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

No doubt a virtuoso journalist will be able to offer convincing answers to Mr. Hamilton's test questions; but the response from poets will likely be confused, bewildered, dispiriting. To a poet of my age (29), these last ten or twelve years are still being lived out: it was during that time that one read the books which made a lasting impression (and rejected other books), wrote poems and met others who were also writing poems, and moved in tentatively and with some embarrassment on the 'poetry scene'. Initiations are among the more memorable things that happen to a man; and I am still bearing the scars of mine—as well as the exhilarations—so I can hardly hope to be other than intuitive and personal here, and make no claim to be critically definitive.

It is too easy to fall into the trap of condemning all that was bad on recollection. The Liverpool Scene, the Children of Albion schools, the poets who write out of political or macrobiotic engagement, or the aridly experimental chasing after innovations when in fact they have no new content to put into their new formal vessels (when they find them): these poets have all disappointed me. There was even a time when I wished I could be like them; long, long ago, it seems, far back in Glasgow. I've always detested experimental writing ever since the time when a pretentious young man who used to write Je Est Un Autre on the café formica pinched my copy of Plant and Phantom. How could I possibly remain sympathetic after that? In any case, their practice has fallen far behind the publicity that launched them even if at times the programme seemed promising. Their poetry for performance is merely a demotic oratory. Their anti-intellectual attitudes (in the name of assaulting the Academy, one of the few barricades I'd contribute furniture to) has resulted in silliness and back-slapping and not individual outburst or contemplation. They are too collective, too social, not lonely enough. Their personalities are inseparable from the crowd that follows them.

But looking back over that decade several books and talents stand out, and the achievement is impressive. Larkin's The Whitsun Weddings walked over me with indelible footprints when I first read it. His apparently prolix details of contemporary observation, the tension throughout his best poems of formal demands against ordinary language, and the way in which his poems spread out into mystery or ironies, still seem to me incomparably right. And in retrospect many will agree that Sylvia Plath was one of the most remarkable talents—in any art—of the decade, if not the century.

Larkin and Plath both tell us a contemporary poet still has to be expert before access to personal or public emergencies can be made poetic. (What 'poetic' is, I don't know; but I know it when I see it.) Lowell and Berryman exemplify the same understanding. But verse-making and line-making skills are essential and yet not primary. If I were to risk the absurdity of generalization on this subject, I'd say that poets have more and more revealed and upheld the sanctities of the inner life; and this at a time when individuality is threatened by capitalist governments in power, and revolutionary extremists in the wings. They both say, 'You must all be the Same, our Same'.

Our situation in the Seventies seems to ask for foudroyance from the strongest poets, those who feel they could survive an encounter with public themes; or hermitage from the lovers and lyricists. Poets might be led into attempting what it is not in their natures to do. This is a danger which I know to be real. Poets are being led away from what is an essential standard: to be honest to what one knows and discovers. 'The true poets must be truthful', Wilfred Owen's maxim, is something every young poet should be obliged to chisel in expensive stone paid for out of his own pocket and humped on his own shoulders from the distant quarry; and if he stays honest, his wife can use it as a headstone.

I may just lack the stringency to be pessimistic. There are so many poets in whom I find a measure of achievement, or interest, or promise, or with whom I feel affinity, that my proper response must be hope. It would be invidious to name them: but I've drawn up a list, and there are about fifty names on it. I have sensible critical reservations about most of them; but the number impresses me.

Defiance or withdrawal might seem to be an effect on traditional writers of the continued popularity of new modes engendered by the many alternative schools. This is silly. The currency of desperanto and voxpopuluk is merely publicised, not real. If the poetry scene seems turbulent to some it might be because they just enjoy the drama. I do, too; but I prefer it stable and productive. Every man has the right to tell the Zeitgeist to go to hell, with his friends Angst, Weltschmertz and Schadenfreude. And the permissive society poses no problems to one who is, by temperament, reprobate. But I confess to being afraid of the wearers of invisible uniforms, the bomb-exhorters, those intent on adding to the unmarked graves in the forest. What happened to love and pacifism in the last years of our Shifty Sixties?