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

I am not qualified to write about the American poetic scene in the Sixties; although, naturally, I do read the books that cross the Atlantic, and occasionally hear the poets reading their work in London. My remarks must therefore be taken to apply to Britain only.

I suppose what could be considered 'encouraging' would be for the writing of poetry to become a lucrative practice once again (I am thinking of the gigantic sales of Tennyson—and also of the present status of poets in the U.S.S.R.) and for more people to read it and enjoy it. To a certain extent, with the Liverpool poets, this did begin to happen in the Sixties. But the poetry that reaches a large audience is usually pretty well diluted; flip, instant, gimmicky, and on very friendly terms with show business. This was, in my view, the nature of the poetry that succeeded best with the new young audience of not very great discrimination to which it was addressed. It sounds too stern and donnish to write it off like this; and, on the credit side, one must admit that good performers like Adrian Henri at least made a lot of people aware that a poem could be fun and needn't necessarily bore one to death from the first word to the last.

If, in fact, the poetry had been better, one would have nothing but praise for the Liverpool Sound. The Beatles, operating in a slightly different medium, produced lyrics ('Eleanor Rigby' in particular) that were on a par with the Liverpool poetry and might even be considered to upstage it a bit. The comparison, of course, isn't really fair, since the Beatle words had the potent extra dimension of music.

The more different kinds of poetry there are, the better. In that respect, the successes of spoken verse must be allowed and welcomed. But neither must a small, courtierlike, learned kind of poetry be dismissed outright as the work of effete snobs. History has shown us how quickly 'difficult' verse can be explained, once the scholars get to work on it. Nothing remains obscure for very long; it all comes out in the wash.

Spoken Poetry and Written Poetry shouldn't be Either Ors. They should be able to co-exist. It seems to me 'discouraging' that the spoken word did begin to show signs of being a cuckoo in the nest. What was elbowed out was the verse that was never designed for public performance. The great tide of Poetry Readings is now receding a little; this, as I have indicated, could be regarded as both a bad and a good thing.

The developments of the next decade look fairly inscrutable to me. Poetry that is 'performed', with, before, after or without music, is likely to be with us, in one way or another, for a long while. We have had it, in any case, ever since Edith Sitwell's 'Facade' in the Twenties. With the right sort of poem and the right sort of music, the results could be good.

With regard to the actual publishing of poetry there is a lot more to be hoped for—since the present situation is so bad. Poets suffer more than any other kind of writer when their books go out of print. Yet most publishers are only too keen to allow this to happen. As soon as sales fall off, the books are remaindered. One could say that there ought to be a law against it. Certainly, and more realistically, it would be very desirable for contracts to contain some sort of clause designed to prevent it happening. The reputation of a poet usually builds up slowly, and the sales of a book of poems are usually slow. Novelists sell their books in thousands—and often within a very short time. Poetry moves in a more tortoise-like way; but it may get there in the end, if it is allowed to. A poet whose work nobody can read is in a very sad position. He is lucky if Public Libraries help him much. In fact a series of Poetry Libraries, on the lines of the excellent Poetry Book Society Library, dotted about the country, would be very well worth subsidizing—even if they were only annexed to the Public Libraries on which novels depend.