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

1.(a) There are three features of the past decade of poetry which I find moderately encouraging.

The first of these might be called the rediscovery of the voice. I don't mean that there are no discouraging features about the possibility of endless egos treading the circuit, hardening their mannerisms, carefully unloading a poor man's rich man's pop lyricism which perhaps cannot really compete with pop. But the actual scene is kinder to our ideals than that. The Sixties saw a poetry-reading explosion where poets all over the country involved themselves with their contemporaries, had to communicate with them, had to learn the various tacts and adjustments and powers and controls of the speaking voice, had to understand that integrity and incompetence, after living in sin together for a long time, had agreed to a separation. For many young people (for example when poets have read in schools and colleges) it has been something of a revelation to be reminded that the 'voice' of poetry is as basic and potent as anything overlaying it.

A second feature could be said to flow from the first, though that is not its raison d'être. As more poetry is spoken in public by the author, more regional accents are heard, and more opportunity is naturally given to non-received-standard poets to develop an idiom of their own. Keats's Cockney and Wordsworth's Cumberland are largely forgotten, but Bunting's voice or Pickard's or Patten's or Alan Jackson's is not so likely to be, because it has become indelibly a part of the total effect of the poetry and has been heard and recorded. I see it as an encouraging feature that what London critics call 'the north' (though it is south to me) has been making its presence felt, and I feel it the more strongly because my own main interest as a poet is bound to centre on Scotland, and from there it will veer towards Voznesensky or Weores or Creeley or Gomringer just as often as to any poet living in the south of England.

I find a third encouraging feature in the fact that concrete poetry penetrated 'these shores' in 1962 and was followed by sound poetry, found poetry, and other manifestations of the questing spirit. No one seems to like the term avant-garde, but without an avant-garde we are poor creatures after all. In addition, both visual poetry and sound poetry can give much joy.

(b) I don't propose to take up too much space with 'discouraging features', as I have always preferred positives to negatives. But one thing I would say: British poetry reviewers seem in recent years to have become dangerously parochialized and deintellectualized. Work which is highly original and hard to categorize, especially when it is experimental in its use of language, or which is obviously influenced from America or the Continent, or which is delicate or humorous or uses fantasy, tends to get short shrift—a few dismissive remarks at the end of a review which will usually give the lion's space to some piece of 'strong' expressionism or 'realistic' comments on experience. For every thousand words on Ted Hughes or Seamus Heaney you will be lucky to find a hundred on Roy Fisher or Ian Hamilton Finlay. This, of course, may genuinely reflect what the majority of reviewers/critics feel about the relative importance of these poets, but I doubt whether such preferences are based on a serious attempt to come to grips with the relegated works. Expressionism—okay; impressionism —m'm; constructivism—boo; surrealism—bah. This seems to be the general hierarchy at the moment, and no one standing back and looking at it could say it was an entirely healthy situation.

2. I would hope to see an extension of the positive features mentioned above, and a correction of the negative ones. Apart from that, I would welcome a variety of things: poems which the author refused to have printed anywhere and which must therefore make their way orally or through the recording media; poems of some substance which used ideas in a clearly structural way and gave the pleasure of following an argument or disquisition (we have reacted too far against belief in such poetry); poems which will record our time without comment (poets have succumbed too feebly to the assumption that a verbal artist cannot compete with the daily paper, TV, or cinéma vérité); poems in three dimensions in public places; environmental poems, especially on the moon; computer poems requiring less and less post-editing and developing into a genre of their own parallel to fully human poetry and probably throwing some new light on the nature of human poetry (though a decade is too short for very much progress in this direction); short, concentrated, semi-subliminal poems, visual in conception but not necessarily non-linear, injected like advertisements into TV programmes; anonymous poems; poems which either as science poetry or as science-fiction poetry acknowledge the position of science in the world with¬out being merely 'ecological' or crypto-luddite; a London poetry (one of the strangest of gaps); a poetry of contemporary everyday work and leisure which will discover the language equivalent of the wiry bounding line David Hockney has perfected in art; a poetry which can be used in the theatre (impossible!—worth looking for, though); songs, and more songs, for one voice and many voices.