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

National Poetry Day is here again, and with it the results of the Bedford Open Poetry competition, which are printed at the back of this issue.  But first, consider how poetry is regarded on the other 364 days of the year.  In May, half a million fourteen-year-olds took an English comprehension paper as part of the national curriculum tests.  For the first time this paper included a poem, ‘Grandfather’, by Edward Storey, a distinguished contributor to The Interpreter’s House.  Naturally, Mr Storey was not informed, let alone paid.  The candidates got unexpectedly low marks because, it seems, they had trouble answering the poetry question, and there was a mass recall of scripts.  That’s why, most unusually, a poem actually got into the national press.

‘Grandfather’ is not particularly difficult, nor are the children stupid.  I’m not even going to blame the last government for the awful things it did to education.  The problem is that most people haven’t read any poetry since Kipling and when they unexpectedly encounter it, they find it baffling.  Yet it doesn’t have to be like this.

Poems on the Underground was and is successful because the poems were short, carefully chosen and targetted a captive audience which soon found that it actually liked them. Auden’s ‘Song’ became very popular when it featured in Four Weddings and a Funeral.  All the evidence is that if people are exposed to good poetry in small doses they will want more and more of it.  So why not devote a minute amount of time and space to reading poems on the airwaves - instead of all those programme trailers - and displaying them in public places, like shop windows, the sides of buses, perhaps even the Millennium dome?  Not once a year, but all the year round.