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

This is the twenty-first issue of The Interpreter's House. It has come of age in a harsh environment where many literary magazines die young. And to celebrate that passing into maturity, that establishment of a past, this is an anthology of the best poems from the previous twenty issues. I say ‘best’, but to be more accurate if more longwinded I mean ‘best in my opinion’. Someone else, no doubt, could have compiled an altogether different selection from the hundreds available.

When I was invited to guest-edit this issue and to compile the collection I was honoured and it was a pleasure to revisit the past issues and see how the many fine poems in them struck me now. First, I read all the issues in chronological order through again, marking those poems that seemed to stand out.  (I did this, by the way, without consulting the information on contributors at the back, so that their publication record wouldn’t influence me).  Secondly, I photocopied those poems to dislocate them from the particular issue, assembled them in a folder, and went through them again.  Finally, I whittled them down to the sixty-eight poems here.  This last stage was especially difficult, balancing the claims of one effective poem against another.  Inevitably, several names cropped up more than once, but I limited myself to one poem by each person.  Also, this collection had to be varied and lively in its own right, so that one theme or subject or tone could not be allowed to dominate.  Finally, I grouped the poems into nine loose categories - personae, things, politics, work, language and poetry, memory, people, landscape, and ‘the enigmatic’, with lighter pieces interleaved between the categories for variety.

Writing poetry, as Eliot said, is ‘a raid on the inarticulate’, but it has to be carried out with and so is hampered by ‘deteriorating equipment’ and ‘undisciplined squads of emotion’.  So, what I was looking for was an unusual ‘take’ on experience, an angle of vision that was fresh and unexpected.  I was also looking for a mastery of language which meant that angle of vision was conveyed fully. Also, those undisciplined squads of feelings had to be controlled or, even better, choreographed. A good poem brings out the extraordinary in the everyday and makes us pay attention to a feature of experience to which we have been blind.  Good poems jerk us out of habits of seeing and feeling.  They also jerk us out of habits of expression, formulating experience in ways that carry an element of verbal surprise. Good poems remind us of what our language can do, of its range, its aesthetic potential, and of the vast scope within it for inventive combination.

I found that topical poems tended not to survive the incident of their writing, apart from one example which carries universal meanings.  And I found, reading through the issues, that there was a lot of melancholy about, and I reacted against that.  I tended to go instead for those poems that had a kind of ‘rage against the dying of the light’, a vigorous rebellion against all the forces and circumstances that can defeat us.

So, the poems had to possess some fresh vision and had to be well-made.  A well-made poem is like a well-made box;   the parts just ‘click’ together with a sense of inevitability and finality, and there’s great pleasure in that.  However, despite one’s efforts to define what makes a good poem, there is always the final mystery as to why one set of words on the page, despite the earnestness of feeling and the craftsmanship, lie dead on the white ground, while another set crackles into electrifying, memorable life.  I think many of the poems here are ‘mysterious’ in that best sense, and I hope you think so too.