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

   Recently, a survey found that poets are more likely than other writers to die prematurely. (The average age is sixty-two, they said. It could be worse). And certainly, the popular image of the artist is of someone living on the edge. Ian Hamilton’s fascinating book Against Oblivion is a study of forty-five twentieth-century poets, seven of whom probably or undoubtedly committed suicide. Unorthodox sex lives and self-destructive behaviour seem to have been much more common among these highly gifted people than in the general population.

   ‘Genius and disease .... may be inextricably bound up together’, speculated Edmund Wilson in The Wound and the Bow. You could choose to live dangerously, if it helps your Muse. Or, if damaging experiences are forced on you, you could use them, like Wilfred Owen, to produce great poetry. But I suspect that the best career move is to do as Hamilton’s famous four - Auden, Eliot, Hardy and Yeats, who are safe from oblivion - grow old, know the right people, and be male.

   I have just finished reading the entries for the first Myeloma Awareness Open Poetry Competition (see page 68). Inevitably, many of them were about bereavement or serious illness and were deeply affecting. It was sometimes quite hard to separate my feelings about the subject-matter from impartial consideration of the poem’s quality. This editor is more sympathetic than most to work written ‘from the edge’, but - it shouldn’t be necessary to say - the work has to be good. If in doubt, consult the late Thom Gunn, who managed to express the most powerful and distressing emotions in immaculate traditional forms.