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

In an episode in Remembrance of Things Past Proust places his narrator in  a strange hotel room at Balbec-Plage. Marcel arrives exhausted after a long  journey, but then, throwing himself onto the bed, finds that sleep is out of  the question. But this is no ordinary insomnia: its special nature is to  transform the conventional surroundings of the room into an inferno of the  unknown and the unfamiliar. The room is unremarkable enough, but as if  throwing off a cloak of normal visibility, the high ceiling, the row of glass- fronted bookcases, the violet curtains come out into the open in an untamed state; and with the menacing hostility, autonomy and sheer otherness of wild  animals, they become almost insanely seen. The experience is the occasion  for a larger meditation on how the dispiriting and monotonous laws of habit  protect us from the 'enchantments of the real'. 'The immobility of the things  that surround us', he observes, 'is forced upon them by our conviction that  they are themselves and not anything else, by the immobility of our conception of them.'

   I was reminded of this recently by a poem informed by a striking
mobility of conception. Richard Wilbur's'Lying'shows us many ordinary  things becoming other than themselves. An onionskin is a'shucked tunic'  which, lying on a chopping board, 'rocks like a flapping sail'. A bit of tarpaulin  torn loose in the yard by the wind is 'some great thing tormented', 'a hip-shot  beast which tries again, and once again, to rise'. Add to these (for the sake of  argument) a butterfly 'bobbing away like wreckage on the sea' and'a lion's chrysanthemum head' (both from Marianne Moore) and we see the force of  Wilbur's observation, 'Odd how a thing is most itself when likened'. Odd, I think, because words seem to confirm to the writer that 'the world is', as  Wittgenstein put it, 'everything that is the case'. A rose is a rose is a rose.  Poets, on the other hand, find themselves in a curious position similar to that  of the storytellers of Majorca who begin their tales, not with our 'Once upon  a time', but with 'It was and it was not'. The head which is neither lion or  chrysanthemum - but also both - has gone into an unnamed state beyond  the words themselves and we as readers are now having to construct the new  image, which the words of the poem demand as their explanation, from own  physical experience. We find ourselves somehow caught in the act of seeing and naming - where the de-visualising process of the written is restored to the vivid pictorialising action of the mind's eye.

   In her Newcastle lecture published recently by Bloodaxe, Jane Hirshfield  recalls an image from Donald Hall. 'A poem is a house with a secret room at its centre, the place where all that cannot be paraphrased is stored. The room  can never he opened to ordinary habitation, yet its presence changes the  house.' She goes on to say that this room is not to be found either in the words of the poem itself, nor in the external world, but in ourselves as readers.

   I'd like to imagine that Proust's hotel bedroom freed from the veto of habit and open to the enchantments of the real is such a secret room in the house of language. Seamus Heaney has said that a metaphor is a poem in  itself in miniature. So let us suppose that these spaces between lion and  chrysanthemum arc also to he found within the pages of this magazine - which stores all I that cannot be paraphrased, which brings words mobile and alive to the mind's eye, and which changes the house.

Martha Kapos, Assistant Poetry Editor

The poems in this issue were edited by Martha Kapos; the reviews and features by Tirn Dooley