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

I suspect my views on question 1 will be totally opposed to those of your regular contributors. If I were Clive James, for instance, no doubt the answer to question 1 would be (a) me, (b) you! Since I think the question an important one I'll try and be rather more impersonal about it.

I think the most encouraging thing in the last decade has been the enormous growth in popularity of poetry—both reading, writing and listening to poetry. This has not been achieved without sacrifices. To some extent, those of you who feel yourselves to be outraged guardians of the Sacred Flame are not entirely wrong: a lot of bad poetry has been written, and read, and a lot of the people who looked pretty good back in 1962 have been found to have clay well up to the waist and beyond. However, in one very important sense any kind of value-judgement is irrelevant: that poetry is being read, listened to, written, talked about is important, from the point of view of the majority. The argument goes back to Russia in 1917 and beyond, and is too long to trace here. (See, for instance, Ludwig Hoffmann's 'The Working Class in the Theatre', TLS, 15.10.71.) I can only say that, both politically and artistically, I believe (and I suppose this answers question 2, that 'good art' and 'popular art' are not mutually exclusive terms, and that I hope all the mistakes, the bad ones, the phoneys of the last decade will be justified by the poets of the next one. In 1962 Brian, Roger and I were reading poems, making one-off theatre pieces, writing dialogues in a small cellar club in Liverpool. Roger was I think the first to see the possibility of really using the mass media to bypass the hopelessly inbred English poetry scene of the fifties and reach real people. Hence 'The Scaffold', who do considerably more than write daft hit songs.

And the scene was hopeless: all that Lucky Jim stuff, sestinas and all, all the tight, negative verse that came out of The Group. I believe poets are important people and should be recognised as such by society. One of the many reasons I admire Tennyson is that, as Herbert Read pointed out, he was the last poet to be regarded as important by the majority of the population. Reading for the Queen or discussing Crimean policy with the editor of The Times and so on were as important marks of public respect as the enormous popularity of his books or the songs sung in every drawing room. Unlike France and Germany we have no cabaret tradition in this century, no George Brassens or Kurt Weill to make a bridge between popular art and high art. When I first heard Brassens back in the early fifties it seemed very sad to me that there were no equivalent figures in England. Now it would seem that a poet like McGough or a songwriter like Bob Dylan have very much occupied this position.

We live in an atomised, late-Capitalist society in which one tactic would be to use the media against themselves to bring about a situation in which the poet does impinge on society. Another is to wait for the revolution and start then. Me, I can't wait, I'd like to do it now.

However, it mustn't be any old poetry: it must measure up ultimately to the highest standards, to Mallarme, to Mayakofsky, to Milton, and all the others. Forget about how many books Rod McKuen or Leonard Cohen sell, or the pretentious pseudo-poetry on the back of so many L.P.s—the important thing is that the songs of Lennon and McCartney and Neil Young are there to prove that excellence and popularity are not mutually incompatible. As I write this the dolly-girls on Top of the Pops are dancing to this week's number one, Don McLean's 'Vincent', a song whose lyrics are far above the level of anything that might have been accepted ten years ago. Poets like me and perhaps a dozen others make a reasonable living from reading and writing poetry rather than hiding our secret identities under the guise of chartered accountants or embittered academics.

Perhaps the thing one could hope for most from the next decade would be that these kind of reflections would sound hopelessly old-fashioned and out of date in a society where social justice and cultural equality are accepted as normal.