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

This was a good idea. In 1995, a group of writers got together in Huddersfield “to investigate a number of shared ideas and experiences.” They took Roy Fisher’s poetry as a basis for their aims, “searching in his work for themes and approaches that would assist us in our own.” It clearly wasn’t a critical gathering, in the sense of a group of academics meeting to present papers on Fisher’s writing, and the end result was meant to be the production of poems and prose which would, if I can quote the blurb, constitute an experiment with the shared experience of childhood, place, dream and maturity.”

     A couple of fairly well-known writers - Jeff Nuttall, Tom Pickard - were involved, and most of the others had published work here and there, so a reasonable level of achievement was to be expected. Of course, it doesn’t always follow that this will be the case. Throwing together a bunch of writers of any quality and expecting them to turn out something worthwhile doesn’t necessarily lead to the required results.

     The various texts are presented without author identification, though there is a key to who wrote what at the back of the book. But the initial anonymity is valuable, in that it allows the reader to judge the work without preconceived ideas of what to expect. The theory breaks down a little, because Tom Pickard more than once mentions his own name and Jeff Nuttall throws in a few references which will incline knowledgeable readers to identify him. But on the whole the idea serves its purpose, and it’s easy to move from piece to piece, from poetry to prose, in the same way that the texts move from the real to the dreamlike. Some pieces are inevitably stronger than others, and I’m tempted to identify the authors concerned (not necessarily the best-known ones), but perhaps that would act against the overall concept of the book?

     If I have one small quibble, it is that the use of supposed ‘dream’ material can lead to a dissipation of effect. It too often allows the writers to slip away from the concrete, and it inclines me to suspect that most so-called ‘dreams’ are, in fact, contrived sequences which can really go anywhere and too often go nowhere. Dreams may be fascinating for analysis, but as literature they have their limitations.