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

1. I don't find it possible to generalize about (a), but can think only in terms of individual poets. The deaths of Louis MacNeice and Sylvia Plath towards the beginning of the decade silenced two poets who were growing and changing all the time: Plath has become a cult-figure, MacNeice isn't much written about but is still undoubtedly read and admired. From the living, four books stand out: Larkin's Whitsun Weddings, Peter Porter's The Last of England, Geoffrey Hill's Mercian Hymns and Douglas Dunn's Terry Street. Roy Fuller, whose Collected Poems were published 10 years ago, is someone whose reputation I have been very glad to see grow. Among younger poets, the ones who seem to me to be developing most strongly are John Fuller, Michael Longley and James Fenton.

So much for the form-book, or the 'encouraging features'. The discouraging features are pretty well what they were 10 years ago, though perhaps there are more of them, and more of them getting into print: the let-it-all-hang-out (or Children of Albion) school is clearly a more baleful influence than the how-much-angst-on-the-head-of-a-pin? (or Review) school, but I'm not happy about either. The large-scale Nuremburg Rally-type poetry reading seems to have come and gone. Nonsenses of the tape-enthusiast sort seem fitfully to continue, though no one has improved on or extended the kind of thing Bob Cobbing was doing entertainingly enough at least 10 years ago. Concrete poetry, shaped poetry, fooling about with typography and layout, are taken less seriously than they were. The passing of all these fashions is encouraging. What is really depressing is the general state of poetry reviewing. Of course there are exceptions; but 10 years ago there were, pre-eminently, Alvarez and P. N. Furbank. Today, neither has a regular platform, nor do they want one. With Alvarez, for all his narrowness and dismissiveness, at least you knew where you were. Furbank was the best consistent reviewer of verse I have come across: very intelligent, sympathetic, fairminded, and unafraid of reputations. No one quite carries that sort of weight nowadays, and some of the reviewing that gets into the professional papers (as well as the little magazines) is a disgrace: slovenly and ingratiating, or cheap and nasty.

2. I hope (doubtfully), rather than predict, that poetry will be seen as an art that is chiefly concerned with saying things—a variety of things—that are interesting and true, and with saying them as memorably and with as much precision as possible. This will partly depend on editors, publishers and reviewers, but more on teachers: for every potential poet who is choked in the schoolroom by unimaginative formal teaching ('Write a prose paraphrase in not more than 50 words of O Rose thou art sick'), there must be a dozen who are given false and grandiose notions of a vocation by sloppy encouragement of 'creativity'. No one should emerge from school with the idea that writing poetry is easy, or that it is primarily `self-expression'.