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

By the time this issue of the magazine is published the new Poet Laureate will have been chosen - unless the government, in crisis, prevails upon Andrew Motion to continue in post. There’s not been much public debate about the changeover - too much else going on, possibly - but someone sent, ‘The 21st Century Needs a Milton’, an A.N. Wilson article from the Daily Telegraph, to this editor’s desk. The article is not kind to Andrew, claiming that he’s good at ‘self promotion, but not at poetry’. Poets, Wilson says, ‘must steep themselves in the old stories, the old mythologies, the old culture’. Well, as well as being able to ride a horse, Motion had a respectable academic career behind him before he became Laureate - surely he’d have had to read some of that old stuff on the way?

What Wilson seems to be doing is grumble about a kind of poetry, or a kind of poet. He approves of a number of dead poets - Homer, the Beowulf poet, Milton, Eliot, Yeats, even Ted Hughes - but, ‘the Motions and the Duffys seem to think that poetry is a form of self-promotion or talk-therapy,’ and they’ve ‘abandoned the quest for immortal fame in favour of the yearning for publicity’. It’s possible that ‘immortal fame’, ‘self promotion’ and ‘publicity’ may inhabit the same field, but no matter. The important point is that A.N. Wilson is ignoring Andrew Motion’s considerable achievement as Laureate.

He instigated the Poetry Archive - readers of this magazine will be pleased to hear that this is soon going to include Peter Scupham’s voice. OK, it’s a side show, but somewhat wonderful and worth every penny. More significantly Andrew put a time limit on the job, removing it from the little grace and favour cloud it had sat upon. Being Laureate is now work. There are tasks to be done beyond scribbling the odd ode. We expect the poet to bring poetry, as much as is possible, into the foreground of national cultural life.

So, yes, he did tour ‘the country and the local radio stations talking about himself and reading.’ He drew a crowd. Could be seen for an hour or so after an event diligently signing books and chatting politely to queues of people - money in the bank maybe, but also by his presence, by the fact that he was some kind of celebrity, he made a statement in favour of words and of writing being useful tools for attempting to make sense of experience, life, this coal-scuttle of a universe. A great many people wrote to or met Andrew Motion and, no matter whether they read his work or what they thought of it, they encountered someone who was not uncomfortable with the label ‘Poet’. And that matters. Maybe Wilson could concede that both he and Motion care about words, about literacy, and, as both make their livings from it, recognise an alliance?

The assertion that ‘poetry is a form of self promotion or talk therapy’ has to be attended to. Particularly as it resonates with themes in a number of letters that have arrived over the past year at The Rialto. These, often extremely well written epistles - at least one of which was marked ‘Strictly Not For Publication’- are concerned to point out that the pronoun ‘I’ appears too frequently in poems in the magazine. They also go on about Creative Writing courses and the work produced, or perceived as being produced, by participants in such endeavours. Andrew Motion, by the bye, as well as being attractive to women, teaches Creative Writing, currently at Royal Holloway, London.

A quick check of this issue finds 28 poems with the offending pronoun: a flick through the Contributors pages shows eight poets (about the same number as in the last issue) admitting to being in the Creative Writing industry, either as students or as teachers. So what? Maybe, but? The glib way through is to say that ‘write about what you know’ is one of the Creative Writing Schools’ principal maxims - hence all the I’s. But let’s scratch the surface a little. It’s a truism that the Romantic school wrote in reaction to the Augustan poets. However Pope’s

Know thyself, presume not God to scan,
The proper study of mankind is man
(An Essay on Man Ep ii line 1-2)

is godparent to Wordsworth’s Prelude, his autobiographical study of ‘the growth and development of a poet’s mind’. This poem, largely written in the first decade of the nineteenth century, didn’t appear until 1850, a delay longer than that between Darwin’s voyage on H.M.S. Beagle and the publication of The Origins. Another great poem of that century, also a poem a long time gestating, Tennyson’s In Memoriam, was published in 1850. And in 1855 in America the first edition of Whitman’s Leaves of Grass the centrepiece of which is ‘Song of Myself ’appeared in 1855. These works mark a shift in the ‘how’ of poetry. The varieties of human experience have always been the concern of poetry - Sir Gawain, for example, is involved in myths and archetypes, and he has to think about his behaviour when his hostess comes on to him. But in these poems of the 1850’s the shift to awareness of the poets’ internal processes is noticeably marked. The thoughts and feelings that a poet has about experiences, events, interactions with other persons (or characters) are written about very much more directly, without props. The relationship with the reader becomes more intimate: poetry shows an interest in psychology. (1)

I sit within a helmless bark,
And with my heart I muse and say:

O heart, how fares it with thee now....

In Memoriam IV lines 3-5

And here’s Hughes in Birthday Letters

If I had paid that pound and turned back
To you, with that armful of fox -

If I had grasped that whatever comes with a fox
Is what tests a marriage and proves it a marriage -
I would not have failed the test. Would you have failed it?
But I failed. Our marriage had failed.

Birthday Letters, ‘Epiphany’ lines 62 -67

This poetry is dialogic, it works with feelings and it works face to face, with the reader and with the Thou and I in the poem. Skipping 150 years from Tennyson to Ted Hughes without mentioning T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound and W.B. Yeats might be considered cheeky. Most people connect Eliot to ‘TheWaste Land’. In this poem he constructs an idiosyncratic self-referential mythology - comparable to Yeats’ resurrection of such characters as Cuchulain and Great-bladdered Emer, and Ezra Pound’s hijacking of Dante’s moral high ground in The Cantos. This poetry, though magnificent, isn’t, in the end, as affective as, for example, T.S. Eliot’s, surprisingly neglected, ‘Four Quartets’, or W. B. Yeats ‘Among Schoolchildren’ or ‘The Circus Animal’s Desertion’ or Pound’s ‘Hugh Selwyn Mauberley’, where the poet’s presence as Ego, or narrator or ‘I’ is more starkly visible.

Persons unsympathetic to Creative Writing Courses prejudicially characterise them as being undertaken by dimity females in last century’s Laura Ashley, prone to spontaneous ejaculations about dead cats or dead mothers. Such poetry is written, and it is poetry, often moving and, at the very least from a phenomenological perspective, it is of interest. But you aren’t likely to get though a Creative Writing Degree without some acquaintance with Tasso and Ariosto, or the lost kingdom of Guge, or the pervasiveness of folk legends about the changeable hare and the trickster rabbit, or being able to hold a conversation with Elaine Showalter about the manifestation of male hysteria in the present financial crisis. True poets take their craft seriously.

This editorial began as a hail and farewell and big thank you to Andrew Motion for being a remarkable laureate. It’s wandered off a bit but at least egocentricity makes a change from the more usual complaint that what’s in The Rialto isn’t poetry but ‘chopped up prose’. As for the laureateship, it’s surprising that George Szirtes hasn’t been mentioned as a contender. He’s intellectually very respectable and a whizz at rhyme and metre - things that some, e.g., the Queen’s English Society, consider the sine qua non of poetry. But maybe they would disqualify George because he’s also an excellent CreativeWriting teacher. If the job’s allowed to go to someone outside of the literary establishment Lily Allen, currently delighting us with ‘The Fear’, could be a neat contender.

Apologies to Sydney Giffard for the typographical error in his poem on page 12 of the last issue.

And apologies to all readers for the late appearance of this issue. We’ve been in that dark place between applying for a grant and hearing whether the application has been successful. The Arts Council has said ‘Yes’.

The Editor

(1) Sigmund Freud was not born until 1856: however Jean-Martin Charcot qualified as an M.D. in 1853.