without knowing the titles in advance.

   This magazine was given its own title over twenty-five years ago by the poet Roy Fisher, who remarked that a small press was something that ‘put poems on either side of a staple’. It’s been many years since Staple contained any actual staples, so these days I prefer to think of it in terms of what a staple does. It connects things, brings a kind of order to the chaos of a pile of loose papers, and I hope the magazine will reflect its title in this sense. This issue was built around the observation that much of the most interesting writing today rejects particular categories and creates its own genres: poems create miniature narratives, fiction assumes the shape of an essay, stories work towards final paragraphs that have poetic resonance rather than plot resolution. A fine example of this trend towards a new kind of creative writing, Strange Attractor, is reviewed in this issue, and Loughborough based author Jonathan Taylor’s non-fiction account of his father’s Parkinson’s disease – also reviewed here – is another.

   For our own part, we include Andrea Roe’s artworks and photographs alongside the written works, and these, ranging from Mimi Khalvati’s oblique contemporary parables to Simon Withers and Chris Lewis-Jones’ tall tale of a Nottingham lace worker finding his way to Dadaist Zurich during the First World War, from Peter Porter’s erudite blend of history, autobiography and traditional form to John Barnie’s intriguing stanzas - folded by enjambment like shirts in a cupboard in order to heighten our sense of how things and thoughts splice and connect – hopefully mean that the work in this issue stretches traditional ideas while remaining alert to the needs of its readers. There are stories of childhood and relationships, poems on ageing, falling out of love, petty crime, quiet reflections and raucous street life. The forms used range from rhymed sonnets to emails, prose poems to clear lyrics, the settings from the modernist city of Oskar Baum’s ‘Riffraff’, first published in Prague in 1919, to the distant galaxy of A.C. Bevan’s ‘BPM 37093 (After Whitman)’ and Douglas Houston’s fictionalised account of a strange meeting with Philip Larkin while attending Hull University as a postgraduate student.

   I hope you will be as intrigued, surprised and entertained by it all as I’ve been while putting this first selection together.